. . >> ladies and gentlemen, you may

be seated. announcer: you are watching american history tv 40 hours of programming on american history every weekend on cspan3. follow us on twitter for information on our schedule of upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. >> each week, american history tv's american artifacts takes you to museums and historic basis. opened in 1829, philadelphia's eastern state penitentiary operated as a prison until 1971. now a museum, we visited to learn about the history that coined the term penitentiary and tried to reform criminals. guide: my name is nick, a tour guide at eastern state penitentiary. today, we will spend the next

hour looking at this beautiful building. this is today an estate of -- in a state of stabilized ruins. this is after 142 years used as a prison, which, when it first opened in 1829, was considered experimental. it was a brand-new type a -- of prison. it was so revolutionary they did not want to call it a prison. they invented a new word --penitentiary. the root is penitent. this is the first attempt at the humane treatment of a criminal. a very quaker inspired idea that deep down everybody was perfectly good. in this building, that person would have a chance to reflect on their life and become penitent, to reform themselves through that feeling. a great question is, how do you make someone penitent? how do you make someone confront some of those decisions they had made? we'll spend a lot of time inside the cells addressing that.

while we're out here, take a quick look around, i want to show you some of the architecture of this place. when it first opened in 1829 the architecture of the -- the architect of the building, a young british man won a $100 prize to design the thing. he wanted to look hundreds of -- he wanted this to look hundreds of years older than it was. he went with the gothic revival style. the battlementse. even the imposing-ness of the stone facade, you have to imagine this the way a philadelphian would have in the 1800's. first off, you would hopefully be seeing it from two miles away. the city today is totally surrounding the entire prison, but when it first opened, this was acres of open farmland all around. imagine that you are in that smaller city. you look up to -- you would look at the largest public structure

on the continent. it was supposed to intimidate. all of the castle-like elements are supposed to make us think about one of the things we associate with the castle -- authority, dungeon, torture. imagine what happens in the basement of the castle. interesting that the inside of what was happening here was this new attempt at humane punishment. when the outside was a harsh and intimidating kind of look towards the outside. it is also, as far as castles go, totally safe. -- totally fake. those battlements are knee-high. they are not going to help in any kind of siege. all along the outside of the perimeter, you will see arrow slit windows, but they do not go through the wall. there is no temperature -- temperature -- aperture on the

inside. again, just for the look of the thing, rather than the actual function. but i want to bring us around the way, show you more of the architecture outside. i'm going to head just up this way. watch your step. it is very icy out. i am going to bring us into the corner here, just to give you a sense of the scale of this place. 10.5 acres. the perimeter wall, you can get a sense of. 30 feet high. it goes another 10 feet deep. this is almost 8 feet thick. this goes for half-mile all away around the site. so, not just the largest but i want to stress this -- this was the most expensive thing, one of the united states had ever built. the only more expensive building on the continent was the capitol dome in d.c. as far as public structures go. this tells us a lot about the

priorities of these early pennsylvanians. this was the major project. it was 8 times over its budget. and they kept building. they were committed toward this new idea, just to try something new as far as crime and punishment compared to what they had been doing. but we are going to head inside of cellblock one. come on in. this is cellblock one from 1829. it is by today's standards kind of gloomy. but back then, this was considered beautifully well lit for 19th century standards. every cell had its own skylight. so, we said the outside architecture resembled kind of

this gothic revival castle. you see the inside is more cathedral-like. a lot of these early ideas -- penitence very religiously inspired. this is when crime was equated with sin. a lot of these ideals of penitence are built into the building. we will see more of that as we go through. before we focus on what eastern state was doing, take a look at prisons before. this is what we are trying to not do. this is an illustration of newgate prison in london. william penn spent time here when he was a reckless quaker on the town. wallet jail might have been even worse. you get a sense of everything going on. total chaos. fighting. what we think about as correctional officers today did not exist back then. it does not matter if someone

was, picked someone's pockets or stabbed someone to death everyone was in the same room , together. the artist did not draw the open sewer. disease was probably. -- disease was prevalent. typhus was so common they called it "jail fever." you did not have to worry if you had money. prisons would have a separate area for the aristocracy. but if someone did not have money or did not have family to support them for their time in prison, they might not eat. in many of these prisons, food was not provided. you had to purchase it. this was way different than what we think about prison today. today, prison is the punishment. back then, jails were the waiting area. this is where someone would be held pretrial. in the meantime, if they want to dance on the table or play ball or gamble, i love this as an example. walnut street jail had a bar in it. if you did not have enough

