Eastern and Western State Penns

I wrote about Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail and Prison and the Eastern State Penn in In Defense of Flogging, but I had never seen the inside of Eastern State Penn…. until now!

Thanks to having written a book about prisons (to be honest, it didn’t hurt that my wife writes guidebooks, but whatev), we got a little private tour . Unfortunate I didn’t even have my real camera with me.







Amazingly, by sheer chance, I stumbled across the site of its sister prison, the lesser known Western State Penn, just last week.

The prison is gone. But the eagle is real!