Neil J. Welch, then head of the New York office of the FBI, and Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Thomas P. Puccio directed the two-year sting operation using a convicted con man, Melvin Weinberg, and his girlfriend, Evelyn Knight, who were facing prison sentences for financial fraud, as informers and planners. Weinberg created a phony company, Abdul Enterprises, and FBI agents posed as owners or employees of the company. The FBI established a $1 million fund to pay out the bribes. Dressed as Arab sheiks or claiming to represent two Arab owners of Abdul Enterprises, agents met with their targets in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Miami, and offered them envelopes or bags of cash in exchange for promises of political favors. All the while, the transactions were being videotaped by hidden cameras.

The Sting Changes Focus

Abscam started out as an operation to recover stolen artwork and fake securities, but when one of the stock forgers suggested to the “sheiks” that they focus on bribing New Jersey state officials to obtain a casino license, the FBI, following the money, shifted its focus to political corruption. Weinberg then spread the word among his criminal associates that the sheiks were looking to break into Atlantic City casino gambling. Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti, also a New Jersey state senator and a mover and shaker in New Jersey Democratic political circles, contacted Abdul Enterprises and told the undercover agents he could “deliver Atlantic City” for them. He then acted as a middleman, putting them in touch with the other politicians who eventually were caught up in the scheme.

When the scheme was first disclosed to the public, law enforcement authorities told reporters that Abscam stood for “Arab scam.” However, after a judge presiding over one of the cases received a complaint from the American-Arab Relations Committee, the judge said it was clear that the codename referred to “Abdul scam,” in reference to the name of the fake company, Abdul Enterprises.  No Middle Easterners were ever involved in the sting.

The accused went to trial in 1980. Eight politicians were tried in federal court in Brooklyn, two in Philadelphia, and two in Washington. In the case of U.S. Senator Harrison A. “Pete” Williams (D-N.J.), the highest-ranking political target, the “sheik” offered no money but instead offered to make him a silent partner with an eighteen-percent ownership of a titanium mine. Williams would be able to profit by steering government contracts to the mine in exchange for expediting the immigration process for the sheik and helping him get a piece of the casino construction and licensing action then underway in Atlantic City. Williams, of Westfield, New Jersey, later argued in his defense that he received no money, but he was convicted nevertheless.

U.S. Representative Frank Thompson (D.-N.J.), a well-liked politician who had represented Trenton and Mercer County for thirty-four years, accepted a cash bribe of $50,000, also to help the sheik bypass immigration laws. Congressman John M. Murphy (D.-N.Y.), who represented Staten Island, met with the sheik the same day as Thompson but was not videotaped. Instead, he sent his attorney, Howard Criden, to pick up his $50,000 bribe at a hotel near JFK International Airport. Other congressmen caught in the scheme, each taking a $50,000 bribe, were John Jenrette (D-S.C.), Richard Kelly (R-FL.), and representatives from districts including parts of Philadelphia: Raymond Lederer (D.-PA.) and Michael “Ozzie” Myers (D.-PA.). Myers famously told the undercover agents as he accepted his bribe that they were going about it the right way because “money talks and bulls**t walks.”

Three Philadelphia City Council members, Council President George X. Schwartz, Harry P. Jannotti, and Louis C. Johanson, all Democrats, were convicted of accepting a total of $65,000 in bribes during separate meetings in a suite of the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia. FBI agents, posing as the sheik’s representatives, told them he wanted to invest in a luxury hotel and coal facilities on the Delaware River, and they all promised to use their influence in City Council to get those projects approved. In all, 19 people were convicted as a result of Abscam, including Congressman Murphy’s attorney, Howard Criden; Alexander A. Alexandro Jr., an immigration official; and several businessmen. Among the convicted politicians, Florida Representative Kelly was the only Republican.

Two Congressmen Not Prosecuted

Two other members of Congress met with the sting operators but were not prosecuted. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who represented the 12th Congressional District in the coal country north of Pittsburgh, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. The U.S. Department of Justice chose not to indict him, and he testified against Thompson and Murphy. Murtha turned down the $50,000 bribe saying he would eventually take the money after working with the agents for a while but he was not interested “at this point.” He always said that his only intent in meeting with the scammers was to bring jobs to his district. Murtha was re-elected 19 times after Abscam. South Dakota U.S. Senator Larry Pressler, a Republican, met with the undercover agents in a mansion in Washington, D.C., at the behest of a neighbor. When they started talking about contributing to his campaign in exchange for help with the phony immigration matter, Pressler told them “it would not be proper” to accept the offer and left the meeting. Thus he committed no crime.

Williams resigned just before the U.S. Senate was scheduled to vote on his expulsion, and five of the six congressmen resigned to avoid expulsion. Myers was expelled by a vote of 376-30, becoming only the fourth member of Congress to suffer that fate. All were convicted of various charges and each was sentenced to three years in prison. Williams and Thompson served two years, Myers served 21 months, Kelly served 13 months, Murphy served 16 months, Jenrette served 13 months and Lederer served 10 months. Errichetti served all of the three years in prison while the Philadelphia City Council members each served several months in jail. Several of the convicted politicians appealed on the basis that they were entrapped–tricked by the FBI into committing a crime they would not ordinarily have committed without the enticement. Philadelphia federal Judge John P. Fullam had set aside the convictions of City Councilmen Schwartz and Jannotti on grounds of entrapment and prosecutorial misconduct but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling. Eventually, federal appeals courts either upheld or reinstated all of the convictions, and in 1983 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review any of the Abscam convictions.

In the aftermath of Abscam, Congress was concerned about the damage it had caused to the reputation of the legislative branch and sought to prevent the FBI from undertaking similar projects in the future without strict supervision. In 1981, U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued the first of several guidelines for FBI undercover operations, formalizing agency procedures for such undertakings and Congress held several hearings exploring the issue of entrapment.

Jodine Mayberry is a retired journalist. She was a legal writer and editor for West Publications, a division of Thomson Reuters, for 18 years. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Fifth Ward originated as part of the reorganization of election wards following the consolidation of Philadelphia city and county in 1854. Originally encompassing the area from Chestnut Street to South Street, between the Delaware River and Seventh Street, the Fifth Ward was part of the oldest section of Philadelphia. Long home to immigrants and African Americans, the area’s southernmost border along South Street and its vicinity had been the scene of race riots during the 1830s and 1840s. By the early 1850s, the collapse of the Whig party also led to new groups arising to seize political power, pitting newer Irish immigrants against nativist groups, at a time when the city also sought to combat disorder by professionalizing the police force.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the area became increasingly crowded and diverse, housing predominantly Russian Jews and African Americans, with smaller numbers of Italians, Irish, and persons of Slavic ancestry. While more prosperous Philadelphians moved to newer and more fashionable areas of the city, like Rittenhouse Square, poor newcomers to the Fifth Ward lived in and amid crowded streets and alleys, apartments, taprooms, cheap rooming houses, warehouses, and small stores. In this increasingly marginalized district, murder and prostitution became chronic, and law enforcement nonexistent. Disease, such as tuberculosis, also plagued the area into the early twentieth century.

Election Day Violence

By the late nineteenth century, Election Day violence, fraud, and other crimes including murder, often relating to immigrant and inter-ethnic conflicts between rival factions, became widespread. After decades of discrimination by nativist groups and the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, the Irish population grew to become a political force. As the Irish competed for the blue-collar and unskilled labor jobs and sought to overcome stereotypes about being unclean and lazy, they also began to displace many Black residents from neighborhoods that had been predominantly African American.

On Election Day in 1871, violent conflict among the Irish, African Americans, and the police spilled over in both the Fourth and Fifth Wards after Black men obtained the right to vote for the first time. On that day, murder claimed the life of African American civil rights activist and educator Octavius Catto (1839-71). These wards had become Republican strongholds shadowed by the influence of Fourth Ward boss William McMullen. Rivalries in the Bloody Fifth persisted well into the early to mid-twentieth century as two factions of the local Republican Party, led by William H. Vare (1867-1934) and Jim McNichol (1864-1917), battled for votes and lucrative contracts for city services.

At the pinnacle of the era of Republican machine politics controlled by ward bosses, the Fifth Ward’s most notorious conflict occurred during a heated primary race in 1917 for the office of Select Councilman and ended in the death of a police officer. This incident centered on the election of the Vare-allied Isaac Deutsch (1874-1919) and James A. Carey, the McNichol candidate also aligned with Sen. Boies Penrose (1860-1921), the Republican leader in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania. According to later testimony, Deutsch’s supporters brought in eighteen men from New York City’s Frog Hollow Musketeers gang who attacked and beat Carey. While defending Carey, police Officer George Eppley (1887-1917) was gunned down and died soon after in a hospital. Though not directly tied to local inter-ethnic violence, the hitmen for the Frog Hollow gang were Italian, a newer immigrant group seeking a foothold in American society similar to the earlier history of the Irish.

Mayor Thomas Smith Indicted

The gunmen from the New York gang who shot Eppley were later convicted of second-degree murder. Deutsch and six officers were found responsible, guilty of conspiracy, and imprisoned. Philadelphia Mayor Thomas B. Smith (1869-1949) was also indicted for interfering with an election. Smith, president of a bail bonds company, was alleged to have said “clubs would be trumps” during the primary contest and accused of abusing his position to assist Deutsch by sending policemen to protect the Vare machine candidate. Smith was acquitted of conspiracy to murder and other charges in early 1919, but suspicion followed him until his term ended in 1920.