money, you could sell your clothes for liquor. you can imagine the environment people were housed in. of course, the trial would occur in the punishment, again, not time. it would be maybe a fine, an execution for serious crimes banishment occasionally, but much more commonly physical punishment. there are some examples we have illustrated along the wall. whipping very common. the state loved it. it was easier to scale. the worse the crime was, the more times the criminal would be beaten. then they are free to go. branding. this is another painful one. but you can see, i mean, the pain of being burnt with a hot iron was not the real punishment. the real punishment was branding, the mark that lasted forever. sometimes on the face indicating criminal. compare that to the ideas here about trying to change someone. very different approach.

stockades pillories. , this is more about public humiliation. if you are familiar with philadelphia, there is a beautiful park called logan's square. you could bring your whole family to have an entertaining evening of throwing rocks at criminals or catch a public hanging. pennsylvania was the first state to say maybe we do not want to do that outside. so this was it. this was our criminal justice system. it had some quirks that reformers were looking at. prisons were filthy, filing, overcrowded. the punishments were not seen as the punishments -- the punishments were starting to be seen as cruel and unusual. this is a bigger issue pretty -- this is a bigger issue. you can imagine let's say there , is a young first-time

offender. they get arrested, they spent a few weeks in walnut street jail. hanging out with criminals they , are getting drunk, catching typhus, hanging out with criminals, they get whipped. you can imagine what that person's life is like afterwards. there is no incentive to reform. not only are they going to go back to their old ways, but they consider prisons and area where you can learn new crimes. tricks of the trade networking, , right? these guys want to switch it up. if you visit philadelphia, you will get acquainted with ben franklin. he was so active in civic life. he invites some wealthy philadelphians over to his place. i love the name of the group they come up with. the philadelphia society for alleviating the miseries of public prisons. along. today it is still around called the pennsylvania prison society. we are looking at the first organization in the world dedicated to prison reform. this is shortly before franklin was involved with helping to write what became the bill of

rights. that language about cruel and unusual punishment, we see that in the 8th amendment. they had a new idea for how a prison could run but they would need a very expensive, custom-built prison. the idea that they had -- it took them 30 years to convince the state. it is called the separate system. and all of the architecture and technology in this building was designed around the idea. so, instead of dozens of people tossed together, at eastern state penitentiary one prisoner would spend the entire sentence, an average of two to 8 years in this cells. they would never leave. they would never see another prisoner. and they had to serve the time in absolute silence. again, the goal was penitence. how do you make someone penitent? there was this inspired belief

that the innate goodness of a person, if you seal away the evils of the outside world, it would return to that goodness. after a few hours, never more than a few days they would ask , for something to do. a book was provided. you can probably guess which the one. bible. and no other books. no reading material outside of that. no newspapers. not even letters. no personal visits from friends or family. but it was not pure isolation. they had a few professional visits. the moral instructor would drop by. today it sounds quaint. in prisons today, we have caseworkers and psychiatrist. that got started here. same thing with job-training. it is something we see in practically every prison today. once a month at eastern state, a professional would come, give the prisoner the materials they needed to learn the craft or a

trade. cellblock one is the shoemaking cellblock. there was another one for weaving furniture making, cigar , rolling. a simple idea, but just, again the hope is in here, they are going to have this quiet reflective time. they are going to learn how to become a new person and leave with a set of job skills and get a job and become a tax paper. -- taxpayer. these were amazingly high ideals for that yeah, and when it first point. opened there was a lot of hope for the wave was going to go this way. you can maybe get a sense of what happened. when it first opened, the entire world sat up and took notice of philadelphia. foreign dignitaries from as far away from china were being sent to the city for the first time with the expressed purpose of studying this building. part of it was this new idea of penitence but much of it was

actually in architecture and technology. this was really, there are some architectural historians that consider eastern state penitentiary the first modern building in the world on account of its large-scale environmental systems. every cell had running water. every cell had a flush toilet. you can see in this diagram it connect we central so that runs under our feet today. this building had central heating in 1829. even the warden was required to live in that front gate house. he did not have a toilet. they did not think of it as a luxury. it was the answer to how to keep someone isolated. they wanted no distractions in that little crucible of penitence so that they could focus on their own personal path of betterment. every cell even had its own private, attached backyard.

