Seminary of Virtue: The Ideology and Practice of Inmate Reform at Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829-1971 by Paul Kahan (review)

Paul Kahan's Seminary of Virtue is an ambitious study of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania from its founding in 1829 to its closure in 1971. Kahan argues that "the institution's various administrative regimes shared a commitment to penal education despite the wide philosophic differences between them." (p. xvi) With this argument, which is supported by a wide variety of source material, Kahan contests the pervasive view by previous scholars that only those interested in penal reform emphasized education as a tool of rehabilitation and that they had to battle the anti-education attitudes of prison officials. He successfully supports this argument as he traces the importance of education programs—both vocational and academic ones—in the Eastern State Penitentiary throughout the entire time period. At any given time both reformers and prison officials put at least some faith into educating inmates in the hopes to reduce inmates' recidivism even if prison officials not always believed that rehabilitation was possible. Kahan describes well the shifts in penal ideology regarding prison education from the tight link between religion and (both public and penal) education in the Jacksonian era to the emphasis on vocational training during the post-Civil War era, and the shift to a mainly academic education system and the professionalization of penal education in the early twentieth century. By the 1950s, the Eastern State Penitentiary, by then renamed the SCIPHA, almost came full circle after a series of prison riots led officials to reorient the institutions back towards its original roots despite some fundamental differences in ideology between Jacksonian penal reformers and twentieth-century scientists.

While I tremendously enjoyed reading Kahan's book, at the end many of my questions that the book provoked remained unanswered, leaving me wanting to know not only more but much more. The shortness of the book is refreshing and certainly makes it attractive for undergraduate teaching in particular. However, this briefness in a comparative analysis over a time period of 150 years is also one of the book's biggest weaknesses. It did not allow for an in-depth analysis of the shifting penal ideology, the reformers and officials themselves, the day-to-day functioning of the educational programs, and the overriding question of why in any of the time periods prison education seemed to have failed. Kahan certainly proved his thesis about the consistent commitment to inmate education among reformers and officials but parallel to this ran the pervasive failure and inadequacy of those programs. Kahan hints at possible causes such as the dearth of funding and resources, the lack of trained and qualified teachers, teaching material not geared towards adult education, and an approach that appeared to be always just behind of what was needed in larger society. As the United States spends more money on incarcerating its adult population than on educating its children, questions about the relationship between imprisonment and education seems all the more pressing. I believe Kahan missed an opportunity to offer important insights into this question with his study if he also would have analyzed the failures and shortcomings of prison education throughout the history of the Eastern State Penitentiary.