Howard’s Extreme Social Tradeoff for Public Knowledge

John Howard’s enormous exertions to create public knowledge about prison conditions contrast sharply with his lack of investment in ordinary communication with family and friends. Constraints of time and energy imply tradeoffs in human activities. Personal dispositions vary across persons. No one can do everything. For an individual to be different from others is normal. Howard, however, made extreme choices between creating public knowledge and engaging in ordinary communication. Howard, moreover, became a new type of public hero. Howard’s life illustrates, in the communicative circumstances of eighteenth-century England, important communicative choices and their effects.

Howard’s actions indicate that he valued relatively little ordinary communication with family and friends. For example, in March, 1765, Howard’s wife died four days after giving birth to their only child, a son.^ Howard cared deeply for his son. Yet he also traveled extensively while his son was young: two months in Bath in 1766, two months in the Netherlands in 1769, and most of 1770 in Europe. Beginning in November 1773 and ending only with his death in Russia in 1790, Howard spent many months inspecting prisons, lazarettos, and hospitals in places far from home. He visited prisons throughout England in 1773, 1774, 1776, 1779, 1782, and 1788. He traveled widely in Europe in 1775, 1778, 1781, 1783, 1786, and 1789, with some of the trips extending into Poland, Russia, Turkey, Malta, and Portugal. While traveling, Howard communicated with adult friends through letters. There is no evidence that Howard corresponded with his son. Howard traveled on his own initiative to collect information that he considered to be important. The work that he undertook surely constrained greatly his opportunities to communicate with his young son.

Howard limited his communication with his son even when he was physically near to him. Howard’s son “frequently declared that he was afraid of his father.”^ Regarding Howard’s relationship with his son, one of Howard’s friends stated:

That Mr. H’s idea of education led him (as it has done many other wise and good men) to regard implicit obedience in a child as an essential groundwork, I readily admit; and that he managed so as to attain this point completely, I likewise know to be true. …That Mr. H’s conduct, with respect to his child, was such as was more likely to excite fear than affection, I have admitted, in asserting that inculcating perfect and unlimited obedience was his primary object.^

“Perfect and unlimited obedience” is a highly unlikely feature of a close, day-to-day, personal relationship.^ Similarly, fear is not consistent with extensive, personal communication. Contemporaries perceived Howard to have loved his son.^ Howard’s friends insisted that Howard did not cause his son to be judged insane and confined to an asylum. That is probably true. Yet it is also true that Howard’s communication with his son was highly limited in scope and time.

Howard also extraordinarily limited his communication with friends and acquaintances. An obituary of Howard noted that he “never partook of the public or private repasts to which he was so frequently invited.”^ One of Howard’s friends explained:

{Mr. H.} declined every invitation to diner or supper; not so much because he could not be a partaker of the repast, but for the same reason which prevented his going to any place of public entertainment, or even so much as looking into a news paper, viz. that he would suffer nothing to interrupt, for a moment, the main object of his pursuit; and that he employed the whole of his time, not devoted to sleep, in arranging the minutes or observations he had been making through the day.^

Howard apparently was keenly aware of the value of time. He linked time closely to purpose:

The value he set upon his time was, indeed, most remarkable. Punctual to the minute in every engagement he made, he usually sat, when in conversation, with his watch in his hand, which he rested upon his knee, and though in the midst of an interesting anecdote or argument, so soon as the moment he had fixed for his departure arrived, he arose, took up his hat, and left the house.^

In 1778, after meeting Howard for the first time, Jeremy Bentham wrote with admiration about Howard’s concentration on acquiring information about prison conditions:

His thoughts, his conversation, his writings are confined to this one object. Prospects, palaces, and pictures he passes by with an indifference equal to that of the Cynic and much better grounded.^

One of Howard’s friends recalled:

He {Howard} mentioned being once prevailed upon in Italy to go and hear some extraordinary fine music; but, finding his thoughts too much occupied by it, he would never repeat the indulgence.^

Howard enjoyed conversing and socializing with women. He wrote letters directly to Samuel Whitbread’s wife.^ Howard’s communication with women was unlikely to be directly related to his prison examinations. Nonetheless, collecting and disseminating information about prisons apparently predominated among Howard’s practice of communication from November 1773 through to his death in 1790.