hours a day locked inside. 23 they were allowed for two and half hours for fresh air and sunlight. it was almost like a little dog run off the back of each cell. these had bare dirt floors. if a prisoner wanted to garden it was encouraged. the physician thought it was therapeutic. some prisoners even kept birds and rabbits. i read about one prisoner growing peaches to supplement his meals. the meals were not bad. three meals a day delivered into the cell. meat, sometimes cocoa, sometimes coffee. if all you heard about was the peaches and cocoa and gardens, you would be like, this place is amazing. if all you heard about was the silence and enforced isolation, you would think that this was the most terrible prison ever built.

but the fact it was both means this was an entirely new type of punishment. this is why it took so long to convince them to build it. they had to say, listen, do not expect anyone to change lastingly unless you take your material needs first. only then, will the prisoner be able to focus on the spiritual discipline. that they were trying to get people to address in here. brand-new ideas for this time. this is another curiosity. you can see this prisoner here is hooded. he has got an officer, called a keeper. being led through the backyard into the cell. whenever were moved around, they were hooded. so they cannot see anyone else. it ups that feeling of isolation. they also cannot see the building. it is disorienting. if you are trying to escape, you come out of the cell, what is the first thing you see?

it is totally quiet. now what? but here is a curiosity. we have hoods with eye holes. what is the purpose if they can see the building or other prisoners? this is a new idea here. the hoods were to preserve the anonymity of the prisoner. they were only identified by a n inmate number. the hope was only a handful of people would know they had served time. after the time at eastern state, the hope was they would go and have a fresh start somewhere. compare that to being branded on the face and known as a thief the rest of your life. or today a felony conviction will show up on student loan applications or housing assistance applications. these were brand-new ideas for that time. but i'm going to show you the inside of one of these cells of the early system here. much of the building we are

keeping in the state of stabilized decay. this area you can see, we actually restored a cell to what it would've looked like in that early separate system. wood floors, that gate would have led to that backyard. there are these curious half doors on the outside here. the first three cellblocks they built they did not bother putting doors to the inside. prisoners were brought into the back door. this was a feeding window. food and work materials would be passed through an iron drawer, trying to cut down on human contact. imagine if your meal slides in silently. if you did not clean it, by the time it was retracted, you would not get your next meal. so, on paper, everything sounds great. but in practice, the separate system had so many issues with it. imagine today in a prison who mops the floors.

who does the maintenance? it is prisoners. who was supposed to do that if everyone is locked in, learning cottage industries? they just broke the rules. prisoners were brought out to work in the kitchen, in the laundry. the first warden, sandalwood -- samuel woulod, really wanted a butler. so he took a prisoner out of isolation. william hamilton becomes his personal server. -- servant. he was the first person to escape. if everything happened according to plan, it would be a strict prison. but in actuality, it was impossible to maintain. let's take a look inside one of the cells up the way here. so, these two cells are open. take a step inside. watch your head here.

so, you can hear out echo-ey it is. part of that was the silence. any noise would be punished. the entire place was whisper quiet. the officers were told to put socks on over there boots. if you were in your backyard your neighbors were not. the food carts had leather padded wheels you would never hear it coming. they did not want inmates shouting over the walls. i should mention, what we see in the cell today, this became in the 1930's, one of the maximum-security units. so the bed frame is bolted to the ground. the toilets -- this is a modern toilet encased in concrete. no one could smash it and have shards as a weapon. and access to the backyards, they eventually started using the backyard spaces for other

things. and the entryways to them were sealed up. so, we are looking at a lot of layers of the prison through decades of history. let's head on back out this way. pretty spacious in there. compared to other prisons at that time, especially. and also designed for one. add in the backyard, that was a lot of space. a lot of expense, but this prison, the separate system had so many different problems built in. one was, i mean, you can imagine what happens if you keep someone alone in silence for years. not exactly mentally healthy. and that silence rule was being broken so frequently. they were trying to be humane but the punishments were, well they escalated quickly. it starts they would take a meal away.

