• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, May 16, 2016

Just north of downtown Philadelphia, the castle-like structure of Eastern State Penitentiary rises from the suburban landscape. Today, it's an historical site, but in its prime, Eastern State was at the forefront of early advances in criminal-justice reform, notably focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment in its methods.

Other claims to fame include the internment of notorious gangster Al Capone, surreal escape stories and multiple cases of spooky occurrences that have shrouded the penitentiary in a cloak of intrigue.

With Philadelphia hosting the Democratic National Convention this Summer, Eastern State Penitentiary is holding exhibitions exploring the world of criminal justice and the current state of our nation’s penal system.

In the courtyard where inmates used to hold baseball games, there now stands a 16-foot tall, 3,500-pound sculpture describing the contemporaneous reality of criminal justice in the United States.

Depending on where one stands, “The Big Graph” presents three sets of statistics: from the South -- the unprecedented growth in incarceration rates since 1900, from the North -- a comparison between the racial breakdown in prisons between 1970 and today, and from the East -- every nation in the world charted against one another, based on incarceration rates.

What is obvious from the educational sculpture is the outsized role prisons play in the American criminal justice system.

Our next president and Congress will have the task of reevaluating our nation’s penal system and work to instill a tone of reform rather than punishment.

The U.S. Senate has recently made important steps in the right direction.

A group of Republican and Democratic senators, including the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), recently presented a plan that eases mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent offenders. While there is still a long road to implementation, the bipartisanship on this issue is encouraging.

Democratic front runner and expected nominee Hillary Clinton has a well-established position on this issue. The section of her Web site focused on criminal-justice reform reads: “End the era of mass incarceration, reform mandatory minimum sentences, and end private prisons.”

Conversely, Donald Trump’s racially based policy commitments would be a bane on the fight for reform in the criminal-justice system. Among 20 videos on his site’s issues page, there is no mention of criminal-justice reform.

Eastern State Penitentiary will be highlighting the importance of reforming the criminal-justice system as the Democratic party descends on Philadelphia for its quadrennial national convention.