John Howard, Public Knowledge, and Friendship

Howard understood truth to be separate from persons and more important than persons, including his friends and himself. According to one of Howard’s friends, Howard

would trust the report of no person, where he could examine himself, having, as he told me, often experienced how little dependence was to be placed on accounts or measurements given in the most celebrated books of travels, &c.^

Howard personally collected information about prison and hospital conditions. He had this information published in books. Howard wanted others to recognize this information, not as his account, but as truth independent from his person. Howard’s concern for first-person observation echoed a fundamental theme in eighteenth-century natural philosophy and subsequent science. Modern science seeks to separate truth from God, peer reviewers, personal and institutional prestige, and academic rankings.^

Emphasizing his devaluation of himself relative to truth, Howard subjected himself to grave risks in order to collect information. To learn about the conditions of quarantine, Howard in 1786 exposed himself to the plague on a ship traveling to Venice. He fell ill with fever, but recovered. In 1789, against the entreaties of his friends, Howard made arrangements for his death and set out to encounter the plague again on a planned three-year trip to Russia, Turkey, Egypt, the Barbary Coast, and other areas in the East. Howard explained his motives thus:

Should it please God to cut off my life in the prosecution of this design, let not my conduct be uncandidly imputed to rashness or enthusiasm, but to a serious, deliberate conviction that I am pursuing the path of duty, and to a sincere desire of being made an instrument of more extensive usefulness to my fellow-creatures than could be expected in the narrower circle of a retired life.^

One of Howard’s friends declared, “Of him, it might truly be said, ‘Amicus carus, sed carior Veritas’” (a friend is dear, but truth is dearer).^ Howard died on his trip through the East. But the information that he collected was preserved and published in an expanded version of The State of the Prisons. Few today who know of John Howard have read that information.

Public acclaim for Howard conflated creating public knowledge and communicating with friends. Howard was called “the prisoner’s friend” and “the philanthropist.”^ ^ Howard didn’t typically establish ongoing relationships with prisoners. Given the scope of his inspection tours, he couldn’t have spent much time with specific persons in prisons even if he had been interested in doing so. Howard made prison conditions public knowledge and hence a public concern. That action has little relation to the practice of ordinary communication among friends.

A monument erected in 1790 above Howard’s grave in Kherson, Ukraine, highlighted the extent to which Howard’s public image conflated different communicative practices. This monument, which included a bust of Howard, was inscribed with similar epitaphs in Russian and in Latin:

Хоч би хто ти був тут друг твій похований. {Whoever you may be, here your very close friend is buried.}
Ad Sepulcrum stas Quisquis es Amici. {In this tomb lies your friend, whoever you are.}^

The Russian inscription uses the familiar form of “you.” It also uses the word “друг,” a term for a very dear, personal friend, not merely one friend among many. Latin lacks these social inflections. Around the world, Howard was considered to be both a very dear, personal friend to prisoners and a philanthropist, a lover of everyone.

Ordinary communication with family and friends involves much different practice of communication than does creating public knowledge. A person might be a particular prisoner’s friend, and do nothing to address general problems of prison conditions. Moreover, even a person who caused great harms to humanity might be a good friend to some human. Public acclaim for Howard mistakenly encompassed within the good of public knowledge the good of ordinary communication with family and friends.

Institutionalization of Social Science in England

When John Howard collected information about prison conditions in the mid-1770s, social science didn’t exist as a recognized field of intellectual activity. The Royal Society was founded in London in 1660 to promote “natural knowledge.” Such knowledge was associated with “experimental philosophy.” Subsequently, spurred by the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), scholars sought knowledge about national welfare and how to increase it. However, production-oriented, deductive theory, epitomized in David Ricardo’s On the principles of political economy and taxation (1819), dominated knowledge about national welfare in early nineteenth-century England. The term social science and the knowledge claims associated with that term did not emerge until the 1830s.

Demand for knowledge like knowledge about prison conditions formed social science. The British government first published geographically comprehensive returns concerning persons tried for criminal offenses in England and Wales in 1805. In 1815, an act (55 Geo. III c. 49) required returns from gaols. That act included a schedule set out in tabular form. Government-authorized factory inspectors submitted to the British House of Lords in 1819 and 1819 detailed worker roosters from cotton factories near Manchester. Early nineteenth-century official data requests such as these provided a basis for the development of social science.

About the same time, a group of scholars in important academic positions rebelled against Ricardian political economy and sought to promote systematic collection of information about social conditions. They considered such information to be analogous to the empirical data of experimental philosophy. These scholars sought knowledge concerning not just wealth and productivity, but also a wide range of population characteristics, such as total births and deaths, average heights and weights, sickness, and crime.^

An intellectual leader in the development of social science was Belgian astronomer and mathematician Adolphe Quetelet. Beginning in French statistical and mathematical publications in 1809, Quetelet directed attention to regularities in aggregate crime statistics. In an influential meeting with scientists at Cambridge in 1833, and in his highly acclaimed book, Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale (1835) (On man and the development of his capabilities, or an essay on social physics), Quetelet argued that crime was a function of social organization. He proposed that the “statistical budget” of social costs from crime should be managed like the state treasury.^ He thus conceptually offered scholars a new field of influence on a key government department: the Treasury.

