On a hot, humid, and sweaty Friday night, visitors and tourists settled into a makeshift classroom at the center of the radial floor plan that connects all of the cell blocks in Eastern State Penitentiary. The almost 200-year-old Philadelphia prison shuttered in 1970 and has been an open museum since 1994, where members of the public can tour the ruins of one of America’s most well-known penitentiaries. 

On this night, visitors were present for a “re-entry simulation,” an interactive activity wherein guests learn about what life is like for those returning home from prison. Each visitor is given a unique backstory and, over the course of an hour, must navigate finding employment, tackle the byzantine probation process, secure housing, and take care of the countless obstacles that often keep people from a stable life and not returning to the inside. This event, a part of Eastern State’s new “Summer Nights” series, is indicative of the museum’s recent efforts to reshape its reputation. 

For years, the museum occupied a very particular space in the minds of visitors and the overall Philadelphia community. Playing up the bizarre association between prisons and the paranormal, it was known for hosting Halloween-themed exhibits in the fall and attracting visitors who are fascinated by the idea that the site itself is haunted. Even guests who aren’t interested in ghost hunting view the site as a source of diversion and entertainment, as evidenced by a couple snapping a selfie near cell block three as staff gave instructions about the re-entry event. Perhaps most infamously, a Wall Street Journal feature published in February about the use of former prisons as wedding venues featured Eastern State and sparked public outrage, as many readers compared it to the popular though increasingly taboo practice of hosting weddings at antebellum plantations.

The juxtaposition between the solemnity of the re-entry conversation against the frivolity of some visitors is indicative of the murkiness around what exactly Eastern State represents and the story that its staff hopes to tell. Just a year ago, when Kerry Sautner assumed the position as CEO of Eastern State, she inherited not just the massive 11-acre structure but also the challenges of an institution in flux—one that is managing both the expectations of long-time visitors and the potential that the space has to represent something more meaningful.

Much of the institution’s success in deepening the space’s meaning will depend on its ability to nail down how Eastern State’s history is framed and what lessons are gleaned from it. 

When Eastern State opened in 1829, it was notable for its size and the system of solitary confinement it would pioneer. Structured around the newly emerging theory that an individual’s propensity for committing crimes was shaped by their environment and could be quelled by time spent in solitude, Eastern State’s design prohibited contact amongst those detained behind its walls. Cells, where prisoners were forced to remain for 23 hours a day, were equipped with “feed doors.” During those rare moments when prisoners were able to exit their cells, masks, and hoods were required to keep communication at bay.

Eastern State’s size and unorthodox confinement system quickly drew interest from the public, with over 10,000 tourists visiting in 1858 alone. When Charles Dickens visited in 1842, he wrote of solitary confinement, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” 

Furthermore, such punishment was disproportionately meted out. Black people were overrepresented at Eastern State and received longer sentences and fewer pardons than their white counterparts. However, in discussing its history, Eastern State staff posit these truths as failures of a system that was well-intentioned in its effort to reform, as opposed to elements of a system that by its nature was punitive and racist. 

Prism sat down with Sautner at Eastern State to discuss the site’s mission, the myriad ways the space has been interpreted over the years, and how it shapes her vision for the museum’s future. 

This Q&A is the third part of a series, Prison in 12 Landscapes, featuring companion pieces from Ray Levy Uyeda and Tamar Sarai, running through September and is organized to introduce readers to subjects beginning with the most—and easing into the least–proximate to prisons’ material form. You can read through the full series here. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Tamar Sarai: What is Eastern State’s mission?

Kerry Sautner: It’s interesting because you’re coming in a time of change. I don’t think it’s like a full rewrite, but that’s exactly what we’re talking about right now. Our mission is interpreting the history and legacy from past to present of criminal justice reform from the long-forgotten cell blocks. But I have a visceral negative reaction to the word “interpretation.” There’s kind of something rude about it, like you’re too dumb, so we have to interpret it for you. It feels like a value judgment about people who are coming to you and, in museums, people can come to you with more knowledge than you have. I believe museums should be center points of dialogue on the past and the present, and how they intersect and affect life. Everybody who comes to a museum adds a voice to that dialogue. 

I think that the coolest part about this place is that it was born out of the idea of “what do we do?” “How do we make [the prison system] better?” And it continues to grapple with those questions today and [ask], “have we found a just and fair society?” That’s what I think is so powerful about this place. What we’re trying to figure out is: how do you codify that into a mission that puts us where we want to go and anchors us in place but doesn’t hold us back by place?

Sarai: I think your point about interpretation and what personal knowledge people bring into the space is interesting. Do you have a sense of who’s visiting, whether it’s tourists or Philadelphia residents? Are you ever able to gauge what brings them to this space, whether that’s interest in the criminal legal system or fascination with the lore of the site? 

Sautner: I think that’s in flux, too. We have a very diverse audience that comes here, diverse in age, diverse in background. They’re from the Philadelphia community but [they’re] not the majority. We have tourists from around the country and international tourists. 

