Preserving the Recent Past of Prisons

On a hot summer day in 2018, Tyler Stump, an accessioning and outreach archivist at the Pennsylvania State Archives, traveled to the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill (SCI-Camp Hill) to gather historical documents from Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections. Instead of going to an office building, he went to an old horse barn, a surplus space that held over a thousand boxes. Stump dug through the boxes for noteworthy archival materials alongside his intern, Department of Corrections staff, two guards, and several imprisoned people. They struck gold when they found the Press Secretary Papers, an extensive collection that documented the prison system from 1970 to 2010.¹ The discovery and preservation of these materials reflects an important first step for the Pennsylvania State Archives because, until recently, the agency has had few items about the prison system from the 1980s to today. This silence in the records is deafening because the late twentieth century ushered in a new era of mass incarceration in Pennsylvania and across the country, as the number of people in prisons skyrocketed during these decades.² Historical records like the ones found in the old barn are invaluable to chronicling the rise of mass incarceration in the United States.

In Pennsylvania, the rates of imprisonment began to rise in the wake of Governor Dick Thornburgh’s 1981 War on Crime legislation, which established a host of mandatory minimum sentences that lengthened the amount of time that people spent in prison. The number of people in the state’s prisons rose from 7,989 in 1980 to 48,828 in 2010—almost sixfold in only four decades.³ Incarceration became a hallmark of Pennsylvania’s government and American society, as the United States imprisoned people at a higher rate than any other country in the world.⁴ Unfortunately, few archives have documented this history. Until recently, the Pennsylvania State Archives, which collects documents from state agencies like the Department of Corrections, had only two boxes of materials from this era, comprising Record Group 58.⁵ Pennsylvania and its state archives was not alone. Other states such as California, Illinois, and New York similarly had few records about their prison systems from these decades.⁶ Prisons, with their barbed wire and guard towers, are often impenetrable to the public, and the lack of archives further obscures their place in our society.

In the past few years, the Pennsylvania State Archives has worked with the Department of Corrections to fill this gap in the historical record. In 2015, David Carmichael, the state archivist of Pennsylvania, made it a priority to collect critical materials from state agencies, including the Department of Corrections. The state archives hired Tyler Stump, who has worked to build relationships with Department of Corrections staff and improve records management procedures. As a result, Stump preserved the press secretary’s records as well as materials at SCI-Camp Hill, SCI-Graterford, SCI-Huntingdon, the women’s prison SCI-Muncy, and SCI-Waymart.⁷

This effort has uncovered hidden gems for researchers of modern prisons. The press secretary’s collection, which had lain dormant in the old barn, contains documents, audiocassettes, videos, and photographs from 1970 to 2010 that document major events in the state’s prison system. The state archives has also acquired materials about the 1989 riot at SCI-Camp Hill; news clippings about landmark legislation, including Megan’s Law; and documents about day-to-day life at SCI-Graterford, such as logbooks and memoirs by people imprisoned there. Finally, the state archives has received twenty boxes of material about SCI-Muncy that date from 1920 to 1989—a major addition to the previously sparse collection about the women’s prison. The archives staff is currently processing these materials and working to make nonrestricted records available to researchers. The effort to preserve the records of the modern prison system in Pennsylvania seems almost Sisyphean, as the Department of Corrections generated millions of documents during these years and continues to produce new records from the twenty-five correctional institutions that it...