TO DWELL IN HELL

ABSTRACT

This paper position Eastern State Penitentiary’s significance not in its operational success, but in its role as a contested architectural and ideological prototype through which historians, theorists, and reformers have negotiated shifting regimes of carceral power, reform, and memory. Bringing an architectural historiographic focus into conversation with disciplines of sociology, philosophy, and criminology, this paper reconstructs how Eastern State Penitentiary’s narration has shifted through time, expanding on its carceral typological innovation to its now museumification and stabilized ruin.

First, the paper analyzes comparativist accounts by Norman Johnston, Robin Evans, Alfred Hopkins, Norval Morris, and David Rothman, showing how they embed Eastern State within a historic materialist genealogy that links Quaker reform, Gothic-revival monumentalism, and the dissemination of Haviland’s radial plan across the Atlantic and the world. These historians’ works frame the penitentiary as an influential architectural node whose form both materialized and exported new penalties of liberty.

Second, the paper mobilizes Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham, and Émile Durkheim to interpret Eastern State Penitentiary as an apparatus of disciplinary power, unverifiable surveillance, and moral regulation, while Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling is used to question whether solitary confinement can ever provide and sustain a genuine human experience of dwelling.

Third, the paper juxtaposes these historical, architectural and theoretical narratives with Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, and Ashley Rubin to foreground tensions between reformist intent, administrative inertia, and the racial-capitalist logics of carcerality. Collectively, their work exposes gaps between Quaker ideals of penitence and the lived realities of isolation and bureaucratic self-preservation within Eastern State.

Finally, the paper traces Eastern State Penitentiary’s late twentieth-century closure and preservation as a stabilized ruin; arguing that its current museumification invites visitors to not only confront layered histories of punishment, but to recognize that the unfinished project of penal reform and abolition is theirs to take up. Together, these perspectives demonstrate that Eastern State Penitentiary is best understood not as a singular story, but as a dense historiographical account of competing interpretations.