9 - An Alternative Status: Administrators’ Transition from Gentleman Reformers to Professional Penologists

Summary

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.