1842 | Crime
Crime
Novelist Charles Dickens visits Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (he has said on his arrival at New York that the two things he wanted most to see were the penitentiary and Niagara Falls) (see 1829). He is impressed by the physical features of the facility, but after talking to some inmates he calls its system of solitary confinement a form of mental torture (when 18 prisoners went mad in 1838, their insanity was blamed on self-abuse, meaning masturbation; overcrowding forced the prison to begin last year to put two men in many of the cells, and by the end of the century solitary confinement will be used mostly for punishment).