The violence of 1917 triggered local protests and helped reform candidates temporarily halt the political machine. Although the Republican political machine began to decline by the mid-1930s, as many voters switched to the Democratic Party during the era of the New Deal, violence continued to flare up well into the 1940s because poverty and poor living conditions persisted. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, redevelopment of the area as Society Hill and gentrification changed the character and dynamics of the community and buried the Fifth Ward’s violent past.

Frank Fuller  is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Chestnut Hill College. He has also taught at Villanova University and Rowan University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Clark Atlanta University, an M.S. in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Politics from Oglethorpe University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Bootlegging gained protected status in a region where neighborhood saloons often served as informal offices for local ward bosses. Corrupt politicians, many operating within the Republican machine, worked in concert with police captains to protect vice industries like prostitution and bootlegging. Police heads often received kickbacks from both their underlings—for job protection—and from the illegal entities in their district—for ignoring their illicit operations.

Just before Prohibition took effect, Philadelphia was home to 1,700 saloons. Nearly a decade later, investigators estimated that nearly 1,200 saloons still operated more or less openly. Philadelphians abided a city of speakeasies, patronizing the candy stores, barber shops, pool halls, and private residences that served illegal liquor. The multitude of breweries in Philadelphia, which had an extensive and centuries-old history of beer production, also continued to supply the region.

Risks of Bootleg Liquor

While police guessed that 8,000 unlicensed taverns operated throughout the city, journalists estimated that at least 8,000 more “blind tigers” sold intoxicants to Philadelphians. Imbibing bootleg liquor carried risk; over the course of one month in 1923, Philadelphia reported 307 alcohol-poisoning deaths to the federal Prohibition Bureau. Government chemists noted that most of their confiscated bootleg liquor samples contained wood alcohol, chloride, sulfuric acid, iodine, or some other poison. By the late 1920s, temperance forces in the government ramped up their anti-liquor crusade by introducing a formula that doubled the poison in denatured industrial alcohol. Imbibing a product redistilled improperly by amateur moonshiners, consumers ran the risk of blindness and death. Nonetheless, forty million dollars poured through Philadelphia’s liquor trade annually.

The Delaware Valley, a hub of the chemical industry, produced millions of gallons of industrial alcohol. Those holding federal permits to manufacture perfumes, medicines, and barber supplies received about 430,000 gallons of alcohol every month. Many of these permit-holders operated “coverup houses” that distributed alcohol to consumers. Investigators unearthed records detailing implausibly large deliveries of hair tonics and perfumes throughout the Philadelphia region, including a delivery of 500 gallons of “hair oil” to an unidentified town of just fifty people. From 1924 to 1928, the number of gallons of industrial alcohol released in Philadelphia doubled, from five million to ten million.

As Philadelphia’s industrial alcohol purveyors moved their product over land, high-profile rum-runners like Bill McCoy (1877-1948) set up shop in the Quaker City, moving their liquor into the city via its waterways. Bootleg liquor bound for Philadelphia often ran first through Atlantic City, described as a “smugglers’ paradise” because of the cooperation among rum-runners, local politicians, and Coast Guard officials. Rum-runners ushered as many as ten million quarts of liquor per year through the Bahamas and up the Atlantic Coast. McCoy and others sailed “Rum Row,” an Atlantic Ocean corridor stretching from Atlantic City to New York’s Long Island, making sure to stay outside of U.S. maritime limits (or working with corrupt Coast Guard officers) as they brought bootleg shipments northward. Though the term “the real McCoy” emerged in an earlier era, it was used by McCoy’s biographer in 1931 to signal the bootlegger’s unadulterated product: high-quality, single-source imported liquor.

The Regional Network

Numerous bootlegging gangs serviced the city alongside Philadelphia’s bootlegging kings, Max “Boo Boo” Hoff (liquor) (1895-1941) and Mickey Duffy (beer) (1888-1931). Philadelphia bootleggers worked in concert with South Jersey syndicates, who in turn partnered with North Jersey and New York City operatives. Max Hassel (1900-33), a bootlegger from Reading, Pennsylvania, who owned more than a dozen breweries in Pennsylvania, New York State, and New Jersey, paired with Duffy to operate several beer breweries in South Jersey, including Camden County Breweries Inc. and Camden County Cereal Beverage Company. Hassel also worked with Irving Wexler (1888-1952), commonly known as Waxey Gordon, a prominent bootlegger and associate of New York City crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928).

Philadelphia’s bootleg trade depended on the region’s roads, rail routes, and waterways—its interconnectivity and proximity to other import and export hubs, like Trenton, New Jersey, and Wilmington, Delaware. Bootleg business that affected Philadelphia often affected the surrounding region. When investigators probed bootleggers and racketeers in Philadelphia during the 1928 Special August Grand Jury investigation, some illicit entities crossed the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey; as Philadelphia became more temperate, Camden became less so.

Charged with investigating bootlegging and its attendant gang violence, the 1928 Special August Grand Jury revealed the extent to which illegal liquor saturated the region, putting bootleggers on the defensive. The grand jury found that over the course of a few months, in excess of a million gallons of consumable liquor was released into the city, much of it diverted from denatured industrial alcohol. Philadelphia boxing promoter and nightclub owner Max Hoff built a bootlegging empire from industrial alcohol and amassed a fortune. Hoff operated several financial firms, including the Franklin Mortgage & Investment Co., to manage the revenue from his bootlegging ventures.

Despite interviewing 748 witnesses, the grand jury failed to indict Hoff or any other big-name bootlegger. Its success lay in uncovering police graft. When the grand jury finished its work, 138 police officers were deemed unfit for service. Many of these officers worked within Unit No. 1, an elite vice force established in 1924 by Director of Public Safety Smedley Butler (1881-1940).

In its report, the grand jury admitted it failed to destroy an underworld architecture built on bootlegging. In noting the lack of a permanent solution to the liquor racket problem, it implicated the residents of Philadelphia. It reasoned that only a constantly vigilant citizenry could prevent bootlegging, violence, and police graft. District Attorney John Monaghan (1870-1954), leading the investigation, implored Philadelphians to insist upon clean government and law and order. His exhortation echoed the voices of many Pennsylvania reformers of the 1920s, including Butler and Governor Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946). The will of Philadelphians to abide by Prohibition remained limited, however, and officials who zealously enforced the unpopular federal mandate assumed a hefty political liability. Bootlegging in Philadelphia continued until Prohibition’s repeal, meeting the unwavering demand for liquor.

Annie Anderson is the senior research and public programming specialist at Eastern State Penitentiary and the co-author, with John Binder, of Philadelphia Organized Crime in the 1920s and 1930s (Arcadia Publishing, 2014). She received her M.A. in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Boston. (Author information current at time of publication.)

On Friday, August 28, 1964, a scuffle with police at the busy intersection of Twenty-Second Street and Columbia Avenue sparked a three-day riot involving hundreds of North Philadelphians hurling bottles and bricks at police and looting stores. With the Columbia Avenue Riot, Philadelphia joined six other cities, including Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, that erupted in African American protest during July and August 1964. Similar actions in hundreds of other cities followed by 1968. In Philadelphia, as across the country, urban unrest fractured liberal interracial coalitions and gave rise to law-and-order politics.

At 9:20 on that August night in 1964, two Philadelphia police officers ordered a married couple to move their car from the intersection at Twenty-Second and Columbia Avenue (the street later renamed for civil rights leader Cecil B. Moore). The ensuing scuffle touched off a rumor that the police had beaten and possibly killed a pregnant African American woman. Rioting spread through an area of North Philadelphia that the local press and the police establishment since the mid-1950s had designated “the Jungle” for its entrenched poverty and high crime rates. Like other “ghettos,” the area of Poplar, Lehigh, Tenth, and Thirty-Third Streets also was racially segregated; by 1960, it was 69 percent African American.

The riot reflected longstanding popular anger at the Philadelphia Police Department and growing divisions among African Americans over a recent shift to more confrontational street protests. On the first night, crowds of young men and women ran along Columbia Avenue, smashing the windows and taking the merchandise almost exclusively from white-owned stores. The busy commercial strip in the heart of North Philadelphia was lined with taprooms and small shops, the vast majority owned by Jewish merchants who sold groceries, appliances, and furniture. One group tossed a garbage can through a squad car window. Crowds pulled prisoners out of police wagons. An activist with the National Muslim Improvement Association led chants of  “We want freedom, we want justice!” Directing the crowd’s anger at Cecil B. Moore (1915-79) for failing to deliver promised reforms despite militant mass protests, one local resident declared, “We don’t need Cecil Moore. We can take care of ourselves.” Members of the crowd also turned their anger on more moderate civil rights leaders who, like Moore, tried to restore calm.

1,800 Police Converge

By the second and third nights, police presence swelled to 1,800 officers. Commissioner Howard Leary (1912-94) instructed police to use minimal force. On Saturday, Mayor James H. J. Tate (1910-83) imposed a curfew in the riot area. By Monday morning, the Columbia Avenue Riot was over. Hundreds had been arrested and injured, and two died. Seven hundred twenty-six buildings had been affected. Property damage and police overtime pay totaled $3.2 million.

In the next few years, the civil rights movement embraced racial militancy and distanced itself from former white allies. Protests increasingly confronted a police force, led by then-Deputy Commissioner Frank J. Rizzo (1920-91), which proudly embraced racial partisanship. After the uprising, the Fraternal Order of Police escalated its campaign against the civilian-led Police Advisory Board. The Police Department countered the rise of Black Power with a siege mentality that treated Black protest as a threat to the city. By 1969, the Police Advisory Board was gone. Three years later, Rizzo was mayor.