What brings them here is a range as well. One day, this kid looks at me and goes, “So are there ghosts here?” There’s a ton of people coming for that kind of scariness, there’s a ton of people coming about criminal justice reform, there’s a ton of people coming because they believe—and this has been kind of hard to unpack—that it’s a history of crime and punishment in America. I could not figure that out for the longest time [until] I was like, “Oh, you think it’s a crime and punishment museum where there’s going to be, like, stockades and all of the ways that we have punished people over the years.” And there’s a truth to that, because in the early 1800s, they thought solitary confinement was a healthy, safe, and less harmful way to get people to rehabilitate, and we now know it as a violent punishment of torture. But also, at the same time, why I don’t ever want to call [Eastern State] the “prison museum” because really what the place is about is about living up to our ideals and [asking] what do we believe people could be in this country, and, even if somebody takes the wrong direction, how can they be reset?

Sarai: I’m thinking about the site’s history and how it represents a then-novel approach to incarceration and the ways in which it failed at its goal—like the fallacy of reform. How do you balance educating the public about and acknowledging the intentions behind the origins of the space and what it can tell us about the criminal legal system now, while not celebrating it? Where is the line between memory preservation and celebration?  

w because it constantly feels like we’re walking that line, and we’re tipping in too far on one side, too far on the other. This idea that reform is in itself flawed is a fascinating conversation, but we’re not having that conversation as a general public. So, again, going back to place and space, you should take these places that are filled with such unbelievable trauma and come to those conversations and open up the dialogue.

You always want to believe that you’re moving things forward, but if you don’t put checks and balances into the system, you’ve got a flawed system, and I don’t think reform has those guardrails. 

I think we have to have a lot of people at the table: people who are highly aware of this and people who came because they thought it was a Halloween site. Every time somebody goes, “Oh, you do Halloween,” I’m just like, oh, I need to fix my face, because I don’t want to judge if somebody comes for Halloween and they leave with a mission and care about it. But it goes back to your question of, are you celebrating this space? We, as an institution, need to grapple with that over the next three years. 

Sarai: When you mentioned Eastern State’s association with Halloween it also made me think about the Wall Street Journal piece about the weddings hosted here. How do you think about and navigate the dual role that the site plays, both as a place of education and an event venue? Is that something that you hope to see change?  

Sautner: Yes. At the minimum, we need to have priorities about how we use the venue. It is changing. We actually do very few events because it’s not rehabbed yet; it’s a preserved ruin. 

But going back to that article, I didn’t even know we did weddings when that came out because they had only done one in like, seven years. And when I talked to the staff, I was beside myself. That was the worst; I was like, “This is so tone-deaf—who wants to get married here?” And then I saw [the WSJ story] on Instagram, and I was reading all the comments, and [one was from] the guy who got married here, and his response was pretty powerful. He said, “I came and I had my wedding there because it’s a part of my community, and I wanted to reclaim that site for something of honor and something of growth.” 

So I sat down with the staff and asked them to explain what happened. One of our researchers said there were a ton of weddings on site. And I was like, “Oh, that’s a much better story to tell—of the people who got married here, who worked here, who or were incarcerated here, or came back after incarceration and got married here, because they saw this as a place that helped them.” 

So there’s a part of me that was like, I can’t shut this off completely. But at the same time, this place should not ever be used in the ways that that article talked about. 

I think it’s part of our national dialogue right now: what do we do with these spaces and how do we deal with it?  

Sarai: There’s been a lot of discussion around what to do with closed prisons, especially as more are being shuttered. Why do you think it’s important to preserve a space like this, and do you think that Eastern State is unique in its need to be preserved, or could it be a model for other closed prisons? 

Sautner: I think there is something to be said that this is the first place that grappled with criminal justice in America and said, “No, that’s not how we do it, we are better than [torture and punishment], and we believe in all of our citizens.” Now again, it was a failed experiment gone wrong but there is something historically powerful to save a site that had that moment. 

We do get a lot of people coming from around the country to say, “What did you guys do here?”

But do you save all of these sites? How many is enough, and then what do you do with it, and how do you re-engage it in a way that is moving a mission forward? I just want to be really honest that I don’t think we’re doing that yet. We’re on a path, but I think we have a lot more work to do to say we saved this, not just for historical reasons but we saved it because we believe in having these conversations and questioning ourselves, the way we treat each other, and the way we see human dignity. 

There’s [a closed prison] in Colorado Springs, it’s just a small one, but it has retold the story, and it’s now unbelievably powerful. The Norristown prison was [also] in the conversation around this about a year ago, because there was a whole bunch of committee people that wanted to tear it down. It has such similarities to Eastern State, and they were looking at Eastern State [as a model for how] it could be a tourist destination and bring revenue into the community, which they are very much lacking. But other people were saying, this is a site of so much pain and trauma—get rid of it! I think it’s part of our national dialogue right now: what do we do with these spaces and how do we deal with it?  

Sarai: This could very well have just been a museum about the prison that doesn’t have any of the original architecture but still tries to relay the same information. What does having the preserved ruins achieve?

Sautner: So there’s two sides to that: We’re building out our workforce development and that feeds into the site. One of those projects works with people who are formerly incarcerated or really underrepresented in the trades fields, and it uses the site as a workshop. So what I love in the last year that the team has done is incorporate [students]. We have a group of high school and middle school kids from Philadelphia, and they’re talking to the preservation trades team about what they’re doing. 

[Second], I think when you walk around this site, you see both its beauty and its rubble, which is, I know, so weird to use those words together. But that’s what actually makes this place so unique and different from anything else that you walk through. You think of the pain and trauma that happened here, but your brain also sees that it is beautiful. It’s this duality of pain and suffering with beauty; it’s confusing, but it’s also uniquely human.