CHAPTER TWO From Newgate Prison to Wethersfield State Prison, 1775–1875

      As to the places of confinement, they are retarded evolutions of the jails, which began in the little germ at Hartford in 1640 … part of a plant whose most gaudy blossom was Newgate.

      — George L. Clark, History of Connecticut

      One of the unique experiences that helped mold my views on criminal justice was the opportunity in the mid eighties to participate in a mock imprisonment at the former Haddam State Jail, a facility that the Department of Correction used as a training site. Along with twenty or so guard recruits, I was fingerprinted late one Thursday afternoon and booked into the old jail as an inmate. Each of us was given a uniform to wear for the next three days and assigned to a cell. Our three guards introduced themselves, one playing a softhearted custodian, one an ambivalent role, and the third a hard-nosed guard. There was the usual banter and slightly nervous joking during the first night. The next two days were filled with bare minimum meals, planted contraband, accusations of rule breaking, ragged sleep, and signs of serious competition to curry favor with one or more of the guards. The third day revealed the effects of being locked up. Just after the noon meal, in the recreation area, we were tossing a medicine ball around, when, without any warning, the hard-nosed guard appeared on the balcony and rapped three times with his keys. In an instant the ball dropped to the floor, and twenty intelligent men who knew this was a game waited in sheer deference to authority, in absolute silence for at least three minutes. In the debriefing after the incarceration ended, there was no argument that each of us had been transformed into inmates in three days.

      Each of the following milestones helped to sculpt the face of justice that would characterize Connecticut at any given time. Retributive justice and rehabilitative justice were both present in greater or lesser degree in every phase of the system that emerged from the state’s founding in the seventeenth century to the present day. Together with the cultural milieu described in chapter 1, this summary of the beginnings of Connecticut’s criminal justice system is intended to put the formation and the work of the Connecticut Prison Association in its historical context.

      The initial development of laws and courts to process the colonial response to crime happened between 1630 and 1700. Connecticut consistently adapted that judicial foundation in the evolution from a colony to a state. A second milestone occurred with the transformation from county workhouses into county jails. A third, and most notorious, milestone passed in 1773, when Connecticut refitted a defunct copper mine into its first prison facility, Newgate Prison. Named after an infamous prison in London (and originally spelled New Gate), the facility confined offenders in underground caverns. The place rapidly earned an international reputation as a throwback to Europe’s dungeons. Newgate’s celebrity status for its savagery provided a major provocation for Connecticut’s first true prison reform movement early in the nineteenth century, our fourth milestone. The carefully thought-out construction of a “modern” prison for Connecticut in 1827 also drew international attention, this time of a positive sort. Wethersfield State Prison marked a significant step forward in the development of an organized, deliberative approach to penology.

      The formation of Connecticut’s first police forces in the urban areas of Connecticut in the late nineteenth century serves as our final milestone. Along with the laws designating who was eligible for arrest, police discretion in enforcing those regulations hugely influenced the tone as well as the substance of justice that emerged in Connecticut.

       MILESTONE 1: CONNECTICUT’S FIRST LAWS, COURTS, AND WORKHOUSES

      When they arrived in America, the early New England colonists of the 1620s brought with them several resources to achieve their goal of establishing an exemplary community of faith and order wherever they settled in the new land. Although differing in important ways, Connecticut derived much of its basic approach to criminal justice from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first resource was the Bible, which supplied a multifaceted religious history of ethical regulations, moral commandments, and proverbial wisdom about how to maintain a faithful, safe, and orderly community. Biblical law was the filter through which the colonists poured their long experience with the upper-class law and societal mores they had left behind. Their memories and experiences with English common law were also resources. The common law had not always been kind to the Puritans and other immigrants, especially in the Crown’s response to religious dissent. The fact that royal supervision was spotty at best, and too often yielded arbitrary decisions, increased the odds of running afoul of the common law. In general, common law worked well enough to hold the nation together and provide at least theoretical limits to royal prerogative. The colonists used the most functional and productive aspects as they adapted to their new, and very different, environment.

      Relationships with those in England who had funded the Puritan emigration were still strong, despite the fact that over three thousand miles of ocean separated them. In the absence of trained lawyers and other legal experts, each of New England’s colonies utilized various parts of the unwritten common law to construct legal foundations. The results in the different colonies were practical laws to maintain order, courts to process offenders, and workhouses in which to temporarily hold debtors and those convicted of moral lapses or crimes.

      The colonies were separated from one another as well as from England. Consequently, each town, as well as each colony, structured itself according to its own needs and abilities. According to legal historian Lawrence Friedman, “There were as many colonial systems as there were colonies…. Throughout the colonial period, the colonists borrowed as much English law as they wanted to take or were forced to take.”¹

      For example, twenty-two of the regulations in Robert Ludlow’s Code of 1650 were taken, almost without change, from the code of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and six other laws were borrowed from other sources in the older colony. Fourteen regulations of the Connecticut code were original. Written colonial laws constituted a pattern quite different from English common law, which was rarely codified. “The first codes of the colonies were fresh-start codes … designed to put limits around potential abuses of power in a barely structured society.”²

      It is easy to ridicule the laws drawn up in the early codes as unconstitutional or for behaviors taken for granted today as personal matters. In a society,