Many local businesses never recovered from the August 1964 uprising. Although the flight of white residents and industrial jobs played a greater role in long-term neighborhood decline, the Columbia Avenue Riot accelerated these trends and contributed to the sense already possessed by Rizzo and many white Philadelphians that “the Jungle” was a violent place to be contained by force. Still, the unrest generated key momentum for local activists that arguably culminated in the election of the city’s first African American mayor, Wilson Goode (b. 1938), in 1983.

Alex Elkins is a Ph.D. Candidate at Temple University, writing a dissertation on the 1960s riots and “get-tough” policing. His article, “‘At Once Judge, Jury, and Executioner’: Rioting and Policing in Philadelphia, 1838-1964,” appears in the Spring 2014 issue of the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The form of the first courthouses in the Philadelphia region came from English practice, just as the origins of the legal system grew from English common law and county-based courts. Each county had its own court, which made the county seat–where the court met– a social, economic and political hub and a significant visual reminder of the colony’s place within the British Empire. Philadelphia County and the adjacent Pennsylvania counties of Bucks, Chester, and Montgomery each had its own courthouse. After 1701, so too did the three counties of Delaware: New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. Similarly, southern New Jersey was divided into counties for governmental reasons: Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland, plus Atlantic and Cape May Counties on the coast, all well within Philadelphia’s city sphere.

In early Philadelphia, the city blocks closest to the Delaware River quickly became the most densely developed of the urban grid planned by Quaker and colony founder William Penn. A social and commercial center flourished near the wharves and warehouses hugging the waterline. Nearby, at Second and High (later Market) Streets, stood not only the Quaker meeting house but also the first courthouse (built in 1707, demolished 1837). The two-story, gable-roofed civic building served dual purposes, with a watchhouse on the first floor and a court on the second. Outside the courtroom was a balcony used for delivering proclamations and addresses, which added emphasis to the street façade visually and symbolically.

Amid the hustle and bustle of city streets below the balcony, urban life jostled around the deferential nature of courtroom ritual and the social hierarchy it reinforced. The legal center abutted several blocks of market stalls in a juxtaposition of street commerce and civic structure, similar to English municipal halls and markets, many of which had arcaded ground floors for the trading and social mixing. A pews-to-pulpit spatial arrangement taken from parish churches influenced the placement of judge, jury, attorney, and witness inside the courthouse, as historian Carl Lounsbury demonstrated in his analysis of both building types.

Mirroring Local Construction Traditions

County seats, particularly the first courthouses, expressed the emerging vernacular architecture vocabulary of the Delaware Valley in materials and scale. In Chester, the initial seat of Chester County, the two-story, stone courthouse (1724) mirrored local construction traditions, readily identified through stone walls, multiple-pane windows with exterior shutters, dual entries, and the pent roof associated with Quaker buildings in southeastern Pennsylvania. Inside, the courtroom occupied the first floor, and the jury rooms were on the second. In the mid-eighteenth century, an apse-like addition offered new space for the judge’s bench, furthering the correlation between church and courtroom interiors. Similarly, the brick courthouse (1732) built in New Castle, Delaware, adopted a Georgian architectural style, seen in its cupola and classical balustrade, central door with pedimented surround, and sash windows. The courthouse (1735) erected in Salem County, New Jersey, also featured brick construction and Georgian architectural details, while the wood-shingled, gable-roofed courthouse (1793) in Sussex County, Delaware, spoke to the region’s building history of wood-frame assembly. These early courthouses occupied central locations in their city plans and in civic life. When the court system outgrew them, their perceived importance to early governance and communal stature ensured the courthouses’ preservation beyond the eighteenth century, and the buildings continued to be used for occasional court activities  even if county seats moved to different locations, as happened in Chester and New Castle Counties.

The significance of the courthouse and the courtroom’s expression of popular sovereignty and localized law resonated through Philadelphia’s colonial-era history, especially during the Revolutionary War period as a democratic government emerged. The U.S. Constitution was debated and adopted in the Pennsylvania State House (later known as Independence Hall), which had a courtroom on its first floor. When Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital in the 1790s, the nascent federal government claimed Philadelphia’s newly completed civic buildings, including a new County Court House (built 1787-89 at Sixth and Chestnut Streets), which became known as Congress Hall for its federal occupants, and City Hall (built 1790-91 at Fifth and Chestnut), which accommodated the U.S. Supreme Court and then municipal courts in the nineteenth century. Like the public buildings in Philadelphia, courthouses throughout the region fulfilled several civic needs. In Dover, Delaware, for example, the Kent County courthouse coexisted with the statehouse in a structure erected around the same time as Congress Hall. The county opened its first purpose-built court in the 1870s.

Into the nineteenth century, courthouses were among the region’s most substantial buildings in scale and building materials. Initially two or three stories, the court buildings of the new democracy were classically appointed and topped with a clock tower or, later, domes. Beneath the domes and behind monumental porticoes, traditional sash windows and wood paneled doors prevailed. As proclamations of civic pride, courthouses became plum commissions for professional architects who intended their designs to project public grandeur and protect the core of democracy: the jury trial.

The expression of democratic ideals could be seen most readily seen in classically inspired temples of justice reminiscent of ancient Greece and Rome. The association of classical architectural forms with the new democratic government informed public buildings of all types, notably the Second Bank of the United States by William Strickland (1788-1854), Girard College by Thomas U. Walter (1804-87), and county courthouses throughout the region. During the 1840s, Walter’s Chester County, Pennsylvania, courthouse in West Chester and Strickland’s courthouse in Sussex County, Delaware, helped to popularize the Greek Revival style. The two-story, red brick courthouse of Sussex replaced the county’s wood-frame building from the 1790s and kept the court functions at the heart of town. Another notable mid-nineteenth-century example was the courthouse for Montgomery County in Norristown, Pennsylvania, by Napoleon LeBrun (1821-1901).

A New Courthouse Next to Independence Hall

In the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia lacked an architectural temple of justice. In 1867, Philadelphia expanded its court system with a new courthouse, located behind Independence Hall, to better serve the burgeoning population and increasingly burdened legal administrators with additional space for court business: court room, jury box and deliberation rooms, judges chambers, spectators gallery, and prisoner egress. Rather than a monumental portico and classical pediment filled with sculptural iconography, the new judicial edifice echoed the Georgian architecture of Independence Hall.

Philadelphia’s mid-century courthouse provided contemporary commentary on the demographic shifts that altered views on how justice was served and made defendants less a spectacle in punishment and more a part of–and apart from–the public ritual of law and judgment. Public shaming, and subsequent shunning by neighbors and kin, gave way to imprisonment in the eighteenth century. This precipitated another building type in the county judicial centers or courthouse squares: the jail. Almost on completion, these early jails became overcrowded with prisoners who shared living space, regardless of gender or offense. Even new jails with interior and exterior spaces, such as the Walnut Street Jail (built 1790-91), failed to end the comingling or deter debauchery within the walls. These persistent social ills within the corrective institutions urged new design solutions for prisons and the fulfillment of reformist ideals for redeeming the prisoner and returning him or her to society. New prisons, like Eastern State Penitentiary built (1821-36) by John Haviland (1792-1852), were designed to rehabilitate the incarcerated through labor and solitude.

The surrounding counties also sought professional architects, such as Haviland, to expand existing courthouse squares in similar ways. For example, Burlington County, New Jersey, hired Robert Mills (1781-1855) to add a prison to its courthouse complex in Mount Holly, as early as 1808, and Atlantic County, New Jersey, commissioned Walter in the 1840s to add a jail to theirs. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, civic leaders commissioned Quaker architect Addison Hutton (1834-1916) to design a courthouse and a jail in the 1870s, thereby crafting a cohesive architectural landscape of justice out of separate sites for the county and continuing the reformative approach to law’s administration that Haviland’s design for Eastern State Penitentiary embodied.

Also in the nineteenth century, the same demographic patterns led to the establishment of new county seats throughout the greater Philadelphia region. In two—Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Camden County, New Jersey—the architect, and sometime partner of Hutton, Samuel Sloan (1815-54) won commissions for the new courthouse projects. The county seat of Delaware County moved from Chester, site of a courthouse with a dual-entry, Quaker aesthetic, to Media in 1850. Sloan created a temple of justice, with a classically appointed portico, to assure that Media was not to be outdone by its rival Chester County and its new courthouse in the Corinthian order by Walter of the same period.

Renaissance Revival in Camden

Sloan’s work for Delaware County was in keeping with mid-century taste for classical courthouse design throughout region, whereas his Camden courthouse (1853) revealed his leanings to the Renaissance Revival aesthetic, popular in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The building exterior was a roughcast brick and the floor levels were articulated by belt courses and arched windows; the roof rose from a deep cornice and soared upward through gabled dormers and a square tower. Sloan’s courthouse in Camden likely influenced the architectural program that emerged in neighboring Gloucester County in the 1880s.

When Camden County broke away from Gloucester in 1844, officials began to shape their municipal center. In Gloucester, however, the existing two-story, complex masonry courthouse (1787) sufficed until 1885. At that time, the historic building was demolished and the new courthouse opened. It was a Renaissance Revival design by the Philadelphia firm, Hazlehurst and Huckel. The use of masonry in the early building translated well into the weightiness of the Italian palazzo reinterpreted for the courthouse through structural ornamentation that incorporated rusticated and smooth surfaces and different colors of brick and stone. This courthouse answered Sloan’s in Camden, although neither proved large enough for the demands of the twentieth-century legal system. Camden replaced its Sloan courthouse with a domed court by 1906. Nearby Cumberland County hired the Philadelphia firm of Watson and Huckel, successor to the Hazlehurst partnership, to fashion a new court building in 1909.