then they would take yard time away. if a prisoner could not stop talking or trying to communicate with other people. they were learning, shouting down the toilet. throwing notes into adjacent yards. they had something called the iron gag. think of it like a horse's bit. it has a chunk of metal to depress the tongue. it locks around the back of the head with chains. in 1833, there was one death in the prison. a prisoner serving 12 years for murder choked in the iron gag. choked to death. it prompted an investigation. the inspection came in here. they were addressing a number of different whistleblower complaints about the warden. it turns out the place was going not according to plan. that inspection learned prisoners were regularly allowed out of the separate system. they found out the wife of one of the officers was throwing parties in the front gate house and inviting the prisoners. it was chaos. and then they also found out

this issue with the mental health of solitary confinement. starting to not admit that it was a problem but certainly addressing it. problem solved itself. they did not have to worry about the effects of isolation when they had to worry about overcrowding. as early as 12 years in, they ran out of cells. the entire prison was billed for solid -- built for solitary confinement but now they had to have two or three or five to a cell. this is two cells joined together. at the highest peak of population, there were seven prisoners in one cell. so, all of these reasons for building the prison, this penitentiary to separate someone from the challenges of being

with another person, they did not have to worry about disease or violence or contraband or criminal ideas being passed around. suddenly they are right back to where they started. so, this was for decades in the late 1800's, this separate system was unraveling. until 1913, they admit the separate system was broken. again, looks great on paper. in practice, it was unworkable. expensive to build and run mentally unhealthy, and then so overcrowded they could not keep everyone separate anyway. the prison changes. i want you to imagine this place in the 20th century. much closer to what we think of prisons today. prisoners have a cellmate. they are allowed to talk. instead of eating and working alone in a cell they eat in the mess hall. they play sports together. they make chess clubs. there is an orchestra are they right publications for the print

-- there is an orchestra. they write publications for what becomes the print shop. you can imagine, let's say you are an officer, you unlock every cell you are going to lead all of these people to breakfast. what is your big concern going to be? suddenly, they have to address i security in a way they had not needed to in the early days of isolation. these gates, the door had been removed but you get the idea. this gate was for some luck one. -- cellblock one. this is called a riot gate. that is not original to the building. 1924 is when they add gates. now they have to think about how to move large numbers of prisoners around. how do you address security? how do you run a congregate prison in an old stone building built before electricity and designed for an entirely different style of confinement?

a lot of issues and we will see , a lot of patchwork fixes along the way. but this is the heart of the prison. this is one of the reasons the place became world-famous. the circle on the floor is the exact center of 10 1/2 acres. it is in the center of the rotunda. officers named the spot center. from this one spot, just like -- by turning and looking around, you can see the entire prison. this was just seven cellblocks. all of the link up to this one central hub. now, this was not the first centrally planned prison. but the architect, his real contribution was keeping it empty. other prisons would have kitchens or something here. he said, take it away. keep it open for convenience ventilation, and watching. watching you get right away. you can see the whole place in less than a second if you need to. it's convenient to get to

anywhere. you feel the cross breeze. it is amazing ventilation. and it is an economical way of staffing the place. you can imagine 7 cellblocks laid out unconnected. you need one officer patrolling or seven officers to see everything at once. from here, because we can see everything, though, you can see some of the changes early on. this radial plan, this is copy copied something like 300 times all around the world. today, every continent but antarctica has a prison modeled after eastern state. so influential for prison design. cellblock we walked through cellblock one was one story high. so is so look two. -- cellblock two. cellblock trees almost completed when the prison opens in 1829. you can see something that changes. cellblocks four, five, six and

seven had a second floor. the plan have been for seven. before they completed the blueprint, they realized they were headed for overcrowding. so the state asks the architect, can you give it more cells? from the surveillance hub, you are not doing surveillance on the top floor. you think the cells are missing something. they do not have the backyard. on the underside, no skylight. they solved that. they put a window in the back. better than nothing. top floor, no backyard -- better than nothing. an empty cell next door. outside time was inside. the reason they're adding extra cells, is not to keep them open. soon those yards are used up as space. by the late 1800's, exercise looked like a small group of inmates put it together -- who did -- hooded together.

