From the very beginning, Eastern’s administrators’ autonomy was challenged directly by occasional incursions from the local penal reformers and indirectly by the state legislature's lackluster patronage. These challenges became more invasive in the 1850s, peaking in the 1860s. In response, Eastern's administrators sought to establish jurisdiction over their prison by proclaiming their own special expertise and insisting on deference in matters affecting Eastern. By the 1870s, however, penal actors on the national stage were likewise proclaiming their own expertise and professional status, while Eastern's administrators felt increasingly irrelevant. In response to these national-level developments, the administrators further developed their claims to professional status. In this context, the administrators' claims to professional status provided them a more promising path to self-aggrandizement than continuing to proclaim the Pennsylvania System's superiority. Consequently, the administrators shifted their focus from the Pennsylvania System to their status as professional penologists. It was this shift from defense to professionalization that deinstitutionalized the Pennsylvania System.

America's early prisons—first the proto-prisons built after the American Revolution and the modern prisons built in the 1820s and later—failed repeatedly and dramatically. These failures and the debates they precipitated gave modern prisons a perennial air of uncertainty. Would they solve the problems endemic to the proto-prisons—and serve the prison's original purpose?Moreover, news of penal failures like Auburn often had sudden and unpredictable impacts on the penal imagination and what commentators believed to be acceptable design choices for the new prisons. In the resulting atmosphere, deviations from the norm seemed even more risky and penal actors routinely sought assurance that they were on the right path. Thus, it is only by understanding this tumultuous, unstable beginning—when reformers repeatedly experimented with variations of prison and failed—that we can begin to understand how Eastern became a deviant prison and how the Pennsylvania System could become personally institutionalized at Eastern in the decades to follow.

Eastern was far from exceptional in the level of prison administrators' autonomy and inexperience, but two factors distinguished the administration at Eastern from that at other prisons. First, Pennsylvania did not employ contractors to run their prisons; consequently, the men in charge at Eastern saw themselves as trusted caretakers of the prison rather than men motivated by the promise of profit. Second, as some commentators recognized, Eastern's administrators were particularly active. More than mere figureheads, they had greater control than at other prisons—and they took advantage of this greater control. It was, in effect, their prison, a feeling of ownership and responsibility that will become clear in the following chapters. This chapter introducesthe administrative and legal framework that provided a group of largely untrained and inexperienced men with tremendous control over Eastern and especially the difficult, and sometimes evasive, task of translating the Pennsylvania System into practice. It was this group of men for whom the Pennsylvania System became personally institutionalized and who would fight to maintain it at Eastern.

This chapter describes the Pennsylvania System’s rapid decline at Eastern in the 1860s and 1870s. Catastrophic levels of post-war overcrowding caused the Pennsylvania System's most central components to break down in ways that the administrators fought hard to prevent or stop. However, the administrators’ verbal commitment to the Pennsylvania System ultimately outlasted its physical presence at Eastern. By the mid-1870s, something changed in the administrators' commitment: increasingly, the administrators abandoned their attempt to save the Pennsylvania System and instead redefined it into something else. This shift occurred after external criticism of the Pennsylvania System had abated. Thus, when Eastern's administrators finally abandoned the Pennsylvania System, they were not acceding to public pressure that they had withstood for nearly five decades. Instead, waning criticism had removed the administrators' opportunity to defend the Pennsylvania System and tout their own excellence, thereby allowing the Pennsylvania System to deinstitutionalize for Eastern's administrators.

When Eastern opened in 1829 and became the first prison to implement fully the Pennsylvania System, it theoretically could have offered a competitor model to the Auburn System. Instead, soon after it opened, commentators revived earlier criticisms of solitary confinement and took aim at Eastern and its supporters, especially its administrators. During the 1830s and 1840s, Eastern became a deviant prison—both as one of the few American prisons to follow the Pennsylvania System as well as a heavily criticized prison. This chapter traces that process. It introduces the origins and propagators of the most frequent calumnious myths about the Pennsylvania System and their influence on other states and prisons' decisions to avoid or abandon the Pennsylvania System. Finally, it discusses the impact of deviance on Eastern's administrators, who were just as criticized as the system they implemented. This criticism became was in the process by which the Pennsylvania System became personally institutionalized at Eastern.

Eastern's administrators’ dedication to the Pennsylvania System and the status it provided competed with baser instincts, like inter-personal animosities and financial self-interest. This chapter highlights several extreme cases in which some of the most apparently committed devotees of the Pennsylvania System jeopardized the prison's operations because of their own pettiness. Such extreme behavior was tolerated by the other administrators who rarely intervened until circumstances became dire—such as when the administrators' private bad actions ran the risk of public embarrassment and thereby jeopardized their collective reputation. This chapter reconciles the administrators' Janus-face character by arguing that one thing mattered to Eastern's administrators even more than maintaining the Pennsylvania System: maintaining their own reputations. For men whose reputation as benevolent, humanitarian gentlemen was integral to their self-image, acknowledging their own or their colleagues' occasional bad acts would be extremely damaging. Both the men who behaved badly and the men who enabled them had to ignore these behaviors or shatter the facade they had constructed and maintained.