Courtrooms in these classically encased courthouses had twofold enclosures: first within symbolic architectural forms, such as monumental porticos, and then within a labyrinth of specialized spaces, such as judges chambers, jury rooms, clerk offices, law libraries, administrative offices for recording paperwork. In the nineteenth century, these enclosures distanced justice from those governed—separated by columnar screens on the exterior or by the bar inside the courtroom itself—and protected their rights at the same time, as Martha McNamara chronicled in her analysis of law’s professionalization and Norman Spaulding demonstrated in his examination of legal administrative spaces.

The rituals of justice conducted in public courtrooms, therefore, reflected the accessibility of law to all citizens even as a maze of jurisprudence few navigated without counsel developed to protect that principle. The architectural choices of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, embodied these ideals in a succession of courthouses placed on the highest point in Doylestown, including the Hutton courthouse of the 1870s, and the houses facing the courthouse square that became known as “Lawyers’ Row” and that received aesthetic upgrades as tastes shifted in the nineteenth century. Hutton’s courthouse met a similar fate to its predecessors in the mid-twentieth century when county officials chose to erect a modern, two-building court and administrative center by Carroll, Grisdale and Van Alen. The courthouse building was round and the greater use of glass in the façade signified contemplation and transparency necessary in the prudent execution of justice. Ultimately the county relocated its judicial center off the courthouse square, leaving the courtroom ideal at the heart of the complex and filling the spaces with administrative offices for the business of the court.

Relocations in Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, a similar arc of expansion and debate that occurred in Bucks County over the movement of the center of justice from its traditional location took place, though condensed into the second half of the nineteenth century as plans to relocate the courts and government center from Independence Square were abandoned and City Hall on Center (Penn) Square gradually rose. The multistoried, highly ornamented Second Empire style building designed by John McArthur (1823-90) opened in 1901. The sculptural program of Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923) added to the ornate character of the building and its enormity, with over 250 figures including blindfolded Justice with her scales. Almost immediately, the administration of justice overwhelmed even its vast interior. Philadelphia’s courts soon occupied auxiliary space in the Widener Building at Thirteenth and Chestnut Streets, and in the late 1930s, the Family Court Building at Eighteenth and Vine Streets designed by John T. Windrim (1866-1934) in the Beaux Arts tradition was added to the court system.

The interior iconography of the Family Court Building continued the decorative program of City Hall by featuring scenes in legal and local history rendered in paint, tile, and metal, as well as stained glass from D’Ascenzo Studios. In the paintings in the Family Court, justice came with a dose of paternalism to the wayward young and the newly arrived. The murals, by artists such as Stuyvesant van Veen (1910-88), encouraged a code of conduct focused on labor and deference. They hinted at alternatives to the jury trial negotiated by legal specialists and to shifts in the conveyance of justice away from the sword-bearing, blind-folded classical figure represented in porticoes and statuary through subject matter that instead featured judges pointing to role models, such as Boy Scouts, or highlighted prominent Americans.

Outside of Philadelphia, during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries annexes augmented courthouses as far as civic pride and purses could stretch. Additions to the architect-designed, mid-nineteenth-century courthouses in Pennsylvania’s Delaware and Montgomery Counties consumed full city blocks, while Bucks and Chester Counties forged courthouse clusters of old and new spaces to house their burgeoning legal systems. This was also true in Gloucester County, New Jersey, where a contemporary justice center supplemented the Hazlehurst and Huckel courthouse. In Delaware, Kent County remodeled its 1874 courthouse into a Colonial Revival-styled building around 1920 and added a three-story building around 2010. The addition evoked the arcaded first floor of the colonial period buildings with its entrance recessed behind a monumental columned portico. With this building and other complexes of the twenty-first century, including New Castle County’s fourteen-story, L-shaped court building in Wilmington, floor plans represented due process by providing space for the service of justice. In the early twenty-first century, the Philadelphia County court system included buildings on Arch, Filbert, and Spring Garden Streets. A new Family Court at Fifteenth and Arch Streets, designed by Philadelphia’s EwingCole, opened in 2014 as a replacement for the Windrim-designed courthouse on Vine Street. Gone were the Beaux Arts references to justice and the paternalistic New Deal era murals; instead, the transparency of the fourteen-story glass tower suggested the virtue Prudence, with her abilities to discern the appropriateness of actions. Concurrently, the city’s traffic court moved from its home in the William Steele & Sons designed Studebaker Building (1918) on North Broad Street, Philadelphia’s Automobile Row, to more modern space on Spring Garden Street.

Thus the courthouses of Philadelphia and the surrounding region underwent rebuilding, renovation, and replacement as demands on the court system rose. These architectural expressions of civic pride echoed local building traditions and, in the nineteenth century, expressed national identity as the young republic matured. With modernization and the expansion of democracy, glass-walled courts and an overwhelming series of specialized spaces stripped figural of Justice of her mystique. The administration of law in the ancillary spaces of the courthouse complex, however, preserved the courtroom as the symbol of justice sought and due process for all citizens at work.

Virginia B. Price is a public historian based in the Washington, D.C., area. She received her M.A. from the College of William and Mary and a Master of Architectural History from the University of Virginia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia, as a seaport and the largest city in the North American colonies, hosted seamen, laborers, runaway servants, and transients, the footloose men most likely to be involved in crime and to patronize the vice trades. Taverns, brothels, and gambling dens dotted the walking city that relied on night watchmen to look out for fire more than public safety. In the absence of what would be recognized as a police force, thieves pilfered purses from the unwary and burgled goods from warehouses and docks, and feared only the “hue and cry” that might lead a posse of pursuers to stop and beat them. Those caught and brought to trial faced a penal code that had eliminated English practices of whipping, branding, cropping body parts, and hanging for most crimes, but Pennsylvania’s penal code reverted to these punishments in 1718, and they remained in effect until the adoption of a new state constitution after the Revolution in a largely futile attempt to stem crime and disorder.

Violence (as reflected in indictments for murder, the most reliably counted form of crime) remained rare in Philadelphia until the middle of the eighteenth century. When people killed, they murdered intimates—neighbors and friends—a pattern that holds true into the present. Men killed women amid allegations of infidelity or in response to challenges to patriarchal authority. Irritations with friends or neighbors sometimes took a violent turn, especially when fueled by drink, and an unlucky thrust with a knife or baling hook might send one man to the grave, the other to the gallows. Masters killed their servants or apprentices as murder extended downward in the social order, but rarely the reverse.  Men committed about 90 percent of murders, in a pattern that characterizes modern societies as well.

Among women, infanticide was the most common form of homicide as women had few ways to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Charges were rare, but those charged faced significant legal hurdles. Unlike those accused of murder, who were presumed innocent until proven otherwise, women charged with infanticide faced the presumption that an infant was born alive and a defense of stillbirth had to be supported by at least one witness. Nonetheless, few women were convicted as juries were loathe to find desperate young women guilty.

Violence increased in Philadelphia in the decade or so before the American Revolution, before subsiding again in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Loss of faith in the king, a government unwilling to redress grievances, sharp fractures in the ruling elite, and an increasingly diverse society disrupted the political and social hierarchy that had tamped down violence. Murder climbed steadily—indictments for murder more than doubled from 3 per 100,000 during the 1750s to 7 per 100,000 in the 1760s—and remained high in the Revolutionary era. While some acts were clearly political attacks on supposed loyalists or Tories, most followed the usual pattern of neighborhood and family strife. Criminal justice proceedings were temporarily disrupted during the Revolution, and it is likely that the pervasive political violence loosened normal constraints on behavior.

Poverty and Crime

A pattern of declining murder rates during periods of political consensus and faith in government (and rising rates when these conditions changed) appeared early in the nation’s history. The fellow-feeling engendered by the formation of a new, more democratic government, a revised criminal code that limited corporal punishments, and the ratification of the Constitution sent murder rates plunging in post-Revolutionary Philadelphia, with fewer than 1 indictment per 100,000 in the 1780s and 1790s. However, rising inequality in the city meant other forms of crime persisted: The combination of wealthy travelers and a countryside in which to hide provided an ideal combination for robbery, which plagued the country roads near Philadelphia, while growing affluence provided an incentive for larceny and burglary.

African Americans and Irish-born immigrants each comprised about a third of those charged with crime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The overrepresentation of Black and Irish people indicated both prejudice—the expectation that these groups would fill the jail and the poorhouse—as well as the activities of very poor people. The most common crimes, the theft of clothing, food, or household items pilfered by servants, were clearly the acts of individuals scrabbling for survival.

In the early nineteenth century, the invention of new technologies, especially the power loom that mechanized the work of artisans in Britain, forced households into poverty and sent streams of immigrants across the ocean to Philadelphia, where they faced ruinous competition and neighborhood strife. In the 1830s and 1840s battles between Irish Catholics and Protestant Orangemen, immigrants and nativists, workers and employers, or between rival volunteer fire companies, saw buildings and churches set ablaze while streets reverberated with the sounds of musketry and even cannon fire. Only poor marksmanship and unfamiliarity with weapons kept casualties low. The Philadelphia sheriff called on citizen posses to suppress disorder, but on a number of occasions only the militia managed to restore peace to the city.

Gangs such as the Rats, the Killers, and the Flayers reigned in Moyamensing and Southwark, just across South Street and outside of Philadelphia’s borders. While these gangs included petty criminals, their principal goals were more social than economic. Gang members supported volunteer fire companies, supplying the manpower to pull engines through the streets and to battle rival companies for access to water supplies. On election day, gangs provided strong-arm support for getting out the vote or preventing others from voting, services that gained them income and some immunity from criminal prosecution. And on a day-to-day basis, they patrolled neighborhood boundaries against outsiders, particularly African Americans. In the five major race riots that occurred between 1829 and 1849, gangs led white rioters in attacking African Americans and looting and burning Black residences.

