Turn the Norristown prison into a museum of justice

This summer, my wife and I visited Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s the site of several notorious prisons where Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and many other opponents of white rule were incarcerated.

The prisons are still there, but nobody is jailed in them. They’re museums now, where people can learn about the history of apartheid and the brave freedom fighters who resisted it.

I’ve been thinking about Constitution Hill during the controversy over the old Airy Street Prison in Norristown, which closed in 1986. Preservationists want to retain the 1851 building, which they regard as an architectural gem at the center of the town’s identity. Critics want to tear it down, arguing that it symbolizes the racial inequities at the heart of American history.

They’re both right. And that’s why the prison should become a museum of justice. We can and should preserve the imposing Gothic Revival building, but we should repurpose it for peace and understanding.

In a 1984 nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, admirers of the building called it a “masterpiece.” It’s hard to argue with them. Its castle-like structure — complete with turrets, spires, and slits — was the brainchild of architect Napoleon LeBrun, a Philadelphia native who also designed the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul and the Philadelphia Academy of Music.

LeBrun drew upon the style of John Haviland, who had designed Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary two decades earlier. And Eastern State is now — yes — a museum, which attracts over a quarter million visitors per year.

They don’t simply learn about Al Capone, Willie Sutton, and the other famous criminals who were jailed there. They also encounter a 16-foot Big Graph sculpture in the prison yard, which depicts racial disparities in rates of incarceration.

Like other American prisons, the Norristown jail “disproportionately imprisoned people of color,” as Kenneth E. Lawrence, chair of the county board of commissioners, told a public meeting last month. That’s why the building should be knocked down and replaced by a green space, Lawrence has argued, which the county will then develop for “a better and higher purpose.”

But what could be a better or higher purpose than teaching people about the history of criminal justice?

Many Americans believe that violent crime increased over the past three decades, even though it declined sharply. But we still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. And not enough of us know that African Americans — who make up 13% of the nation’s population — comprise 38% of people in jail.

Nor do we know enough about the history of capital punishment, in which the Norristown prison played an important role. The first person to receive a death sentence by electric chair in Pennsylvania, John Talap, was jailed in Norristown before he was executed in 1915; so was the last person to die in the chair, Elmo Smith, who was executed in 1962. (Both prisoners died at a penitentiary in Rockview, Centre County, the site of the state’s lone electric chair.)

Would it be expensive to preserve the Norristown prison and convert it into a place of learning? Of course it would. But things of value cost something. The county is spending $90 million to restore its courthouse, also in Norristown, with $20 million earmarked for the preservation of “historic elements.”

That also made me think of my visit to Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, where a new court was built on the same compound as the prisons that held so many anti-apartheid activists. And when the court opened in 1995, the country’s most famous ex-prisoner was on hand to inaugurate it.

“The last time I appeared in court was to hear whether or not I was sentenced to death,” recalled Nelson Mandela, who had been elected president of South Africa the previous year. He later returned to Constitution Hill to inaugurate an archive about his 27 years of confinement, including the famous photograph of Mandela working in a prison garden.

Mandela reminded his listeners that they were surrounded by apartheid-era jails, which he and his generation regarded as symbols of oppression. “Today these remains are being turned into places of commemoration,” Mandela noted, “so that future generations will remember what their freedom has been built on.”

We should follow Mandela’s lead. Tearing down the Norristown prison won’t erase our history of injustice. We need to preserve the building, to serve the best and highest purpose of all: remembering the past. That’s the only way we can make a better future.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was published last year in a revised 20th-anniversary edition by the University of Chicago Press.