The struggle to create social science generated new scientific institutions in England in the 1830s. Institutional support for knowledge production became a matter of considerable contention. Scholars complained that the leadership of the Royal Society was intellectually unimpressive, secretive, corrupt, and dominated by persons with personal connections in London.^ An attempt at reforming the Royal Society in 1830 failed. Tension between professional and amateur philosophers, differences between metropolitan and provincial philosophers, concern about the decline of science in England^, and the growth of persons interested in science roiled intellectual relations.^

Turmoil within existing scientific institutions provided propitious circumstances for creating new types of knowledge. In 1831, the British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded. In 1833, the British Association for the Advancement of Science added a Statistical Section to provide “the raw material to political economy and political philosophy” and to promote “lasting foundations of those sciences.”^ In 1834, the Statistical Society of London was founded for the “collection and classification of all facts illustrative of the present condition and prospects of society.”^ The Manchester Statistical Society, founded in 1833, sought “to assist in promoting the progress of social improvement in the manufacturing population.”^ These societies all competed to produce knowledge like the public knowledge about prison conditions that Howard created in the 1770s.

Making a Myth of John Howard for Social Science

In late nineteenth-century Britain, John Howard had become a fanciful figure in a founding myth for British social science. William A. Guy, one of the Vice Presidents of the Statistical Society of London, set out this myth in a paper read to the Statistical Society in 1873. Guy authored papers as William A. Guy, M.B., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. He was a doctor living in London, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Guy served as dean of the medical college of King’s College from 1846 to 1858, was elevated to President of the Statistical Society in 1873, and then served as President of the Royal Society in 1876-77.^ Guy thus occupied the highest positions of authority in British science.

Guy declared John Howard to be “founder of a new epoch both in statistics and humanity” and “one of the foremost statists of his time.” According to Guy:

The statist (or, if you prefer the term, statistician) I take to be one who devotes himself to inquiries practically important to the State, as the legislative and administrative centre of the nation,… one who shares with all men of science a love of truth for its own sake, coupled with supreme indifference, so it be truth, to the form it assumes,…one who spares neither time nor labour in the prosecution of the particular inquiry in which he is engaged – who plans it with care and foresight, pursues it with patient industry, and takes note with minute accuracy and particularity of all the facts that bear upon it.

Guy contrasted Howard’s motives with those of religious zealots:

What highly wrought religious emotions have prompted the founders and apostles of new religions to undertake and perform, that and nothing less did this man {Howard} do under the compulsion of a sense of duty, sobered down by the most minute and laborious attention to fact

As scholars often do, Guy urged study of Howard’s writings:

To understand Howard, his work and his motives, a man must study his writings. From them he will learn how reasonable were the motives that impelled him to action, how careful and systematic his mode of procedure, how calm, philosophical, and yet original and far-sighted, the views he formed, how searching and comprehensive his inquiries. … by his magic method of inspection and record, he had in one short year brought about the legal reform of English prisons

Guy concluded by identifying himself and the gathered members of the Statistical Society of London with Howard: “we who live in this year 1873 are but the disciples of the modest, noble Howard.”^

Guy and other members of the Statistical Society were not careful, systematic disciples of Howard. Prison reform legislation apparently motivated Howard’s initial prison inquiries, rather than those inquiries producing reform in a year. Howard effectively practiced applied theater, rather than merely sober observation. Moreover, Howard’s motives were far from reasonable in the sense that Guy described. In a representative entry of his diary, Howard wrote:

when I consider & look into my Heart I doubt I tremble, such a vile Creature, Sin folly & imperfection in every action, oh dreadful tho^t a Body of sin & death I carry about with me, ever ready to depart from God, & with all the dreadful Catalogue of Sins committed my Heart faints within me … I once more in the Dust before the Eternal God acknowledge my Sins heinous and aggravated in his Sight…oh compassionate & devine Redeemer save me from the dreadful guilt and Power of Sin^

A later twentieth-century scholar noted, “Even those eighteenth century biographers still steeped in the Bunyanesque tradition found some of Howard’s diary entries reading ‘like the ravings of a lunatic.’”^ Howard was also capable of expressing strong emotions with much greater verbal control. In a letter to his close friend Richard Price, a leading eighteenth-century philosopher, Howard wrote:

permit me to say with great sincerity my ardent wishes are for your Health and success in that great and good Cause you are embarkt in, the Honour of God and the true knowledge of Jesus Christ.^

In the eighteenth century, Protestant dissenters from the Church of England understood religious liberty, seeking truth, and devotion to God to be intimately related. Guy’s portrayal of the “statist (or, if you prefer the term, statistician)” retained Howard’s commitment to truth-seeking. But it replaced devotion to God with devotion to the state. It replaced religious liberty with a passionless methodology.

