Quakers have contributed much to our society:
Richard Nixon is an example that comes immediately to mind.
They also brought us our draconian criminal justice system, the model for the world. It all traces back to the early part of the 19th century, and the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The first inmate, brought in October 23, 1829, was a farmer turned burglar named Charles Williams, age 18. He did two years, his name replaced by his number, "1". He was locked alone in his cell, eight feet by twelve, with nothing but a Bible. He spoke to no one the whole two years, not even a spiritual advisor. If he was caught speaking to another prisoner, it would mean being locked in a cell without light, denial of the one hour of exercise he'd get a day, or denial of one or more days meals. One prisoner is known to have been chained to a wall in a darkened cell for forty-two days. Others were doused with water in the freezing yard or fitted with iron gags connected to cuffs behind their backs. Resistance to the gags forced them down the prisoner's throat, killing at least one man.
Sermons were read by men, presumably Quakers, walking up and down the long corridors splayed out like a man on a rack inside the penitentiary walls. Surely, with two years of such solitary cogitation, the miscreant would see the error of his ways.
It has been argued that, given the standards of the day, the Quaker model wasn't all that bad. The inmates were well fed and had their medical needs met. But it is clear that, even in that benighted time, the prison's continuous solitary confinement shocked the conscience of the world.
"I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain," said Charles Dickens of his visit to Eastern State, "to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body."
The Quakers who ran the place attributed the inevitable cases of madness they produced to excessive masturbation.