An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House, in the City of New York: by one of the Inspectors of the Prison.

£950 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A very good copy of the first book on prison reform by an American. The Quaker prison reformer, Thomas Eddy (1758-1827), was born and raised in Philadelphia by Irish parents. He received little education and was soon apprenticed to a local tanner. From such humble beginnings Eddy, became an importer of good from England and Ireland (then scarce following the American Revolution), a banker, and a shopkeeper. All this before relocating to New York aged thirty-three. He met fellow Quaker John Murray there, became interested in education, and later prison reform. “Eddy was one among many English and American citizens lobbying for changes to the penal code at the end of the eighteenth century. These reformers of various persuasions argued that bodily punishments were barbaric, unfit for enlightened nations. The Americans among them added that bloody penalties were particularly unsuitable in a democratic republic. Many of these reformers, Eddy included, proposed incarceration as a humane alternative to the pillory and the gallows. In the 1790s, Pennsylvania and New York started building prisons” (Graber). “In 1801 he published his Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House in the City of New York , a detailed examination of the prisons in New York, which asserted that the first and major goal of imprisonment was to prevent crime by reforming the offender . Gradually, after serving as inspector and agent for Newgate prison in Greenwich Village, he came to favor a solitary cel

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