Some long-lived gangs, such as the Schuylkill Rangers (c. 25 years), drawn from an Irish immigrant community on the banks of the Schuylkill River, began by resisting nativist and anti-Catholic attackers, but evolved into a more organized form of criminality. They became river pirates, demanding a tax from barges heading to the city, robbing the trade carried across the river at nearby Gray’s Ferry, and raiding wharfs and warehouses.

Responding to Crime

Philadelphians responded by organizing new mechanisms of social control. Eastern State Penitentiary (1829), the nation’s first, loomed ominously above the city as a warning that miscreants could count on years of solitary confinement. Patrolmen and inspectors were added to the constables and night watch (1833), although criminals could still escape arrest by crossing a street to another township. The consolidation of Philadelphia’s political boundaries, the expansion of the police, and charter reform (all in 1854) replaced the different township jurisdictions and the ineffectual committee structures dependent on citizen volunteers. Finally, centralized control (1855) over fire companies (and professionalization in 1871) eliminated the disorder involved in firefighting.

Better policing and new institutions found their match, however, in more organized crime. Burglars raided shops and warehouses with sets of skeleton keys designed to pick different types of locks and then disposed of their booty to fences, who specialized in specific types of goods.  Safecrackers had a variety of drills for iron and eventually steel-plated safes. Counterfeiters and forgers enjoyed the most lucrative returns in an age of international trade and no exclusive national currency, copying different states’ bank notes and merchants’ letters of credit, while con men advertised in newspapers to sell counterfeit currency to gullible businessmen, who received a package of green cut paper (hence the “green goods swindle”) instead. Gamblers introduced English bookmaking and assumed control over betting on (and fixing) sports.  Meanwhile, corrupt police detectives developed a scheme of recovering stolen goods and then splitting a reward from their owner with a cooperating thief.

Despite riots and disorder, homicides remained relatively rare in the city until the 1850s. The collapse of political consensus over westward expansion and slavery and continued ethnic tensions drove murders upward, while the introduction of Samuel Colt’s concealable revolver made murder easier than before. Indictments for murder in 1853-59 climbed to 4 per 100,000, the highest rate since the founding of the nation. Revolvers continued to proliferate after the Civil War, and the proportion of homicides committed with handguns increased. Overall, however, homicide indictments declined in the late nineteenth century, staying below 3 per 100,000 in the 1880s and 1890s even as depressions and labor strife disrupted society.

The decline in homicide does not reflect the large number of infant killings each year for which no one was ever charged. Between 1861 and 1901 an average of 55 infants were found dead outdoors or drowned in outhouses each year, while physicians and public authorities estimated several hundred more died of neglect or abuse, but with no definitive sign of foul play.  Single mothers seeking to hide a birth and parents unable to manage another child resorted to infanticide, abandonment, and depositing newborns at “baby farms,” where death rates were high but intent to kill impossible to prove.

The Vice Trade

Prostitution remained an important source of employment for women whose wages as seamstresses, waitresses, domestics, and even department store clerks were rarely enough to support them. While some women had “friends” who helped support them, others relied exclusively on prostitution. Vice districts were a lucrative and well-advertised component of the city’s mainstream economy and employed many hundreds of women. By the 1890s, two sizable vice districts had emerged to bracket Philadelphia’s downtown, one along South Street, the other north of Market Street, between Ninth and Eleventh Streets.

The area north of Market, known as the “tenderloin,” was the city’s primary entertainment district with cabarets, theaters, dance halls, and opium dens. White, native-born women served an upper-class clientele of businessmen and revelers from the entertainment spots nearby who used published visitors’ guides that evaluated the quality of sex services. There were an estimated 300 brothels in the tenderloin in addition to houses of assignation (where women could take the men they met on the street or in a dance hall), as landlords broke up the large houses in the neighborhood into single rooms that catered to transients—and their guests.

Brothels operated openly by bribing the police, who in turn paid off the ward leaders responsible for their appointment to the force. Despite occasional clean-up efforts, Philadelphia’s tenderloin only came under sustained enforcement pressure during World War I, when prostitution was outlawed within a five-mile radius of a military training camp, and municipal authorities across the nation were pressed to close down open vice districts.  Some commercial sex migrated to Market Street, where women trolled for soldiers and sailors on the street.  Since Market Street hosted movie theaters, restaurants, and most of the city’s department stores, it was a less sexualized commercial zone than the tenderloin, and streetwalkers blended more easily into the flow of pedestrians.

The city’s second vice district ran along South Street and coincided with the major area of African American settlement, to the consternation of W.E.B. Du Bois, who in The Philadelphia Negro (1899) deplored its demoralizing association with the neighborhood. African American prostitutes catered to the transient merchant seamen and dockworkers from the nearby commercial wharves. In Philadelphia’s Black population, women outnumbered men—the reverse of the immigrant white communities that supplied their customers. Enforcement pressures were fewer than in the tenderloin, since the area was less obviously a commercial center, and because white reformers, unlike Du Bois, were indifferent to the presence of vice in a Black neighborhood.

The most obvious social cost of coexisting with the vice trade was the violence associated with it. The homicide rate among African Americans ranged from 6.4 indictments per 100,000 in the 1860s to 11.4 in the 1890s, about five times the city rate. Illegal entrepreneurs required some means of protection, since they could not rely on police, but also the history of white attacks on African Americans may have been an incentive for young men to carry weapons. As a result, the commonplace disagreements that whites settled with fists and clubs took on a more deadly tone among armed African Americans.

Crime as Big Business

The same technologies that supported business, real estate, and industrial development in the city and surrounding region, and allowed the rapid transmission of information, also meant that professional criminals could better organize their trade. Railroads and intercity streetcar service spread settlement into the Main Line and beyond, as wealthy Philadelphians escaped the tenements and factories that crowded the city.  They found to their dismay that, while other crimes were rare, rings of professional burglars followed the money. Con men could employ a dozen or more individuals working fake wire services and purporting to share tips on stock transactions. And prostitutes moved from city to city as part of a circuit similar to the ones followed by entertainers and vaudeville performers. But it was Prohibition that really turned organized crime into big business.

The scope of illegal enterprise changed with the managerial tasks of making, importing, and distributing illegal liquor. In Philadelphia and South Jersey, Jews (with Italians as secondary partners) dominated the bootlegging trade and vertically integrated their industry from supply to retail while forging alliances with other gangsters both nationally and internationally. Oceangoing vessels brought Canadian whiskey into Atlantic City from where it was distributed up and down the East Coast, and beer from South Jersey breweries quenched thirsts throughout the mid-Atlantic region. These same international trade routes and associations formed the basis for the eventual importation and distribution of heroin.

The partnership between Jews and Italians continued well after the end of Prohibition. When Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver brought his investigatory committee to Philadelphia in 1950-51, he found the familiar pattern of gambling, loan-sharking, labor racketeering, and police payoffs. Kefauver’s committee focused on Jewish organized crime, but the aging gangsters dragged reluctantly before the television cameras were well on their way to retirement, prison, or death. It was Angelo Bruno (1910-80), the “Quiet Don,” who would become the face of a new generation of mobsters.

Not the first Mafia don in Philadelphia but perhaps the most significant, Bruno became the head of the Philadelphia-South Jersey mob in 1959 and managed the ascent of Italian-dominated organized crime.  Under Bruno, loan-sharking and gambling remained central money-making enterprises, and the opening of casino gambling in Atlantic City in the late 1970s offered additional revenue through mob control of key construction and hotel services unions. However, Philadelphia’s Mafia quickly burned itself out.  Battles over Atlantic City revenue and impatience with Bruno’s conservative leadership led to his assassination in 1980. Chaos followed as murderous, but largely incompetent, mob bosses left a trail of bodies, with lengthy prison terms for the survivors.

Internecine warfare among Italian mobsters provided openings for others. The Black Mafia, organized by former members of the Twentieth and Carpenter Street Gang, began by extorting criminals in its South Philadelphia neighborhood. By the early 1970s, the group had expanded into heroin dealing throughout the city, with connections to New York importer Frank “Black Caesar” Matthews, and eventually became the extortion wing of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque 12. Younger gangsters formed the Junior Black Mafia, and gangs with roots in Jamaica opened new drug-importing routes, while Asian and Russian groups followed the time-honored tradition of extorting and robbing their fellow immigrants.

Murder in the Twentieth-Century City

The homicide rate remained relatively low in the middle decades of the twentieth century. During the Great Depression everyone shared in a common misery and hoped that Franklin Roosevelt would save American capitalism, while during World War II, the populace united behind the war effort and the military absorbed the young men most likely to commit murder (and other crime). The homicide rate spiked immediately after the war, as war-damaged young men returned home, but the increase was only temporary. A strong economy, spurred by Cold War-related defense spending and government subsidies for the new, predominantly white suburbs, meant high wages while an increase in marriage and family formation kept young men from street corners and taverns. Homicide among whites hovered around 2 per 100,000 in Philadelphia into the early 1960s. Other forms of crime (excluding the prostitution, gambling, and loan-sharking promoted by organized crime) also remained fairly low during this period.

African Americans, for all intents and purposes, lived in a different city. The homicide rate for African Americans in the early 1950s was 22.5 per 100,000. African Americans from the South flooded into a city that was more segregated than at any point in the past, and migrants brought with them a well-founded mistrust of police and criminal justice. People hustled to make up for inadequate incomes and high city prices, and these activities, without the police protection provided to white organized crime, exposed African American illegal entrepreneurs to the predation of stick-up men. As in the nineteenth century, African Americans venturing into public spaces carried weapons for self-protection, and murders among acquaintances were the most common form of homicide.