Promoting Public Knowledge and Publicity

The development of social science has promoted public knowledge and devalued prisoners’ ordinary communication with their families and friends. Leading late-nineteenth-century social-scientific authority William Guy described prison-reformer John Howard as “the discoverer or inventor of that modern method of dealing with social wrongs.” Guy explained the initial steps of this modern method of social reform as follows:

Some person, among those lookers on who proverbially see more of games than the players themselves, happens to become cognizant of some cruel injustice, the inheritance perhaps of remote times, the product, may be, of some brisk and thriving industry, and he exposes it. If there is some real ground of complaint, the public is brought to sympathise with the sufferers, the press gives the needful publicity, and possibly some benevolent association lends its support.

Non-participation (those in the position of “lookers on”) in this scheme is associated with more acute recognition of “cruel injustice.” If some implicit, objective evaluation finds “real ground of complaint,” publicity is then invoked as an instrument to create public sympathy. The next step explicitly creates public knowledge:

The subject is brought under the notice of Parliament, or laid before some executive department of the Government. A Parliamentary Committee or a Royal Commission is appointed, witnesses are examined, evidence taken. The results are embodied in a report.

Only then occurs legislative action, along with institutionalization of an associated process of public-knowledge creation:

At length an Act of Parliament is passed, and Inspectors are appointed, with power in some cases to bring about punishment of those who neglect its provisions or set them at defiance; in others to give, by means of periodical reports, that publicity which either checks malpractices, or, by pointing out legislative shortcomings or defects, paves the way for improved legislation.^

This method emphasizes mass communication (publicity) relative to ordinary communication among family and friends. It emphasizes the production of public knowledge (reports) relative to democratic action (individual behavioral choices and electoral voting).

Guy’s modern method helps to support claims of social science for public funding. Guy, like a hard-working university administrator, sought to secure a gift of public land on which to construct a new building for the Statistical Society. Guy promoted this objective in an article entitled “On the Claims of Science to Public Recognition and Support; with Special Reference to the so-called ‘Social Sciences’.” This article was published in the Journal of the Statistical Society in 1870. Guy was by then vice-president of the Society and on his way to becoming president in 1873. Guy opened the article with relatively abstract competitive assertions:

In treating the claims of Science, I have two objects in view, the one general, the other special. I wish to show, in the first place, that Science, as distinct from Learning and Art, is eminently deserving of the support and patronage of the public; and, in the second place, that the branches of knowledge now generally known as the “Social Sciences” have special claims of their own.

Then Guy moved directly to specific institutional interests:

I desire so to handle my subject in these two divisions, as to promote an object our President has long had at heart, and in which every member of this Society, and of those which are now co-operating with it, may be presumed to take a lively interest: I mean, the bringing together under one roof, with the great and obvious advantages of fixity of tenure, close proximity, facile and friendly co-operation, and economy of management; with office convenient for the transaction of business, a spacious theatre, large meeting rooms, and well-lighted libraries and museums; of such societies, or groups of societies, as have most in common in their aims and objects.^

Such facilities provide critical infrastructure for the social-scientific aim that Guy identified: “the patient heaping up, intelligent sorting, and critical examination of the elements of a knowledge which, properly applied, is power indeed.” These activities Guy described as promoting “practical works of justice and benevolence” via the modern method of dealing with social wrongs.

The modern method that Guy described isn’t the only possibility for addressing social wrongs. Howard’s example shows that serving the interest of legislators can help to advance their legislative interests in addressing what they perceive to be social wrongs. Howard had close personal relations and considerable contact with legislators introducing prison-reform legislation. Serving legislative interest in prison reform appears to have motivated Howard’s work. In contrast to Guy’s modern schema for dealing with social wrongs, Howard’s work was first published in 1777, while directly relevant prison-reform legislation was passed years earlier in 1773 and 1774. Howard continued to inspect prisons personally for more than a decade after his work was first published. Parliament first appointed prison inspectors only after additional decades. Nonetheless, Guy declared:

“Now every word of this description {of the modern method of dealing with social wrongs} applies in its full force to the method of procedure of John Howard.

