The Age of Reform 279from their present corrupting circumstances and
placed in specialized institutions where they could be
trained or rehabilitated. Almshouses, orphanages,
reformatories, prisons, and “lunatic asylums” sprang
up throughout the United States like mushrooms in a
forest after a summer rain.
The rationale for this movement was scientific;
elaborate statistical reports attested to the benefits
that such institutions would bring to both inmates
and society as a whole. The motivating spirit of the
founders of these asylums was humane, although
many of the institutions seem anything but humane
to the modern eye. The highly regarded
Philadelphia prison system was based on strict soli-
tary confinement, which was supposed to lead cul-
prits to reflect on their sins and then reform their
ways. The prison was literally a penitentiary, a place
to repent. In fact, the system drove some inmates
mad, and soon a rival Auburn system was introduced
in New York State, which allowed for some social
contact among prisoners and for work in shops and
stone quarries. Absolute silence was required at all
times. The prisoners were herded about in lockstep
and punished by flogging for the slightest infraction
of the rules. Regular “moral and religious instruc-
tion” was provided, which the authorities believed
would lead inmates to reform their lives. Tocqueville
and Beaumont, in their report on American prisons,
concluded that the Philadelphia system produced
“the deepest impression on the soul of the convict,”
while the Auburn system made the convict “more
conformable to the habits of man in society.”
The hospitals for mental patients were intended to
cure inmates, not merely to confine them. The empha-
sis was on isolating them from the pressures of society;
on order, quiet, routine; and on control—but not on
punishment. The unfortunates were seen asderanged;
the task was to arrange their lives in a rational manner.
In practice, shortages of trained personnel, niggardly
legislative appropriations, and the inherent difficulty of
managing violent and irrational patients often pro-
duced deplorable conditions in the asylums.
This situation led Dorothea Dix, a woman of
almost saintlike selflessness, to devote thirty years of her
life to a campaign to improve the care of the insane. She
traveled to every state in the Union, and as far afield as
Turkey and Japan, inspecting asylums and poorhouses.
Insane persons in Massachusetts, she wrote in a memor-
ial intended to shock state legislators into action, were
being kept in cages and closets, “chained, naked, beaten
with rods, and lashed into obedience!” Her reports led to
some improvement in conditions in Massachusetts and
other states, but in the long run the bright hopes of the
reformers were never realized. Institutions founded toEastern State Penitentiary, opened in 1829 in Philadelphia, sought to reform prisoners by enforcing a solitary life
to promote reflection.