the system was falling apart. you can get a great sense of what's changed here. by 1836, 7 cellblocks were complete. there is usable farmland between. some lucky inmates were being taught agriculture. they would come out of the cellblock and work in the yards alone. there was a greenhouse. trying to help the prison be self-sufficient and way outside of the city. this is the graphic from 1855. take a look at this aerial photo 99 years after that. it is a very different prison. this is a photo. you are looking at the roofs of 14 cellblocks all jampacked in. they are not even done building. they squeezed a 15th in after the photo was taken. imagine this place at its most overcrowded. 1929. there were over 1800 prisoners. the original design was going to

house 250. over time, they are adding new buildings, new cellblocks, always trying to meet the demand of the numbers they had here. you can imagine with that number, there is not nearly enough work to go around. there were laws in place saying only 10% of the prisoners were allowed to have gainful employment. so, there would not be any competition with outside markets. imagine 90% of those guys just hanging around. they start to see a lot of trouble in the 1920's. gang activity. drug rings. prostitution rings. corrupt officers. all sorts of violent riots. escape attempts. the warden in 1923, there was a grand jury investigation. he is about, well, we will let history decide. about as corrupt as they come.

it looks like the corruption especially the heroin trade might have gone up to him. the new warden comes in. it is his job to clean up the place. the first thing he wants to do is get the overcrowding out of the building. let's say you are that warden. what type of offender would you pick to get onto a bus, build a new farm branch and stay out there? what kind of offender gets that job? they selected low flight risk minor offenders. they are on the bus. who would that leave behind? suddenly eastern state penitentiary became some of the most hardened convicts in the state jammed into this person. this is a great comparing contrast. 1830, the number one offense was horse theft. 1930, the number one offense was second-degree murder. more than half the men were in for violent offenses. the sentences were getting longer.

decades, life terms, death sentences. you can kind of get a sense of the character of the place changing. early on the reason for building this was penitence. isolation and penitence with me -- would lead to reform. by the early 20th century, the number one goal for this place was secured, was control. that is not to say reform went away entirely. they had classroom instruction job training. but not nearly enough. you can see, not just the goal of security but there was a pretty good reason for it. by the 1900's, the city had grown around the outside of the walls. by the 1900's, we have warehouses. these are homes. that building is an elementary

school right next to the maximum-security prison. again, a ton of changes over time. but i want to bring us out to the ball field. we are going to talk about life in the 20th century here. then i will show you our exhibit about current corrections. this is cellblock four. from 1830, some of those early cellblocks designed for the separate system. it has seen a lot of changes over time. that is one of the old food carts. you can see it is built into the real to deliver meals along the cellblock. some of the photos we have seen here are all from the 20th century. machine shops, workshops, they had a whole different slew of things. typewriter repair, a box factory. this is one of the strangest photos we have in our archives. these men are drying a line of tiny clothing.

we have no idea why. passing the time, i suppose. this prisoner is wearing headphones. if you take a look inside the cells, there is a square box . it was headphone jacks. by the 1930's, inmates could purchase headphones and plug into four different radio channels. even in some of the cells designed for two, they have two headphone boxes so you would not have to argue over what they were listening to. this cellblock, especially, you can see the extent of the decay. i always rush to let prisoners -- sorry, visitors know that prisoners did not sleep on a pile of rocks. this was, after the prison shut down, we are looking through decades of neglect. there are over 1000 skylights in the building, which is 1000 places water got in.

you imagine 20 years of freezing and falling through the winter. the place got an absolute mess. but our goal is not to fix it up. we are never going to repaint this cellblock. the goal is what we call a stabilized ruin. we are trying to keep it from falling apart. this last cell on the right is one of the shower cells. in the early 1800's, inmates would be hooded and brought to the gatehouse for a bath once every three weeks, which sounds a little grody, but compared to philadelphia at that time, it was not too far off. by the 1920's, they had a shower cell installed in every cellblock. let's head back outside. it is this way. one of my favorite views of the whole prison. you get the 19th century tower.