Guy didn’t even manage to convince himself of that. About a page after that statement, Guy noted that Howard was able to bring “the grand total of personal injustice and national peril” to interested members of the House of Commons, “and thus it would happen that the long and tedious process of instructing and interesting the public might be rendered unnecessary.”^ Right up through to the present, most legislative acts occur with little public understanding and interest. The most direct means for non-legislators to support legislation is to help interested legislators.

Ordinary communication among family and friends can address social wrongs without scientific authority and without creating public knowledge. Gossip has long functioned as an informal social sanction against perceived social wrongs. Gossip lacks authority and does not constitute public knowledge. In democracies, broad-based elections select political leaders. Voters are not required to state publicly reasons for their votes, nor are they required to be able to articulate such reasons. Through ordinary communication among family and friends, voters may come to perceive a social injustice not well-documented in public knowledge. Their votes can elect legislators likely to act to address that social justice. The social-scientific model of social reform serves the interests of social science as well as social reform. It is not the only possible model.

Philadelphia Society Favored Institutionalized Communication

Charitable institutions, like any other institutions, have institutional interests. Public reason, like any other communicative field, favors some communicative acts and disfavor others. Philadelphia society was at the center of America’s democratic development. The history of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons shows institutional interests and communicative structures that favored institutionalized communication with prisoners and disfavored prisoners’ communication with their families and friends.

The Philadelphia Society, founded in May, 1787, was a pioneering American civic institution concerned about penal policy and prisons. Benjamin Rush, a leading member of Philadelphia society, led the founding of the Philadelphia Society. Rush published two months before the Philadelphia Society’s founding an essay warning against communication with persons being punished. The Philadelphia Society soon followed up on Rush’s concerns. Seven months after its founding, the Philadelphia Society petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature for penal amendments to lessen communication with and among persons being punished:

punishment by more private or even solitary labour, would more successfully tend to reclaim the unhappy objects, as it might be conducted more steadily and uniformly, and the kind and portion of labour better adapted to the different abilities of the criminals; the evils of familiarizing young minds to vicious characters would be removed^

In 1801, the Philadelphia Society urged the legislature to confine prisoners separately. It did so again in 1803:

in 1803, (Jan. 25,) they {the Philadelphia Society}, jointly with the inspectors of the prison, urged the principle of solitary confinement, with labour, as the most efficient element of discipline —avoiding the possible dangers of idle solitude on the one hand, and the inevitable evils of association on the other. And we may add, that the general character of our {Pennsylvanian} Legislation on this subject, from 1803 to 1817, shows very clearly the sense then entertained of the importance of cutting off all means of communication between the convicts.^

The Philadelphia Society subsequently played a key role in designing the Eastern State Penitentiary to suppress all unofficial prisoner communication. That suppression encompassed communication among prisoners and communication between prisoners and their families and friends.

The Philadelphia Society’s written constitution described a universal fellowship of humanity, but also supported obvious distinctions among persons. The constitution’s preamble declared:

When we consider that the obligations of benevolence, which are founded on the precepts and examples of the Author of Christianity, are not cancelled by the follies or crimes of our fellow-creatures: and when we reflect upon the miseries which penury, hunger, cold, unnecessary severity, unwholesome apartments, and guilt, (the usual attendants of prisons) involve with them, it becomes us to extend our compassion to that part of mankind who are the subjects of those miseries. By the aid of humanity, their undue and illegal sufferings may be prevented; the links which should bind the whole family of mankind together, under all circumstances, be preserved unbroken;^

The miseries of of penury, hunger, and cold probably were not personally familiar to the elite members of the Philadelphia Society. Those hardships were commonly associated with a different “part of mankind.” Seeking to preserve unbroken “the links that bind the whole family of mankind together” didn’t prompt the Philadelphia Society to encourage prisoners’ communication with family and friends. The Philadelphia Society instead extended the concern of Philadelphia’s elite to the typically low-status population of Pennsylvania’s jails and prisons.

The Philadelphia Society was organized primarily as an institution of public knowledge. The offices of the Society included four physicians. Their duties were to “visit the prisons when called upon by, or to give advice to the acting Committee respecting such matters as are connected with the preservation of the health of persons confined therein….”^ The acting committee, consisting of six members, was to collect information, report to the relevant authorities, and analyze treatment effects:

The acting committee shall visit the public prisons, or such other places of confinement or punishment as are ordained by law, at least once every week. They shall enquire into the circumstances of the persons confined; they shall report such abuses as they shall discover to the officers of government who are authorized to redress them; and shall examine the influence of confinement or punishment upon the morals of the persons who are subject to them.^

Pennsylvania law in 1829 explicitly enumerated the acting committee of the Philadelphia Society among those authorized to visit prisoners:

No person who is not an official visitor of the prisons, or who has not a written permission according to such rules as the inspectors may adopt as aforesaid, shall be allowed to visit the same; the official visitors are the Governor, Speaker and members of the Senate, the Speaker and members of the House of Representatives, the Secretary of the Commonwealth, the Judges of the supreme court, the Attorney General and his deputies, the president and associate Judges of all the courts in the state, the Mayor and Recorder of the cities of Philadelphia, Lancaster and Pittsburgh, Commissioners and Sheriffs of the several counties, and the acting committee of the Philadelphia society for the alleviation of the miseries of public prisons.

