ABSTRACT
Modern historians, penologists, and social critics differ widely on the motivations driving prison reform in late eighteenth-centuiy Philadelphia. The “Philadelphia Society” met for the first time on 8 May 1787, at the German School house in Cherry Alley. Among the earliest documents of the American prison reform movement is the constitution of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. One set of social contradictions is bound up in the sympathetic linkage of criminal and citizen suggested in the epigraph, and extended in the preamble, to the Philadelphia Society constitution. In the Philadelphia Society constitution, the timeless conditions of religion and the material forces of history are both brought to bear on the problem of crime. Certainty was an architectural goal of prison reform on either side of the Atlantic; but the earliest American examples were unique in how they proposed to achieve it.
