A HULKING historic prison with a frightening exterior has preserved many of its surprisingly serene cell blocks.

The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was home to thousands of prisoners between 1829 and 1970.

It was decommissioned and left to rot for a few decades until the structure was rehabilitated as a museum in 1994.

From the outside, Eastern State looks like an impenetrable medieval castle complete with turrets and several imposing wrought iron gates.

“Inside, it doesn’t look like that,” Damon McCool, the museum’s senior specialist of research and public programming, told The U.S. Sun.

The museum’s most scenic historic cell block has hauntingly high arched ceilings and large openings in the roof that let in plenty of natural light.

It’s a surprisingly calm vibe for a building that held some of the nation’s most hardened criminals, including Al Capone who spent his first prison term there in 1929 for a gun charge.

McCool said the contrast is intentional.

“It’s supposed to scare people on the outside but reform people on the inside,” he said.

REFORM MINDSET

Before Eastern State was created, life for the average prisoner was much more brutal than it is today.

Facilities like the Walnut Street Jail, where many Philadelphia prisoners went prior to 1829, were cramped and poorly ventilated spaces that bred disease and mental anguish.

The high-minded reformists who lobbied for Eastern State had a totally new corrections strategy in mind based on strict solitary confinement.

“Prisoners were never supposed to interact with one another,” McCool said.

“The founders of Eastern State thought this version of solitary confinement was a progressive, good thing.

“They thought if a prisoner spent their entire sentence alone, they would spend that time thinking about the crime that they committed and achieve some sort of penitence, which is where the word penitentiary came from.”

Inmates weren’t given much more than a Bible and the tools they would need to learn a new trade, like shoemaking or carpentry.

CUTTING EDGE

But McCool noted that the building made some cutting-edge amenities for the time.

“An early historian once described Eastern State as a rocket ship,” he said.

“The cell needed to contain everything an individual needed to survive.”

The running water and flushing toilets in the facility, which was the largest public building country at the time, were truly cutting-edge.

“Eastern State Penitentiary actually had indoor plumbing before the White House or any other public building in America,” McCool said.

However, the historian said the solitary confinement system was ultimately abandoned in 1913.

McCool said a large percentage of the prisoners who endured the isolation suffered a mental break.

“The truth is that solitary confinement on the whole is incredibly destructive,” he said.

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Even though it’s known to cause depression, anxiety, suicide, and stress around large groups of people, McCool said between 50,000 and 120,000 people are enduring solitary confinement at any given moment.

“It’s really alarming that there’s 200 years of evidence that solitary confinement is damaging to incarcerated people, but it’s still so widely practiced today,” he said.

“Humans are social creatures… We will find ways to interact with one another.

“We know that prisoners were interacting with one another essentially from the time Eastern State opened.”

The evidence mostly comes in the form of secret letters, which show that prisoners were having affairs and drinking alcohol together all the way back in the early 1800s.

“Around the time of the Civil War, the number of prisoners at Eastern State exceeded the number of cells,” McCool said.

As the prison expanded rapidly, officials struggled to maintain the practice.

“Mathematically, there was just no way to continue a system of solitary confinement,” McCool said.

AL CAPONE

By the time Capone arrived at Eastern State in 1929, solitary confinement was a distant memory for guards and prisoners.

That’s why the mobster, who was already a household name, had a cellmate.

Capone arrived at the prison after police found him with an unlicensed gun outside a Philadelphia movie theater, McCool said.

At the time, he was on his way back to Chicago from Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The courts were tough on Capone, who got the maximum one-year sentence.

Eastern State has a distinctive design where every wing of cell blocks radiates out from a central building.

But for some reason, Capone was held in that central area instead of one of the wings with regular prisoners.

“A lot of people questioned whether his proximity had anything to do with his status on the outside,” McCool said.

“Did he receive different treatment?”

But the historian hasn’t found any evidence to indicate he did.

“The only thing I can tell is that Capone’s cell is different from most everybody else that lived here,” he said.

“By all other accounts, he was probably treated like most other people that lived here.”

Capone was able to buy a radio from the person who lived in the cell before him, but that privilege would have been granted to any prisoner with the money.

He loved using the device to listen to waltzes.

At the time, Philadelphia newspapers reported that Capone also decorated his cell with opulent items including fine artwork, high-end furniture, and colorful rugs.