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Behind the wall | Scene Through the Lens

More than ruin porn

April 10, 2023: Eastern State Penitentiary, a former prison turned museum. It closed in 1971 and had been abandoned for decades. The National Historic Landmark has since been turned into a place where the historic preservation, interpretation, and public programs “move visitors to engage in dialogue and deepen the national conversation about criminal justice.”
April 10, 2023: Eastern State Penitentiary, a former prison turned museum. It closed in 1971 and had been abandoned for decades. The National Historic Landmark has since been turned into a place where the historic preservation, interpretation, and public programs “move visitors to engage in dialogue and deepen the national conversation about criminal justice.”Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer

When it opened in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary was the most famous and expensive prison in the world. Today the long-abandoned and crumbling cell blocks and empty guard towers are not preserved for tourists to make selfies and ruin porn, but to interpret the legacy of American criminal justice reform. A prison system that today incarcerates more people than any other in the world had its roots here.

Before Eastern State, most prisons were just crowded and dirty pens where people - adults and children - accused of everything from petty theft to murder, were held while awaiting their court date. My colleague Samantha Melamed wrote last year that the use of incarceration as punishment, rather than merely a means of pre-trial detention, was born out of Philadelphia Quaker ideals — proposed as an alternative “to public humiliations and corporal punishment.”

I was there last week for the graduation of the city’s first Carpentry Academy, a program in partnership with the Carpenter’s union, local businesses and Eastern State to give women and people of color a pathway to hard-to-get union apprenticeships. Participants were introduced to the construction industry with paid, hands-on-the-job training and experience, including work on restoration projects at Eastern State. Their story will be coming out this week.

The windows in the working public restrooms were broken during the decades when Eastern State was a heavily vandalized, decaying eyesore. Like the rest of the prison, the restrooms have been safely and securely preserved for visitors. Here’s an alternative version of this week’s photo:

I wrote here last week about the 25th anniversary of my weekly photo column in the legacy print version of the newspaper. Yesterday the Sunday paper published a selection of twelve black and white images from the over 1400 that have run in that space in The Inquirer’s local news section.

Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column