Under this law, communication with prisoners was legally limited to officially authorized visitors. These visitors were prohibited from facilitating communication with any other persons:

None but the official visitors can have any communication with the convicts, nor shall any visitor whatever be permitted to deliver to or receive from any of the convicts, any letter or message whatever, or to supply them with any article of any kind^

The Philadelphia Society visited prisoners as authorities under law. Such communication is not how human fellowship is ordinarily constituted. The Philadelphia Society’s authoritative position served the purpose of creating public knowledge about prison conditions.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia Society members were visiting prisoners in a mode of friendship mixed with moral instruction. In its Annual Report of 1862, the Philadelphia Society urged members to approach prisoners “in the spirit of kindness,” to act “friendly; manifesting a feeling of interest and desire to benefit them in any proper manner,” and to relate to prisoners as to “a fellow being, and a candidate for Divine Mercy.” Its members also sought to encourage “daily reading of the Holy Scriptures,” “cleanliness and good order in the cells,” and to provide “counsel suited to the case.”^ The Society’s rules recognized that some prisoners’ might not want to communicate with Society members:

3^rd{rule}. That we regard the feeling of such inmates, as have expressed a desire not to be visited; and avoid pressing our company upon them; similarly situated we should desire others to respect our feelings in that particular.^

Society members visited on average each prisoner held in Eastern State Penitentiary twenty times during 1861. Visits reportedly ranged in duration from “a friendly salutation” to “a half hour, or in some instances even an hour.”^ In a typical month in 1854, visitors averaged 11 visits to prisoners per trip to Eastern State. If total visiting time was about three hours, the average visit length per prisoner was less than twenty minutes. Nonetheless, so impressive were these efforts that the Chaplain of the prison, perhaps feeling professionally threatened, gave a sermon in which he claimed that Society members were “endeavoring to promote {their} own salvation, and establish a claim to the mercy of God by self-righteousness in visiting the prison.”^ From 1886 to 1903, Philadelphia Society members’ visits to prisoners were less frequent, averaging about 3.4 per prisoner per year.

While attempting to provide Christian fellowship to prisoners, the Philadelphia Society showed little concern for prisoners’ communication with family and friends. Eastern State Penitentiary’s physician, not the Philadelphia Society, urged allowing prisoners to communicate with their families and friends.^ By 1854, prisoners’ “friends and relations” were allowed “under proper restrictions” to visit the prisoners.^ The Philadelphia Society in 1861 presented the purpose of its visits thus:

1^st . To Secure a continuous supervision of our Prison Discipline – as to its effects upon the health and character of its subjects; and of the particulars in which its administration might be improved.
2^nd. To give to prisoners the moral advantages of association with respectable citizens, desirous to aid their reformation, and to promote habits of reflection; good order and industry, and general amendment of life.^

The second purpose implicitly discriminates among visitors in a way that favored Philadelphia Society members’ self-understanding. It pointed away from prisoners ordinary communication with their families and friends and toward treatment expertise. The Pennsylvania Prison Society, which grew from the Philadelphia Society, describes its official visitors as “advocates for just and humane treatment of prisoners.”

Ordinary communication between prisoners and their families and friends has less value in public deliberation than does more instrumental communication. Regarding visits to prisoners from family and friends, a leading penal scholar and officer of the Pennsylvania Prison society early in the twentieth century declared:

Prison visits of this sort have always been pathetic to contemplate due to the emotional content involved and also because they are so inadequate. … Those who have witnessed a visiting day in a prison must agree that the bedlam due to several visitors talking loudly, the better to be heard, sometimes in several dialects and languages, with a certain amount of gesticulation, is not a very wholesome picture.