20th century steel guard tower. 21st century comcast tower. this was all the skyscrapers you can see beyond the perimeter there. by the time the prison shut down in 1971, they were not there yet, but many of the prisoners we interviewed would talk about their connection to the outside world, with the city just on the other side of the wall. they would hear things like, a school bus or the ice cream truck or fireworks. they would comment on that feeling of being able to hear it but still totally disconnected. i guess that is the part of the reason for prisons. that idea of what you are giving up. what is taken away. this area here. it is not much to look at today with all the snow, but this was the baseball field. in the 20th century they needed a large area for congregants

sports. that was the backstop for baseball. they have feel stops for football they also played out here. along the left field wall, there is this four foot high fence. it's not a regulation sized field. it was easy to blast home runs out of here all day. then you think -- what is on the other side of the wall? we have accounts from the 20's of trolleys having the windows smashed and the drivers injured. another issue of baseballs being returned back in. in the the 1920's, there was a cocaine smuggling ring with racquetballs being tossed over full of cocaine. 1944, a package of dynamite was tossed in here. they secured that, but we get to see one of the real challenges of this place. it was never designed to be in the middle of the city. it was definitely not designed to be maximum-security. then it found itself being both

of those things. there are prisons in center city, philadelphia, designed to be there. you could walk by and not notice it. this one not the one to have. but let's take a look around here. this grass here. this is one of our newest exhibits. it shows the change in the rate of incarceration in the united states over the last century or so. you can see 1970 is red. that is when eastern state shut down as a state facility. in the last 40 years, you can see the rate has skyrocketed. that number up top -- 730 per 100,000 -- that is the number of people in prison for 100,000 citizens. it works out to about one out of every 125 americans was in prison in 2010.

it is the highest rate in the world. if you want to compare it internationally, take a look around here. you can see the united states, we have highest rate of incarceration in the world by a huge margin. we are beating out rwanda. you can see this change has happened in the last 40 years. countries listed on the left like the united states use capital punishment. countries on the right to not. -- do not. so what we do right now exactly -- now is actually historically unprecedented. no country in the history of the world has ever had this number of prisoners or this percentage of its population incarcerated or spent this much money. it is $80 billion every year. that's combining the federal, state, and local levels. if you want to take a look on this side of the grass.

this shows the breakdown of the prison population by race. you can see the major change from 1970 to 2010. so, even though black and latino americans are 30% of the general population, they are overrepresented at 60% in the prison population. so, this is something we as a historic site have recently turned to, just to try and address and bring it up in conversation. it has certainly been a year with some great racial tension in the air. this is one of the reasons we want to remain a relevant cultural institution, as a place to address some of these larger questions. is the justice system equal for everyone? what can be done? do we want this number of prisoners? why so high? what has changed since 1970?

it is a super-complicated topic. there are some things we can say for certain. now more than ever before, a conviction will lead to jail time more than any other type of punishment. now more than ever before, sentences have never been longer. i was curious to see how things will change and unfold. we have a space on the grass for 2020. after that census, we will complete one more bar on the graph. we ask for people's predictions. whether they think it is going up or down. as neutral as we try to be there are ways of looking at it. you can look at the number of people in prison is going down. but the percentage, and populationwise, it is going up. people think this as the crime rate, which it actually is not. crime has sharply decreased

since the mid-1990's. both violent and nonviolent. much of the discussion usually turns to the war on drugs and law enforcement in that direction. in the federal system, it is about 49.5% are in for nonviolent drug offenses. that seems to be one of the areas people are focusing on as far as if the goal of the prison system is punishment, are we achieving that? if the goal is rehabilitation, are we achieving that? it's difficult, but these are questions we were first addressing here 200 years ago. what is a prison for? what is the ultimate goal? how do you best get out of here how much are you willing to spend to do so? they are very much live questions, very much unsettled. i especially love whatever we -- whenever we have middle

school or high school groups in here, because they are in a way the people that will determine the answers to a number of those questions. but we have a lot yet to see. we are going to head around the corner. i will show you more changes in the 20th century as far as security goes. so, i will stop us here for a second. this little concrete patch was actually the handball court. they never designed the place to have large numbers of prisoners exercising at once. so, suddenly they had to scramble and use every scrap of space they had. this is the handball court. they would run track along the outside of the walls. it is covered with snow but you can see these raised curves. this is where the bocce courts were. i also wanted to stop here. this is the site for the one successful escape from the prison. in 1923, six men got over the wall in the middle of the

