Ashley Rubin's The Deviant Prison seeks to understand why generations of administrators at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary retained the Pennsylvania System of solitary confinement throughout almost half a century of national and international criticism. Her argument is convincing although counterintuitive: by defending the Pennsylvania System from its many critics, Eastern's administrators gained a public platform and an air of uniqueness. In the process of defending it, these administrators thus became personally invested in their controversial system and retained it at Eastern for several decades despite intense public opposition throughout this period.

Rubin begins her book by outlining how prison reform became popularized in the wake of the American Revolution at a time when the egalitarian goals of the new republic appeared to be misaligned with the realities of overcrowded county and city-run jails: disease, violence, criminal networking, and sexual activity were rampant. Separating prisoners by gender and crime, in part for their own sake, became an important goal for organizations such as the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, and many prison reform advocates came to tout the transformative benefits of absolute solitary confinement. A person would, after all, be “protected” from disease transmission to some extent and predation by other inmates. However, in 1821, New York's Auburn State Prison instituted this policy to disastrous effects: “The solitary cells were too narrow to allow prisoners sufficient exercise, causing muscle atrophy and disease; insanity and suicide were also common” (6). That very year, the Pennsylvania legislature authorized construction of a new penitentiary—the Eastern State Penitentiary—to ease overcrowding in the state's other prison and jails. It took another 8 years for Eastern State to open, during which time reformers and policy makers fiercely debated the use of solitary confinement in the wake of reports about the deleterious effects of the practice at Auburn. Eventually a particular form of solitary confinement was developed and instituted at Eastern dubbed the “Pennsylvania System.” Prisoners were to remain alone in their cells except when visited by a physician, a moral instructor, visiting dignitaries, inspectors, or the warden himself. These controlled interactions were expected to lessen the chances of a prisoner developing mental illness and the deaths by suicide witnessed at Auburn where visitations of any kind had been prohibited. Meanwhile, New York State responded to its own failures by instituting a new model of congregate daytime labor and night-time separation. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an increasing number of states were deterred by the financial commitments and mental-health consequences of solitary confinement. By 1869, Eastern State was the only prison in the United States to operate under the Pennsylvania System; even the state's other prisons had switched to Auburn's reformed model.

In this well-researched and provocative study, Rubin outlines the unique factors at Eastern that made it a ripe environment for what she calls, following mid-century organizational theorist Philip Selznick, “personal institutionalization” (xliii). Personal institutionalization describes how any organization, once established, generates “its own momentum and motivations” to counteract the external forces it faces (xliii). This internal force “comes from the people who populate the organization: they develop their own sets of goals for themselves in relation to the organization and for the organization itself” (xliii). In particular, those personnel who are in the position of defending an embattled organization find opportunities to make claims about themselves as individuals through their institutional association and effectively dig into those identities and defensive postures. According to Rubin, neither personal profit nor prisoner reform were the primary goals directing policy decisions at Eastern from 1829 to 1913. Rather, for these “gentlemen reformers,” prison administration offered the promise of status, whether achieved through the display of humanitarian benevolence or through the procurement of professional expertise. Indeed, through painstaking analysis of public and private documents written by these administrators, Rubin demonstrates the counterintuitive conclusion that antagonistic public opinion only cemented the Pennsylvania System at Eastern: “Because of their defensive posture… the administrators could sublimate their own self-praise into the defense of the prison… Indeed, the ability to constantly issue these statements incentivized Eastern's administrators to maintain the Pennsylvania System for as long as they did” (173). Significantly, it was only after this public debate between carceral systems had subsided that Eastern's administrators effectively ended the practice of solitary confinement, seeking status through the attainment of expertise in the burgeoning fields of penology and criminology instead of their one-time defense of the Pennsylvania System.

The Deviant Prison makes a number of interventions into both neo-institutional theory and prison studies. In particular, neo-institutional theory “excels at explaining conformity—not deviance—and field-level trends—not individual … organizations” (xl). Following the legacy of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), many theoretical strains of prison studies share this interest in dispersed, pervasive, and dominant forms of power. These critics generally engage with specific examples only to outline broader socioeconomic patterns or to mark major historical shifts. Conversely, by focusing on anomalies like Eastern State Penitentiary, Rubin unveils a more complicated and variegated picture about how power can both work and fail to do so. That is, if congregate labor became an institutional norm by the end of the nineteenth century, Rubin pursues the holdouts and obstacles that produced a counterforce to this historical outcome. With respect to the prominent place given to reformers’ backgrounds and motives, she also enlivens our historical vision with the power of personality and individual will—a biographical and even psychological interpretive practice largely absent in both institutional theory and prison studies. Through this focus on the power of individuals, she prompts readers to acknowledge their own responsibility as political actors with the power to transform or maintain current systems of (in)justice. Given this sentiment, however, readers might wish Rubin to engage more immediately and thoroughly with the racist underpinnings and effects of the prison in its emergence as well as in today's crisis of mass incarceration.