The worlds of white and Black Philadelphia slowly converged during the late 1960s, as a collapsing economy and growing heroin use destroyed working-class neighborhoods. Heroin users fueled a dramatic increase in burglary, larceny, and robbery, which largely unskilled and uneducated young men used to support their habits. White flight, already apparent in the 1950s in response to African American migration and the lure of the suburbs, accelerated in the 1960s as the crime rate rose and abandoned factories drained the value out of nearby row houses. Philadelphia’s homicide rate increased by 300 percent between 1965 and 1974, the same decade the city lost about 40 percent of its industrial jobs. Racial tension, job loss, and increased gun ownership resulted in frayed personal relations and a spiraling homicide rate.  As in previous decades, these tensions were internalized: Black people murdered Black people and whites murdered whites with most victims the closest at hand—friends and family.

These trends were not limited to Philadelphia. In nearby Camden, New York Shipbuilding, Campbell Soup, and RCA all closed or decamped for locales with cheaper, nonunionized labor, and the city lost about half of its industrial base between 1960 and 1970. Corporate board decisions to gut Camden’s economy trapped African Americans in place, while those whites who were able moved to burgeoning suburban Camden County. The change in the homicide rate was startling; a modest 3.4 homicides per 100,000 in 1960 became 26.3 in 1970 and 31.9 in 1980 as the underground economy replaced the world of legitimate work.

The Underground Economy

With a virtual collapse of the job market for unskilled labor, the underground economy became the only economy in sections of Philadelphia, Camden, and Chester. Shifts in the drug trade meant the Philadelphia region had some of the purest heroin and least expensive cocaine in the nation. The arrival of crack cocaine during the 1980s and disputes over drug-selling turf settled with increasingly powerful semiautomatic weapons sent murder to new heights. Camden (an average of 50.3 homicides per 100,000) and Chester (an average of 51.3) had among the nation’s highest homicide rates during most of the 2000s, and Philadelphia started the new century as the city with the highest homicide rate (22.5 per 100,000) among the nation’s ten largest cities. Not only do the poorest cities have the highest homicide rates, but the poorest neighborhoods within these cities concentrate the effects of poverty and the violence associated with the underground economy.

Since its founding, Philadelphia has been a source for illegal, but highly desirable, goods and services for the region.  Their provision rested on the exploitation of the poor—women who worked as prostitutes, and men who organized gambling and sold illegal liquor and drugs to wealthier consumers.  However, for most of the region’s history, trends in murder moved along a separate trajectory from trends in vice, other crime, and disorder.  In the late twentieth century, these trends merged as the underground economy became more central to the economic fortunes of the inner city, the inner city itself became more isolated from the mainstream economy, and new, high-powered weapons proliferated.  One thing is clear from this history:  The evolution of crime and violence has paralleled developments in the urban economy over three centuries, and solving these problems depends on a larger resurrection of urban economic fortunes.

Eric C. Schneider, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, has written three books on American urban history and is currently working on a history of murder in Philadelphia since 1940. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Since classical times, people have pitted dogs against other animals in fierce competitions. During the Middle Ages, Europeans engaged in sports known as bearbaiting and bullbaiting in which dogs squared off with these animals in bloody contests. For centuries, few quibbled over the ethics of these savage events because a deeply embedded Christian worldview assured people that the creatures of the Earth existed solely for their own use and pleasure.

American colonists harbored similar attitudes for a time, but eventually bourgeoisie sensibilities prevailed and the respectable classes came to frown upon staged fights between animals. The 1682 Great Law of Pennsylvania banned “Such rude and Riotus Sports & practices as Prized or Stage Plays Masks Revells Bulbaits Cock fightings,” under penalty of ten days hard labor or a fine of twenty shillings. Lawmakers intended such proscriptions to save human souls more than animal bodies, but Quakers also denounced cruelty to animals as a transgression in its own right.

A Turn to the Tawdry

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, dogfighting became associated with the more sordid elements of urban life. Middle-class reformers routinely linked blood sports with other iniquitous behaviors and the lower class. In Philadelphia in 1835, the Public Ledger observed, “We never heard of a bull baiting, a dogfight, a cockfight, a boxing match, or a horse race without supplementary quarrels … and we ascribe them to the excitement of the lower animal propensities by the exhibition, as well as to the alcohol always drank on such occasions.” In the view of reformers, such events highlighted a lack of self-restraint and an alarming tendency toward brutality in society.

With bulls and bears becoming scarce in urban centers, sporting men bred dogs to fight against one another in locations sequestered from public view. Pit bulls—crossed between terriers and bulldogs— were bred for ferocity and agility for fighting in pits or rings. One of Philadelphia’s more infamous Gilded Age sporting men, Pat Carroll, invested long hours in a dog’s training, sometimes walking it twenty miles a day, throwing it in water to swim, or harassing it with the skin of a rabbit attached to a pole. Matches could last for hours until one dog killed the other or until one or both combatants were too injured to continue. Carroll observed that “a fighting dog does not last long,” noting that tenure in the pit seldom extended beyond four years.

Following the Civil War, dogfighting reached its zenith in the shady underworld of American cities, but the cause of animal rights also gained momentum. The Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (PSPCA) formed in 1867 and the Women’s Branch (WSPCA) formed the following year. Both of these organizations employed officers with law enforcement powers. In 1869, Pennsylvania enacted an animal cruelty statute that explicitly prohibited the practice of dogfighting under a penalty of ten to twenty dollars for a first offense. New Jersey followed suit in 1873. Anti-cruelty officers routinely raided suspected pits, arrested participants, and confiscated dogs. In June 1874, for example, one such raid nabbed sixty-one men, including Pat Carroll. In most instances, the small fines imposed rarely served to deter further dogfighting. In spite of numerous arrests, Pat Carroll continued his involvement in the Philadelphia dogfighting scene until at least the 1880s.

“Gambling the Dog”

Throughout the twentieth century dogfighting remained on the margins of society, but in the 1980s, the sport took a new turn. It became fashionable for youth in Philadelphia to parade pit bulls with spiked collars through the streets. In this new culture, young men “gambled the dog” or waged impromptu fights on street corners and schoolyards to gain a measure of respect in the community. These practices proved disastrous for pit bulls, in particular, since their trainers often abandoned them when they did not possess the necessary traits of successful fighting dogs. By the late 1990s, the SPCA in Philadelphia was collecting more than three thousand pit bulls per year.

In 2009, public awareness of dogfighting as a persistent urban problem reached new heights when the Philadelphia Eagles signed quarterback Michael Vick (b. 1980), who had served eighteen months in prison in Virginia after pleading guilty to federal charges stemming from his involvement in a dogfighting ring. While some fans praised the Eagles franchise for giving Vick a second chance, others signed online petitions, surrendered their season tickets, or protested outside the team’s practice facility. In the cities where the Eagles played during the 2009 season, Main Line Animal Rescue of Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, purchased newspaper advertisements offering to donate five bags of dog food to local animal shelters for each time opposing players sacked Vick.

Subsequently, the increased recognition of dogfighting as a crime reinvigorated local vigilance. The PSPCA reported a surge in tips about dogfighting, resulting in an increase in investigations of dog fights from 245 in 2008 to 903 in 2009. The Pennsylvania state legislature also enacted new laws that made it a crime to possess dogfighting paraphernalia and shifted the burden of paying for the care of seized animals to the accused owners. Nationally, dogfighting became a felony in all fifty states. For his part, Vick assumed a role as an advocate for the humane treatment of animals, speaking to school and community groups and lobbying for legislation, including the federal Animal Fighting Spectator Act (2014), which made it a felony to bring minors under the age of sixteen to a dog or cock fight. Although fans remained ambivalent about their quarterback, Vick’s presence contributed to the region’s increased recognition of a dog fighting problem deeply rooted in the city and surrounding area.

Jonathan Hall is an environmental historian, specializing in the history of animals in the nineteenth century. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Montana. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Eastern State emerged from the concerns of prison reformers in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century, when prisons held accused criminals only until their trials. If convicted, prisoners faced public and corporal punishment. Following the American Revolution, reformers including Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) argued for a more humane and systematic approach to treating criminality and began advocating for a system of incarceration as the primary form of punishment. Isolation, he argued, would provide the criminal with an appropriate environment to repent, reflect, and ultimately reform. In this spirit, in 1787 advocates for reforming Philadelphia’s prisons formed the Pennsylvania Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons under the direction of Bishop William White (1748-1836), though Rush provided the driving force. Many modern accounts attribute Eastern State’s early approach to Quaker inspiration, but considerable evidence suggests that the penitentiary’s strategies were grounded in Enlightenment thought in England that made its way across the Atlantic and took hold in the prison society.

Experiments with prisoner isolation began in the 1790s at the Walnut Street Jail, located between Fifth and Sixth Streets behind the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall). Opened in 1775, the Walnut Street Jail housed accused men, women, and children together in common rooms until they went to trial. In the aftermath of the Revolution, critics of this “den of debauchery” and “school of crime” successfully petitioned the state to eliminate harsh public punishments such as whippings, brandings, and beatings in favor of a new experiment in isolation and labor. All prisoners were sentenced to labor within the walls of the prison, thereby moving punishment from the public to the private—an important shift in penological theory.

In 1789 and 1790 Pennsylvania passed legislation to convert a portion of the Walnut Street Jail into a penitentiary house, where more serious offenders would serve their sentences in complete isolation. Advocates of isolation, who argued for the humanity of silent reflection over the barbaric punishments of the past, initially viewed the experiment positively. However, by the late 1790s the system began to break down due to severe overcrowding and mismanagement.