afternoon. they came out to their yard. they had pistols with them. then smuggle them into the prison. they just started doing visitation. they had not yet built the no contact visitation room. contraband was flooding into the prison. they came out here. they stuck up the unarmed officers and locked them into a sentry box on the ground floor. then they brought with them what looked like a foot locker, but was actually four segments of a ladder. one of the escapees have been a had been a cabinet member before his arrest. they get onto the roof of the sentry box. assemble the ladder. go over the outside of the wall of a homemade rope. they hijacked a truck on corinthian avenue. and escaped out of the city. in broad daylight. 15 eyewitnesses. eventually, they did recapture five of those six. the last when they picked up,

they found two months later in honolulu, hawaii. leo callahan disappeared. no one knows. he is the one man to escape out of the prison and never be recaptured. that was 1923. those corner towers were added in 1924. the stone has always been there. it was part of the decorative look. the brick portions you see was when they were increasing security in the 1920's. officers up there were given repeating rifles, orders -- tommy guns. again, just trying to become a maximum-security prison. concrete cellblock. cellblock 14. you can tell by 1927, they do not care if it looks like a castle or cathedral. this is utilitarian architecture .

the challenge was, how do you house as many prisoners in a small space as possible? for as cheap as they could? it is poured concrete and rebar. it is in bad condition today. this was built with inmate labor. it was designed by an inmate architect. harvard educated guy serving time for forging checks. it is also remarkable because of what is underneath. you can see the stairway leads down to the basement level of the prison. the entire prison has a basement, a maintenance tunnel. in this set of tunnels, they sealed this away from the rest of the prison and added four isolation cells for punishment. many prisons would call this area "the hole." here it was known as the klondike cells. there were a few stages of punishment, but this was end of the line. particularly for violence. if someone was violent with another prisoner or especially against an officer, they could spend time down there.

usually between seven and 30 days with practically nothing. no bed, no clothing, no heating, no plumbing. bread and water. two meals a day and absolute pitch darkness. one prisoner was down there for 30 days. they brought him back to the surface. it turned out his vision was privately damaged. -- permanently damaged. today, prisons in their punishment areas, they used way for hours of bright light to avoid that competition. -- complication. but this was only in use for a fairly short time. 1953, the state came in. they inspected the prison. they saw down there and they said, you know what? we are going to have to find something else. some of the officers we interviewed who were here said the do-gooders made us shut down the hole. they had a legitimate question afterwards. in a humane prison, what can you do? how do you deal with an unruly

or violent prisoner? not an easy question, but it looks like the answer, they went way back to the early days of eastern state. isolation. long-term solitary confinement. so we see it even in today's super max prisons. if you are familiar with super maxes, it is one step above maximum-security. one in 44 states today. it sounds a lot like eastern state early on. everyone is in separate confinement 23 hours a day. one hour in a yard. they are expensive to build and run. some of the same mental health issues, but again, it is sort of the best solution we have. it is difficult. eastern state early on, the goal was reform. super max -- the goal is control. if you can get the unruly ones out of the general population,

the hope is you can have a functioning prison system. at eastern state cellblock 15 sort of served that purpose. you can see the cornerstone. 1956. this was the last cellblock they built. and you can think of it like a prison inside a prison. after they shut down the hole, they needed a place to house troublesome inmates. this was one of the areas they could keep everyone away. again, just out of the general population in the prison. come on in. so, cellblock 15 is known as death row. this is where prisoners who are awaiting an execution were usually kept on the second floor. the execution did not take place at this prison. in pennsylvania, there is one prison called rockview. it is in the center of the

state. any execution in pennsylvania will happen there. used to be the electric chair. today it is lethal injection. although it is right now being debated. just last week, governor wolf signed a moratorium that would hold off on the death penalty. until we study it more. it is still an active debate. we are curious here to see where it will land. this is the most modern cellblock. so, because it is from the 1950's, you can see the sink-toilet unit. still used in prisons today. the unit just like that. the bars have been removed. these used to have a sliding gate over each cell. along the ceiling, there was a second set. officers call this area the safety corridor. many officers said they would walk up to the cell to show the guys they were not afraid of them.

