Arch Street<\/a><\/p>\n Map of Arch Street (close-up)<\/a><\/p>\n Over the next twenty years, many of the disorderly and destitute of the Philadelphia region were incarcerated in this facility, which was essentially a bridewell that some accounts claim was \u201cnever considered sufficiently safe or well constructed to house prisoners.\u201d[2]<\/a> For the two thirds of Arch Street\u2019s inmates who had arrived there following a vagrancy conviction, the punishment of incarceration in this institution was usually for some form of movement or mobility. Over a thousand persons were sentenced to serve time there each year for the crimes of \u2018strolling\u2019 and \u2018wandering,\u2019 being persons \u2018having no residence,\u2019 and \u2018being destitute of a home.\u2019 This mobility and general lack of stability not only prompted their arrest and punishment, but was also used to demarcate the level of comfort and provisions due such persons while incarcerated.<\/p>\n Arch Street Prison contained a separate apartment to confine debtors, while in the rest of the prison, an annual average 2,000 of \u201cvagrants and untried prisoners, of all colors and all degrees of crime\u201d were \u201cassembled in one common room\u201d where they formed \u201cone common association,\u201d and \u201cthe reputed pirate and murderer\u201d might be found \u201cseated beside a youth confined for a drunken brawl.\u201d[3]<\/a> Legislators and reformers had condemned this intermingling at Arch Street\u2019s predecessor facilities, and the prisoners\u2019 shared confinement in space contributed to calls for a separate system that might not breed, as it was feared, further crime. And yet, strong distinctions were drawn by authorities between criminal convicts and Arch Street\u2019s non-criminal prisoners, who claimed that convicts held in Philadelphia\u2019s high profile Eastern State Penitentiary were \u201cof a different class,\u201d possessing \u201chigher intelligence,\u201d better social habits, and better hygiene than the average \u201cmiserable vagrant\u201d confined in the Arch Street Prison. [4]<\/a> The conditions in the two institutions reflected this perception. In 1824, a Philadelphia Grand Jury found that \u201cthe arrangements made for the safety and health of the convicts [at Walnut Street Prison] are as well calculated for those objects as the extreme scarcity of room in the\u2026apartments of the vagrants and untried prisoners.\u201d Discomfort was a design feature for the punishment and housing of vagrants and debtors as a deterrent against recidivism, yet the Grand Jury asserted that the \u201cprivations so great\u201d which they endured were a \u201csevere punishment for their misfortunes and poverty.\u201d[5]<\/a> A legislative committee investigating the issue in 1833 questioned whether offering greater \u201cprovisions and comforts\u201d to incarcerated vagrants would encourage \u201cidleness and profligacy,\u201d yet asserted that they were entitled to be treated at \u201cleast upon an equal position with the convicts.\u201d[6]<\/a> Incarcerated in penal facilities with worse conditions than those endured by convicts and yet not considered actual criminals by the state, vagrants and debtors occupied a unique position in the early nineteenth century United States system of crime and punishment.<\/p>\n Arch Street was located in the city arguably at the very heart of debates about American penal reform. The historiography of punishment has cast the experiments in solitary confinement undertaken at Eastern State Penitentiary as a focal point for understanding the gradual trajectory toward modern systems of punishment, and even the inevitability of abolishing imprisonment for debt. The separate system was constructed primarily to place physical space between prisoners in a direct rebuttal to the lack of space between prisoners in Walnut and Arch Street Prisons, barely a mile away across the city. While it was the conditions at these two prisons that prompted reform, the decades of concurrence in the Jacksonian era while these institutions continued to exist side by side because the realities of the size of the population \u2018requiring\u2019 incarceration forced practicality to the fore, rather than leading to swift replacement of the old facilities, are often overlooked.<\/p>\n During this time, likely under the influence of debates over separate confinement, the considerations of spatiality within the \u2018Old Arch Street Prison,\u2019 as it was referred, became paramount. The prison was segregated by sex in addition to level of criminality, with the debtors separated from vagrants and those awaiting criminal trials. When cholera struck Philadelphia in 1832 and Arch Street saw the highest mortality rate in the entire city, commentators reported deaths at the prison by their spatial location even over sex, noting that on one day alone, \u201cabout twenty-two died on the women\u2019s side, and upwards of fifty in the men\u2019s department.\u201d Divisions both theoretically penal and physical marked the management of disorderly and criminal behaviour in Philadelphia, punishments \u201cdealt out,\u201d as one observer noted, \u201cnot to convicts, but to men whom the law holds as innocent, they not having received a trial by a jury of their peers\u201d and to vagrants, men and women alike.[1]<\/a> By 1837, the prison\u2019s short-lived function as a vagrant prison was trumped by plans for new facilities, and Arch Street was demolished. Convictions and incarceration, even in a prison without convicts, revealed contemporary beliefs about the moral degradations brought on by poverty and the physical, spatial solutions authorities used to limit their impact on the wider community.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> A Tale of Horror! Giving an Authentic Account of the Dreadful Scenes that took place in the Arch Street Prison <\/em>(Philadelphia, 1832).<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> \u201cSale of Walnut Street Prison,\u201d Hazard\u2019s Register of Pennsylvania<\/em>, vol. 7, 1831.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Manuscript collection description, Arch Street Prison minutes, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, http:\/\/discover.hsp.org\/Record\/ead-Am.3228.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Prison Discipline Society<\/em>, vol. 5, 1830.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Philadelphia<\/em> Inquirer, <\/em>November 9, 1832.<\/p>\n![\"70512_ca_object_representations_media_12781_mediumlarge\"](\"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/carchipelago\/files\/2015\/09\/70512_ca_object_representations_media_12781_mediumlarge-300x198.jpg\")
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