Total Isolation on a Large Scale

In response to prison society reformers’ agitation for a new penitentiary based on the concept of total isolation, in 1821 the Pennsylvania Legislature appropriated $250,000 for Eastern State.  Reformers chose a site northwest of the city (later Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood), where they believed the high elevation would promote good air flow and contribute to healthy prisoners. In the competition to determine who would design the new penitentiary, prominent Philadelphia architect William Strickland (1788-1854) and British-trained architect John Haviland (1792-1852) both submitted plans. The state awarded Haviland the project and a $100 prize.

Haviland faced the formidable task of designing an institution based entirely on prisoner separation. To meet each prisoner’s needs in isolation, each cell needed to be equipped with a rudimentary toilet and central heat. Haviland chose a “hub and spoke” design or a radial plan, which would facilitate the observation of prisoners as well as properly ventilate the building. Prisoner health and the avoidance of miasmas (bad air) were among the concerns of reformers,  who remembered all too well the deadly epidemics of the Walnut Street Jail. The penitentiary’s interior earned Haviland high praise, and Eastern’s imposing gothic facade made it one of the most recognizable buildings in nineteenth-century America.

Opened in 1829, Eastern State’s unique system of solitary confinement and labor became known as the “Pennsylvania System” or “separate system.” This new system effectively merged the best qualities of the Walnut Street Prison: solitary confinement and labor. To preserve isolation and anonymity at all times, prison policy required inmates to wear hoods whenever overseers moved them around the penitentiary. To help offset the cost of incarceration, the state required prisoners to do work in their cells, including shoemaking, weaving, and chair caning. They ate three meals a day in their cells and exercised one to two times daily in small exterior exercise yards. On Sundays local ministers offered sermons in the corridors. The only other visitors allowed were members of the prison society or a local minister employed by the penitentiary known as the “moral instructor.” The Philadelphia Bible Society provided prisoners with Bibles, and when the number of German prisoners began to rise in the 1840s, the German Society provided German Bibles. Reformers no doubt believed a Bible could be a source of consolation for lonely prisoners, but many prisoners struggled with illiteracy and the Bible remained inaccessible to them.

Population Reflected Immigration

Early intake records reveal a diverse prisoner population. African Americans were always disproportionately represented, and changing immigration patterns brought Irish and German inmates in the 1840s and 1850s and Italians and Eastern Europeans between the 1880s and 1920s. Until 1923, the prisoners included women. The number of women committed to Eastern State was always small compared to the number of men, but their presence prompted officials to hire a “matron” to oversee them. Women served similar sentences to men and committed the same crimes. In the nineteenth century, the vast majority of prisoners had committed property crimes including theft (predominantly horse theft), burglary, and robbery. Most served two-year sentences though many served longer terms for more serious offenses such as murder.

From the outset, prison administrators struggled to maintain control. Many prisoners refused to work, sabotaging their tools and equipment or using their tools to fashion knives to attack overseers. Prisoners (especially Irish Catholics) frequently refused visits from the Protestant moral instructor or pretended to accept religion to gain shorter sentences. Still others found ways to subvert the system of silence by sending notes through plumbing lines or tapping code on walls of adjoining cells.

In 1833, just four years after Eastern State opened, a fiery public scandal erupted when prisoner Mathias Maccumsey died after prison officials subjected him to a torturous instrument known as the “iron gag” to prevent him from talking. The gag fit over the prisoner’s tongue (like the bit of a horse bridle) and attached to his arms pinned behind his back. The penitentiary physician declared the cause of death to be “apoplexy.” Although Eastern State’s administrators were exonerated in an exhaustive investigation, they tried to cover up the death and the institution’s reputation suffered a serious blow.

Despite problems with prisoner management, Eastern State’s supporters touted the Pennsylvania System as the solution to crime and punishment. Financially, however, Eastern State was less successful than the “Auburn Plan” for penitentiaries developed in New York. There, prisoners labored in large factory-like conditions by day and returned to isolation at night.  The factory labor system made Auburn-style prisons largely self-sufficient.  Eastern State, meanwhile, struggled with costs because the craft goods like shoes, chairs, and weaving produced by prisoners in isolation could not financially sustain the institution.

Charles Dickens Among Critics

Supporters of Eastern praised its humane approach to prisoner treatment while critics claimed that isolation led to insanity and even death. A heated pamphlet war broke out between supporters of the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems. Charles Dickens (1812-70), perhaps the Pennsylvania system’s most damning critic, visited in 1842 and in his American Notes argued that while reformer’s intentions remained humane, the system itself amounted to torture. Eastern’s physicians acknowledged instances of insanity but attributed them largely to African American prisoners, whom they viewed as predisposed to mental illness because of their “unique” nature. Officials also argued that overstimulation in the form of masturbation contributed to cases of insanity.

By the 1850s problems with prisoner management, overcrowding, and mental health led Eastern’s officials to slowly relax the rules of isolation. Overcrowding prompted construction of even more cells and, beginning in the 1860s, officials frequently housed more than one prisoner per cell.  While the Auburn Plan had been adopted by many states, those who had adopted the Pennsylvania System quickly abandoned it because of problems with profitability and prisoners’ health. Nevertheless, many new penitentiaries adopted Haviland’s hub-and-spoke design as the best method for surveillance of prisoners. Examples of Haviland’s hub- and- spoke design can be found throughout the world including Japan, Russia, and Brazil.

In 1913, Eastern State officially declared the Pennsylvania System dead though it had not been closely followed for decades. In a struggle to catch up with congregate-style prisons of the day, Eastern converted many of the useless individual exercise yards into congregate workshops. Space between cellblocks became used for sports and recreation, including a baseball field and football field. Italian prisoners added bocce ball to the prison’s many activities.

During the twentieth century Eastern continued to be rocked by scandals. In 1929, while serving an eight-month sentence, Al Capone (1899-1947) enjoyed luxuries denied to other prisoners such as an oriental rug and radio. In 1933, prisoners rioted and set fire to their cells to protest overcrowding and a lack of recreation facilities. In 1945, Eastern experienced perhaps the most sensational escape in its history when notorious bank robber “Slick Willie Sutton” (1901-80) escaped with eleven other men through a tunnel under the wall. In 1961, after the largest riot in the Eastern’s history, Pennsylvania began serious discussions about closing the penitentiary. While initially isolated from the city, the prison had become surrounded by the neighborhood of Fairmount, which grew quickly from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. Baldwin Locomotive (at Broad and Spring Garden) and many local breweries spurred the development of housing, and by the 1960s Fairmount had become a diverse working class and middle class neighborhood. Neighbors as well as state officials were increasingly nervous about public safety and the ability of the aging institution to properly manage the prison population.

Eastern State as Tourist Attraction

Eastern State finally closed its doors in 1971, and the remaining prisoners transferred to Graterford State Prison. The Philadelphia Streets Department briefly used the site for storage but performed no maintenance on the building, which quickly decayed and became the target of vandals. In 1984 the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority considered proposals to convert the site into commercial uses, including plans for a shopping center and condominiums. Concerned that a significant piece of Philadelphia’s history would be lost if development proceeded, a group of preservationists, neighbors, historians, and architects created the Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force with the goal of saving Eastern State as a historic site. Limited hard-hat tours began in the late 1980s, and in 1991 the site received its first funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts to perform necessary stabilization and preservation. Continuing as an independent nonprofit organization, Eastern State Penitentiary became committed to interpreting the institution’s complex past while raising important questions about the contemporary justice system.

By the first decades of the twenty-first century, Eastern State Penitentiary had become one of Philadelphia’s most popular tourist destinations. Audio and guided tours and other interpretative programs highlighted the significant role Eastern State played in penitentiary reform while art installations and public programs addressed contemporary issues in incarceration. While remaining the site of several very popular annual events including a Bastille Day celebration and Terror Behind the Walls, a haunted house fund-raiser, Eastern State also became actively involved with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Striving to make connections between the past and the present in order to effect social change, Eastern State added programs and exhibits such as “The Big Graph,”: a 16-foot-tall, 3,500-pound plate steel sculpture depicting current rates of incarceration around the world.

Once among the most recognized buildings in the United States, Eastern State Penitentiary encapsulated the hopes and anxieties of a generation of reformers. Its formula of isolation and labor seemed to provide the logical solution to crime and punishment, yet the crumbling cells and cavernous cellblocks became vivid reminders of failure. As a historic site, Eastern State became a site for exploring this complex history while inviting the public to engage in discussion of the future of incarceration.

Jennifer Lawrence Janofsky, Ph.D., is the Giordano Fellow in Public History at Rowan University and curator of the Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield. She has served as a historical consultant for Eastern State Penitentiary, which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation at Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In response to growing tensions with France and confiscation of American ships, the Federalist administration of John Adams (1735-1826) expanded the American military to prepare for a potential war. To fund this expansion, on July 9, 1798, the Fifth Congress of the United States, meeting in Congress Hall, passed the House Tax Law, which imposed a direct tax on lands and dwelling houses. The Federalist government also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, a set of four laws that curtailed the rights of immigrants and punished critics of the Federalist government.

Similar to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-94, rural Pennsylvanians during the Fries Rebellion resisted federal legislation, resulting in mobilization of troops, imprisonment, and trial for treason in Philadelphia. In this case, the House Tax and Sedition laws angered many citizens in Northampton, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties, particularly the Germans, who viewed these acts as unconstitutional and designed to rob them of their property and liberty.

