Prisons didn’t always exist either. Somebody had to think them up, and eventually somebody did. Quakers thought that capital punishment, particularly as it existed in the late eighteenth century, was inhumane. So in 1790, they created prisons as a reform. Based on the Calvinist idea that solitude and silence could lead to repentance—to penitence for wrongdoing—the Quakers created “penitentiaries” as a place for that solitude. Many traditions, Indigenous ones included, contain elements of solitude: time apart in fasting and prayer to realign relationship to self and environment. But chosen
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