What working at Eastern State Penitentiary taught me about child bans

In Jim Rutter’s recent controversial Editor’s Digest, he says requesting a Smith & Wollensky table far away from young families, and then eating a divine rib-eye, made him realize why kids should keep out of fine museums and restaurants.

“Just as kids have not yet had a wide enough variety of culinary experiences to fully appreciate a 28-day aged, USDA Prime steak cooked to perfection, they cannot yet apperceive a full aesthetic experience from the art on display at these museums,” Rutter writes.

Mona Lisa beware

That plus my experience at Eastern State makes me think of an old Far Side cartoon, in which Gary Larson draws a Louvre security guard who is worried about an Exorcist-style Linda Blair approaching the Mona Lisa. That’s one reason to keep kids out of museums, though in Eastern State’s case, I think the decision had more to do with the amount of flaking lead paint throughout the 19th-century building. And for tour guides, however culturally and historically valuable the prison and its annual art installations were, it was easier to teach visitors about gangsters, bloody prison riots, and death row without having to cater to kindergarteners.

When Eastern State lifted its ban on the littlest ones a few years ago, I wasn’t just worried about toddlers squirming under cell barriers to gorge themselves on the crumbling horsehair plaster or scratch themselves on jagged, rusty door-frames. I wondered how to cater to tour groups that suddenly included strollers. I had the joy of leading 45-minute-long midsummer tours about architecture over a chorus of sweaty three-year-olds’ miserable howls.

My mother always called me a “child Scrooge” — a strange girl who didn’t want to hold infants and who would rather write and draw than babysit. I thought Eastern State was making a huge mistake. Like Rutter, I knew there was no way young children could process the cultural programming at Eastern State, whether it was the history of Pennsylvania’s death row inmates or the particulars of penitentiary architecture.

The backlash

But many BSR readers denounced Rutter’s opinion on Twitter, including New York theater artist Tamara Winters, who called the piece “probably the most tone-deaf, elitist article on how humans experience art I have ever read.”

She and many others don’t buy Rutter’s line that kids lack the life experience and empathy they need to approach works of art properly: “Even the most perceptual or analytic child has not yet had enough time to reflect on the totality of his or her limited experiences,” he writes, and without these “social, analytic, cultural, political” perceptions, kids can’t have a meaningful aesthetic experience. So who wants to walk around a museum with them?

I would’ve said the same about kids encountering the social, political, and cultural history of criminal justice.

Skipping death row

But then the kids began to come in, and — though the inevitable vomiting and sobbing made life more difficult — I had to admit I’d been wrong. Giving tours to younger groups made me realize the opposite of what I’d expected. Educating children and educating adults certainly take differently tailored approaches, but the fundamental principles of engaging them are exactly the same: Move around. Get their names and make it personal. Be specific. Ask questions. Answer questions. Interact, don’t lecture.

And as for Death Row, when I had a group of second-graders, I just skipped over it. Some experiences really should be at the discretion of parents, not a field-trip tour guide.

Speaking of Death Row, for the sake of full disclosure, maybe I should add that before becoming a full-time writer and the associate editor at Broad Street Review, I was fired from Eastern State with no warning because my boss said I had “a negative attitude about paranormal investigations,” and I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about giving elementary school tours.

The courage to ask

But I still learned the surprising truth about just how much young children are able to understand. An Eastern State coworker told me a child came up to her after the tour and asked, unbidden, how prisons can be sure people won’t do another bad thing after they’re released.

And one day, after I wrapped up a large tour outside Al Capone’s cell, a dad approached me, holding the hand of a little boy who couldn’t have been more than five.

“Go on, buddy, it’s okay,” the dad said.

“Do you have a question? You can ask me,” I said, bending down.

“What if a policeman does something bad?” the boy asked. “Can a policeman go to prison?”

The short answer was yes, of course, but the tot’s instinctive grasp of a complex problem blew me away. It was a sobering privilege to see young minds grapple with new paradigms where the real world is more than the good guy vs. the bad and redemption is uncertain, and find the courage to ask about it.

Questions of crime, rehabilitation, recidivism, authority structures, and the administration of punishment and justice aren’t ones that anyone can answer definitively, but they are the vital questions that we come together to ask at a museum like Eastern State. And questions from people who were barely potty-trained could hit the nail on the head just as well, if not more so, than the adults.

So if your kids are raising a ruckus, endangering the art or artifacts, or disturbing other patrons, by all means, remove them to Pizza Hut or the Please Touch Museum. But don’t tell me that kids lack the empathy, experience, and perceptions to appreciate the human stories museums and fine art hold.