Resistance Commences

Resistance began in August 1798 less than fifty miles from Philadelphia, primarily in Northampton, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties, and increased through December with public denouncements of the acts and the erection of liberty poles. Through 1798, the rebels threatened violence against the tax assessors sent to these regions, but did little physical violence. In January 1799 the federal government issued arrest warrants for obstructing assessment of the House Tax. U.S. Marshal William Nichols left Philadelphia on February 25 to serve the warrants, which required resisters to appear for trial in Philadelphia. Nichols arrived in Northampton County on March 1, took twelve men into custody the next day, and served the remainder of his warrants over the next three days. He then retired on March 6 to his new headquarters and temporary jail for his prisoners, the Sun Inn in Bethlehem.

The next day nearly four hundred armed resisters entered Bethlehem in an attempt to free the prisoners. As the highest-ranking militia officer present, John Fries assumed command of the men. Once they reached the Sun Inn, Fries began negotiations with Nichols. As the negotiations dragged late into the day the uneasy crowd grew anxious. Nichols finally agreed to release the prisoners in order to calm the crowd and also to protect his deputies. In response to this event President Adams issued a proclamation from Philadelphia urging all insurgents to retire peacefully by March 18, 1799. The insurgents complied with Adams’ proclamation by March 18, but by that point Adams had already set the military into motion.

On March 22 the Philadelphia Aurora printed a notice from Secretary of War James McHenry (1753–1816) calling for Pennsylvania militia to assemble to put down the insurrection. In the same issue Aurora editor William Duane (1760–1835) severely criticized the Adams administration for its use of military force, a bold move when the Sedition Act was in place. The troops left Philadelphia on April 4 to quell the insurrection, meeting little resistance as they marched into Northampton County. They promptly arrested thirty-one insurgents, including John Fries, and returned to Philadelphia on April 20.

Fries and Two Others Face Trial

Fries and two others faced trial under the expanded definition of treason that Philadelphia lawyer William Rawle (1759–1836) put forth during the Whiskey Rebellion trials. Rawle, the lead prosecutor in the trial, had argued in 1795 that combining to defeat or resist a federal law was the equivalent of levying war against the United States and therefore was an act of treason. Fries’ trial began on April 30,1799, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Pennsylvania, which sat in City Hall (later known as Old City Hall, Fifth and Chestnut Streets). The jury convicted Fries of treason on May 9 and he was sentenced to death, but on May 17 a mistrial was declared when evidence surfaced that a juror had expressed a desire, before the trial began, to see Fries hang.

The second trial opened on April 16, 1800, with Judge Richard Peters (1744-1828) and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase presiding. To expedite the trial Justice Chase issued a legal brief upholding the expanded definition of treason. The House of Representatives in 1804 cited Chase’s brief and actions during this trial among the articles of impeachment, of which the Senate acquitted him.

Fries was again found guilty of treason on April 25, 1800, and sentenced to hang on May 23. President Adams issued a presidential pardon for Fries and the two other men convicted of treason on May 21. This pardon was the last straw in a developing dispute between Adams and Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), who wrote to colleagues that the pardon was the “most inexplicable part of Mr. Adams’ conduct.” When published, this letter created a schism in the Federalist Party, helping Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) to defeat President Adams in the 1800 election. More generally, the harsh Federalist prosecution of the Fries insurgents and enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Acts encouraged Pennsylvania Germans and other voters to shift their allegiance to the Democratic-Republicans.

Patrick Grubbs is an advanced Ph.D. student at Lehigh University and is currently writing his dissertation entitled “Bringing Order to the State: How Order Triumphed in Pennsylvania.” He has also been employed at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, since 2009 and has taught Pennsylvania History there since 2011. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Fears of threats to the survival of the new republic motivated several early Pennsylvania grand juries. The nation’s earliest grand jury, which met in Philadelphia in 1778, indicted twenty-five British sympathizers for treason. Philadelphia grand juries helped establish the limits of free speech in two famous libel cases, against journalists Eleazer Oswald (1750–95) in 1782 and William Cobbett (1763–1835) in 1799. Eastern Pennsylvania circuit court grand juries responding to popular uprisings in western Pennsylvania and in the hinterland north of Philadelphia indicted dozens of participants in the 1795 Whiskey Rebellion and the 1799 Fries Rebellion for treason.

As Philadelphia’s population grew, in part due to an influx of European immigrants and African American fugitives from slavery, grand juries grappled with issues of race, ethnicity, and religion. In 1838, Philadelphia grand jurors indicted two rioters responsible for burning down the antislavery meeting house Pennsylvania Hall, though they blamed radical abolitionists for inciting the riot. A few years later, in 1844, riots sparked by Catholic opposition to the use of Protestant Bibles in public schools erupted in Kensington against Irish Catholics. A Philadelphia grand jury eventually indicted nineteen rioters (only a handful were convicted), but castigated the victims. In 1851, a circuit court grand jury in Lancaster County heard the case that resulted from the Christiana Riots, which tested the federal Fugitive Slave Law. Though it indicted thirty-eight men who had refused to aid a federal marshal in seizing a fugitive slave for treason, none were convicted, on the basis that neither self-defense nor refusing aid was an attack on the nation.

Important Philadelphia grand juries in the twentieth century addressed the city’s experience with racketeering and corruption, a scourge that contributed to Philadelphia’s reputation as “corrupt and contented.” Federal and state grand jury investigations and indictments ameliorated this reputation to some extent. In 1928, a grand jury on bootlegging found 138 police officers unfit to serve, though the grand jury’s report did not lead to charges against any bootleggers. Grand juries continued to investigate city corruption into the 1950s. Corruption within the Republican-controlled city government was the subject of several grand jury investigations supported by Democratic reformers Joseph S. Clark (1901–90) and Richardson Dilworth (1898–1974). The findings of a special grand jury that convened from 1948 to 1951 to investigate city corruption led to numerous indictments and several suicides and helped Clark win the mayor’s race in 1951.

Despite their incorporation of citizen concerns and viewpoints into the legal process, however, grand juries have faced criticism. During the Vietnam War era, the federal government used, and sometimes misused, grand juries to indict war protesters and suppress dissent, as in the case of two grand juries in Harrisburg in 1971 that brought questionable conspiracy indictments against the Harrisburg 7, including Catholic priests Philip (1923–2002) and Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016), and the Camden 28, including Father Michael Doyle (b. 1934) of Camden. In both cases, juries later acquitted the defendants.

Because of complaints about their secrecy—and to make the filing of charges consistent across the state—Pennsylvania became one of only two states, through a pair of acts in 1974 and 1976, to abolish indicting grand juries. (It retained investigative juries, and federal grand juries continued to have the power to indict.) That power was restored by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, however, in 2012, in response to widespread witness intimidation at public preliminary hearings in Philadelphia.

Police misconduct and organized crime were the targets of Philadelphia grand jury investigations in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1984 and 1995, they led to numerous convictions for abuse of police authority. Philadelphia’s ties to the notorious Genovese and Gambino crime families were highlighted by the federal grand jury indictments of Philadelphia mob bosses Nicodema Scarfo (b. 1929) and John Stanfa (b. 1940) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One of the most important political corruption cases handled by a Philadelphia grand jury was the Abscam case. In 1980, a federal grand jury in Philadelphia handed down the first indictments, against council president George X. Schwartz (1915–2010), council members Harry P. Jannotti (1924–98) and Louis C. Johanson (1929–2004), and lawyer Howard L. Criden (1926–92). Several politicians from southern New Jersey were indicted by grand juries elsewhere. State and national representatives from the region have also been the subjects of grand jury investigation. A federal grand jury indicted Pennsylvania state senator Vincent Fumo (b. 1943) in 2007 and U.S. Representative Chaka Fattah (b. 1956) of Philadelphia in 2015, both for public corruption and fraud.

New Jersey and Delaware have not been immune from similar investigations. New Jersey grand juries have indicted several mayors for official misconduct, including, in 1990, Mayor James L. Usry (1922–2002) of Atlantic City. In Delaware, a Wilmington grand jury indicted Thomas Capano (1949–2011), a former assistant district attorney, in 1997 for the murder of Anne Marie Fahey (1966–96), the then-governor’s scheduling secretary. His sensational trial resulted in a death sentence for Capano, who later died in prison. In 2014, a New Castle County grand jury indicted employees of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for drug trafficking and tampering with evidence, endangering thousands of drug cases.

In the twenty-first century, grand juries in the region have continued to wrestle with issues of right and wrong. Among the most important investigations was that of a 2003 Philadelphia County grand jury into sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy and Archdiocesan employees. The investigation lasted longer than the jury’s three-year term and had to be continued by a newly empaneled jury. The final report, released in 2011, recommended significant institutional and legal reforms and identified credible accusations against thirty-seven priests as well as a large-scale cover-up. It led to the conviction of Monsignor William Lynn (b. 1951) in the cover-up (later overturned on appeal), trials of other abusers, and numerous civil suits by abuse survivors. Sexual abuse of minors was also the subject of a 2010 Delaware grand jury investigation that led to the indictment of pediatrician Earl Bradley (b. 1953) of Lewes, Delaware. Attorney General Beau Biden (1969–2015), son of Vice President Joe Biden (b. 1942), declined to run for this father’s former Senate seat in order to see this case, involving sex crimes against 103 children, through to its conclusion.

Throughout the region’s history, grand juries have reflected citizens’ and government’s concern about such issues as sedition and the limits of legitimate dissent, race and ethnicity, and racketeering and public corruption. Grand juries in the Philadelphia region have both provided citizens a voice in the judicial process and been used to stifle certain voices, all while illuminating the moral issues that have faced the nation.

Linda Myrsiades is professor emerita of English and comparative literature at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and the author of several books. Her most recent works include Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America, Medical Culture in Revolutionary America, The Culture of Abortion in Literature and Law, and Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance. (Author information current at time of publication.)