Relations among family and friends are emotionally fraught and not typically bounded instrumentally. Applying consequential reason to such communication makes sense only within ideals of public deliberation:

The selection of visitors to prisoners might more carefully be considered. … There are cases where a parent visiting his son might do more harm than an older brother or sister. This selection of relatives or friends for visitation has scarcely been touched in most, if not all, penal institutions. … It would seem, therefore, that if this field is to be explored, an extra-mural specialist should be added to the staff whose duty it would be to carefully cull out those {among the prisoner’s relatives and friends} who might, by their very presence in the prison gallery, do the prisoner a disservice, and encourage those to visit who will have a wholesome effect.^

Pennsylvania’s world-famous separate system suppressed prisoners’ communication with their families and friends. Within that system, visitors from the Philadelphia Society were considered to be highly important:

Visiting prisoners in their cells was the keystone of the system. And the thirteen volumes of the Minutes now in the possession of the Pennsylvania Prison Society bear mute testimony to the concern those patient Philadelphians felt for their unfortunate charges. The lone prisoner in his cell, working at a trade, took time from his employment to converse with the kindly visitor who was probably the only person in the world who was interested in his welfare. These visitors represented the best citizenship of the Quaker city. They were busy men. They came from the ranks of the professions as well as merchants, ministers, and even scientists.^

Men like these formed Philadelphia society, participated in public deliberation, and founded the Philadelphia Society. That social reality is as real as their concern to help prisoners. Both shaped the regulation and practice of communicating with prisoners.

Philadelphia Society Linked to John Howard

The founders of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons were keenly concerned with its place in elite discourse. The founders were leading members of Philadelphia society — clergy, doctors, printers, writers, merchants, and others.^ Ten days after the Philadelphia Society’s founding in 1787, Benjamin Rush, a founder, attempted to bring its constitution to John Howard’s attention through a letter to one of Howard’s close friends. Howard was at this time a highly celebrated public figure. Rush proceeded with a combination of flattery and self-promotion in his letter to Howard’s friend:

The institution {the Philadelphia Society} has grown out of his excellent history of Prisons {The State of the Prisons}, aided in a small degree by the pamphlet lately published in this city upon the effects of public punishments upon criminals and society {Rush’s own work, Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and upon Society} …I beg you to show it {the Constitution of the Philadelphia Society} to Mr. Howard (if returned to London), or publish it in some of your periodical papers.^

In a subsequent letter directly to Howard, Rush thanked Howard for “the immense services you have rendered to humanity and science” and invited Howard to visit the U.S.^ A few months later, the President of the Philadelphia Society also wrote to Howard. He enclosed a copy of the Society’s constitution, asked Howard for his thoughts upon it, and praised Howard for his work.^

Howard was impressed with Philadelphia Society. In an edition of his work published in 1789, Howard declared:

Should the plan take place, during my life, of establishing a permanent charity, under some such title as that at Philadelphia, viz. A society for alleviating the miseries of public prisons, and annuities be engrafted thereupon for the abovementioned purpose, I would most readily stand at the bottom of the page as a subscriber of £500; or if such a society shall be constituted within three years after my death, this sum shall be paid out of my estate.^

The Philadelphia Society surely counted this citation as a major success.

19th Century U.S. Civic Institutions Concerned with Prisoners

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Philadelphia Society for alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons was competing with similar societies in Boston and New York. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York were the leading cities in the newly independent United States. The Philadelphia Society was founded in 1787, the Prison Discipline Society of Boston was founded in 1825, and the Prison Association of New York, in 1844. The Philadelphia Society thus had the distinction of preceding its U.S. competitors by decades. Nonetheless, struggling in 1847 to raise money to support its journal, The Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, the Philadelphia Society noted the intensity of the competition and warned of falling behind:

We cannot afford to be outstripped in this contest of good deeds. Philadelphia has presented a bright example as the pioneer in this still overgrown and tangled wilderness. Let not the sister cities,—her eager competitors in all that concerns the flourishing existence of an enlightened commonwealth,—bear off the palm that has so long rested on her brow, in a career that has already secured to her a lasting fame—that of the first and strongest advocate of prison discipline reform.^

Competition among penal reformers in the mid-nineteenth century was centered on how to best suppress prisoners’ communication. The two, internationally famous model regimes for suppressing prisoners’ communication were the separate (Pennsylvania) system and the congregate (Auburn, New York) system. Louis Dwight, a founder of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, advocated vociferously in favor of the Auburn system. Pennsylvania prison reformers probably sensed in 1847 the balance of deliberative power shifting against them.

NY Prison Association Emerges As Rival to Prison Inspectors

In New York State, political and civic institutions occupied similar positions for creating public knowledge about prison conditions. From the opening of the first New York State Prison in 1797, politically appointed inspectors reported to the New York legislature about prison conditions. Some of these inspectors in 1844 invited “the attention of the benevolent” to forming a society to aid discharged prisoners.^ The following month concerned citizens formed the Prison Association of New York.