on this side of the bald, you the less bulkhead -- on this side of the bulkhead, you can see the control panel. -- on this side of the bulkside. this is the only one in the prison. this has stone issues. although you can unlock all the cells at once with that lever you can see they bolted this , piece of metal under the leather. because this was maximum-security, these were not the prisoners they were trying to move in numbers. so even though the prison had the option of being efficient, they disabled it. in 1915, they were talking about shutting this prison down and building one central pennsylvania prison. shortly after that, 1923, all these grand jury investigations. into the 1930's and 1940's, a series of riots. in 1944, the place declared unfit.

the place was declared unfit for human habitation. calls were made to shut it down. 1953, the state says we will build one last cellblock and change the name and try to get back to the early ideals of reform. it was really too little too late. it was 1961, when they had a good reason to change their mind. 1961 there was a riot in this prison. the one time inmates took control. that night, a handful of inmates managed to get out of their cells. from there, chaos started to spread. most of the officers on that night -- the night shift was 18. many were taken hostage. state troopers were alerted. they completely surrounded the place. they came in the front gate with tear gas and rubber bullets. there was a standoff in the garage. this is incredible. state troopers put the riot down that night without a single loss of life. every hostage was rescued.

they did it within four hours. they were all very pleased with operation prison breakout. as it was called. the neighbors, you can imagine not very pleased. suddenly, they had to rethink this neighborhood prison. so, it still took another decade. 1971 is when the last inmate was transferred out. i will show you this photo up here. this is 1970. the last state inmate is leaving. these guys are happy, waving and smiling. they are going to a different prison. they are just happy it is not this one. many of these prisoners ended up at one still in use today an , hour west of here. we keep in touch with them. there are prisoners that started their terms in this building.

we have a lot of living history. not in prison. we invite them back. every may we have an event called alumni reunion. we invite ex prisoners and ex officers and staff back. they all have a barbecue together on the ball field. we invite people to ask these men questions about whether time -- what their time was like here. they are all getting on in years. 70, 80 on average. it is always a great time, but they will not be around forever. you can see what happens. the city buys it from the state. they use it as an overflow facility for a few months before realizing why the state did not want it, right? they were trying to run the modern prison in an old stone building built for a different style of confinement. this is what happens. just 16 years after it is shut s down, it is an urban forest.

50-foot tall trees where we were walking. feral cats had moved in. vandals had stolen the copper piping. the city did not want the building at first. they wanted the land. we have a number of plans. this is one of them. developers are thinking about the eastern state penitentiary shopping mall. i think my favorite option they , were going to build luxury condos, but retain the outside wall and call it the ultimate gated community. kind of glad that did not happen. by the late 1980's, civic leaders got in here and started to discover a lot of the things i have been telling you. i mean, let's just look at the building itself, right? this is an early example of american architecture that, this was the reason european architects had to come to the united states early on. i love this as an example as far

as famous visitors go. 1842, trust dickens, the first -- charles dickens, first time in the u.s. he says i want to , see two things in the new world -- the falls of niagara and the eastern state penitentiary. this is on that scale as far as a building as grand as something like that. that is just the building. think of the ideas that get started here. even the word we use for our prison system today. the department of corrections. the idea that someone might be corrected or changed was actually an idea first fully applied in this building. so it is definitely would something we want to hold onto. we opened up in 1994 for tours. it used to be you had to put on a hardhat & a liability waiver. we are getting a little bit better. our big fundraiser for the year is a haunted house. it's an enormous thing.

250 actors dressed up like zombie guards and inmates jumping out from all over. our mission is to preserve this building so we can continue asking the questions that they had here 200 plus years ago almost. what is a prison for? what is the best way out? how do we make that as a social institution? i want to thank you guys for joining us. we would love it if you come and visit. we will be here. thanks for your time. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the

national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> with live coverage of the house on c-span and senate on c-span2, on cspan3 we supplement that by showing you public affairs events. on the weekend, cspan3 is home to american history tv including unique series visiting battlefields and key events, touring museums and historic sites to discover what artifacts reveal about america's past. history bookshelf, the presidency lectures in history with top college professors delving into america's past and our new series featuring archival government and

educational films from the 1930's through the 1970's. cspan3, watch us in h.d., like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter. >> 70 years up next, a panel of poor war to veterans from kansas city discuss their wartime memories. included the atomic bomb, the invasion of normandy, and harry truman after fdr caused death as the war was ending. hosted by the kansas city public library, this event is about an hour. host: a catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale, world war ii