The Prison Association of New York assumed a broad role in relation to prisoners. In addition to relief of discharged convicts, the Prison Association included as its purposes “amelioration of the conditions of prisoners” and “the improvement of Prison Discipline generally.”^ The Prison Association followed earlier, similar associations in Philadelphia and Boston in encompassing these purposes. These purposes directly concerned the primary activities and interests of the politically appointed prison inspectors.

The first annual report of the Prison Association described inspection difficulties. The report noted “difficulty in inspecting the prisons of the State, arising sometimes from the reluctance of their officers to submit to what they deemed unauthorized intrusion.”^ Punishment is a public function. In a democracy, civic institutions and citizens in general should be concerned with prisons. At the same time, civic concern is not the same as direct administrative responsibility. The Prison Association and prison officials differed over who was authorized to inspect prisons.

Evidently responding to questions of authority, the Prison Association secured extensive authority under a legislative act of incorporation. The Prison Association’s Act of Incorporation, passed on May 9, 1846, stated:

The said executive committee {of the Prison Association} by such committees as they shall from time to time appoint, shall have power, and it shall be their duty to visit, inspect and examine, all the prisons in the state, and annually report to the legislature their state and condition, and all such other things in regard to them as may enable the legislature to perfect their government and discipline.

The Act of Incorporation explicitly gave the Prison Association committees the same rights to inspect prisons that the official prison inspectors had under statute:

And to enable them to execute the powers and perform the duties hereby granted and imposed, they shall possess all the powers and authority that by the twenty-fourth section, of the title first, chapter third, part fourth of the Revised Statutes are vested in the inspectors of the county prisons, and the duties of the keepers of each prison that they may examine shall be in the same relation to them, as in the section aforesaid, are imposed on the keepers of such prisons in relation to the inspectors thereof^

Prison Association members were required to secure a judicial order prior to inspecting a prison. The first president of the Prison Association, W. T. McCoun, was a New York State Vice Chancellor. A leading founder and the Vice-President of the Prison Association, John W. Edmonds, was a circuit judge. Since Prison Association members included such judicial officials, securing a judicial order was probably quite easy. The Prison Association became potentially as powerful as the politically appointed prison inspectors for creating public knowledge about prison conditions.

Conflict Between NY Prison Assocation and Prison Inspectors

Within a year after the Prison Association received authority comparable to that of the politically appointed prison inspectors, the Prison Association and the prison inspectors were harshly criticizing each other. The Prison Association in its annual reports provided to the public and the New York State legislature a large amount of formerly unavailable information about conditions in all four New York State prisons and some county prisons. The Prison Association published information about prison finances, prison discipline, prisoner population statistics, and discharged convicts. Moreover, the Prison Association documented abuses that had not been previously publicly reported. In its report of Dec. 2, 1847, the Prison Association’s Executive Committee compared the Prison Association favorably to the official state prison inspectors:

The inspectors however honestly they may be disposed to discharge their duties, are always more or less interested in particular offices, they are instruments of their own appointment, friends perhaps of long standing, and it may be, men of considerable political influence; besides, as supervisors of the prison, the presentation of any serious charge against the officers is in fact a censure upon themselves, impeaching their vigilance, care and discretion. Thus many abuses are yearly overlooked, which if they had been properly represented to the Legislature might have led to investigations which would have formed a basis for desirable improvement in our prison discipline or at least furnished important lights to guide us through its scarcely illumined mazes. The power therefore vested in the Prison Association appears to be wisely devised, and limited as it is, to examining and reporting, of the utmost importance. ^

The State Prison Committee of the New York Senate, however, expressed concern about the Prison Association’s actions. In a report to the Senate on Dec. 14, 1847, the Senate’s State Prison Committee stated:

its influences have tended to impair the discipline of the prison. The convicts are said to be “in daily communication with the prison association, or some officer of the prison in the interest of the association, and are informed that the Legislature has given this society power to regulate and control the affairs of the prison;” that there is “intense feeling and sympathy entertained for the poor creatures, and a watchful eye will be kept upon all the acts and conduct of the keepers, &c., &c., which has a tendency to make the convicts restless, impudent, and to doubt the authorities of the prison.” This is the testimony of one who knows well its effects. They seem to act in the character of spies on the discipline generally and particularly, being permitted to converse alone with the prisoners, without the presence of the keeper; and the results above alluded to, your committee are of opinion, are the natural consequences of such minute and constant interference with the particular management of the prison, and must be very annoying to the keepers in their attempts to preserve a mild but healthy discipline.^

The actions of the official prison inspectors did not generate such concern. Apparently the Prison Association members were inspecting prisons more actively and more independently than were the official state prison inspectors.

Communicating with Prisoners