The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
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rehabilitative efforts have marked the evolution of American crime control.
The Quakers learned a valuable lesson by the reversal of Penn’s laws. Instead of building their crusade around governmental authority, in 1776 they formed a voluntary organization called the Philadelphia Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners. Its express purpose was to care for those convicted and promote the passage of more compassionate laws. The Revolution against England, however, diluted the new agency’s energy, and it disbanded shortly after its formation. Once the American Revolutionary War was ended, efforts resumed to create an enduring agency.
In 1787 the Pennsylvania Prison Society was formed. Still in existence, it is the oldest American voluntary association focused on penology and prison reform—its timeline exceeded only by the John Howard Association, which today is more active in Canada and the United Kingdom than in the United States. The Pennsylvania Prison Society is still highly productive and respected nationally and internationally. It has remained the gold standard for voluntary agencies seeking a balanced and enduring approach to improving and reforming state criminal justice systems in each successive generation. Other private nonprofit agencies have at times exceeded the Pennsylvania Prison Society’s energy and budget, but none has ever surpassed it in staying power, effectiveness, and creative output.
With the formation of the Pennsylvania Prison Society a corner had been turned. Three decades later, in Boston, a Congregational minister named Louis Dwight became an ardent convert to prison reform while distributing bibles for the American Bible Society. He started a lengthy evangelistic journey for the society in the early 1820s, and as a Yale Divinity School graduate, he chose as a starting point a place with which he was familiar: the New Haven Whalley Avenue Jail. Dwight was horrified at conditions he found. Next he visited the Bridewell Jail in New York City, which further disturbed him. His tour then took him through numerous county jails and more than a few prisons, as he traveled down the Atlantic Coast and westward. At the conclusion of his journey, in 1825, he returned to Boston with a vision and a plan. With some friends he formed the Boston Prison Discipline Society, a group that acted more aggressively to move prison reform forward in the early nineteenth century than any other in the country.23
Dwight was an indefatigable evangelist, not just for the Christian church but also for a new, more humane but disciplined approach to criminal justice. He became a veritable “Johnny Appleseed” of the prison reform movement. Having seen, firsthand, the atrocious state of affairs in both county jails and penitentiaries on his journey, he visited Connecticut’s Newgate Prison in November 1825 and was still not prepared for the horrors he beheld. His lobbying in Connecticut was crucial in moving the legislation for a new prison through the House, Senate, and the governor’s office.24
Dwight’s influence was felt in other states too, and he was gaining additional advocates with similar agendas. Englishman William Crawford made a similar tour of American prisons in 1834 and drew similar conclusions. In New York some leading citizens formed the third statewide voluntary reform group, called the Prison Association of New York, founded on the information and enthusiasm it had gained from nearby Philadelphia and Boston.
Louis Dwight’s views found ready acceptance in Connecticut. A trio of Connecticut proponents implemented the call for a new prison: Martin Welles, John Russ, and John Peters. Welles, a Hartford attorney, was the foremost advocate, authoring most of their reports and undoubtedly others. In 1825 the general court voted to close the Simsbury mine shafts and build a new institution. It was not without significant opposition, but the session finally voted to allocate $500 and purchase land from the heirs of Justus Riley of Wethersfield. The primary motivation: a new prison might mitigate and eventually remove the stigma of Newgate, and it held out the hope of being less expensive, always an attractive feature where tax dollars are involved.
DEBATES OVER PRISON MANAGEMENT: PENNSYLVANIA VERSUS NEW YORK
In the mid-1820s prison reform leaders in Connecticut struggled to choose between two competing prison models. Some opted for the system adopted by New York’s new prison in Auburn, a sleepy upstate town. Others preferred the Pennsylvania system being erected in Cherry Hill outside Philadelphia. Both approaches represented the view of reformers such as Louis Dwight that incarceration was intended not just as a place of confinement but also as a hospital to heal sinners through meditative conditions and constructive work.
The exemplary Pennsylvania and New York prisons had both been developed on four pillars of prison reform: silence, solitude, labor, and obedience. All four features had their roots in the religious concepts of sanctuary and redemption as they had evolved in the Middle Ages. The religious roots are worth remembering for both positive and negative reasons. On the positive side, many, if not most, prison and jail reformers over the past few centuries have emerged from a spiritual setting and claimed, often authentically, to seek spiritual goals in the treatment of offenders. On the negative side, religion has also supplied much of the moral passion behind the punitive attitudes toward those who resist or disobey the laws of society.
The disciplines of labor and obedience, solitude and silence, had originated in the monastic communities. By the nineteenth century they were part of a total culture of the Christian church for over a thousand years. Two features of monastery life, however, distinguished it from the secular jail or prison. First, within the monastery the correctives used were limited by the rules of the order, and the monks living in individual cells were accustomed to a certain amount of isolation. In some monasteries of the Trappist or Cistercian type, complete silence was observed at all times. Consequently, the penalties administered usually consisted of reductions in food, clothing, and blankets, along with additional work assignments and prescribed periods of study and prayer. Whipping was rarely used but self-flagellation and the wearing of heavy, bristly hair shirts were not uncommon as ways of punishing the body.
Second, regardless of the discipline imposed, both the abbot and the monk being punished usually shared the goal of repentance and a return to the normal regimens. The monk was part of the community voluntarily and had taken a vow of total obedience to the abbot. Discipline was not unexpected. Silence, solitude, labor, and obedience were part of a cohesive whole and, when fully accepted, became a spiritual discipline.
Unlike the monastery, there has seldom been anything resembling a shared goal in prison life. The imprisoned offender has been placed against his will into an institution designed to be oppressive, where vague limits accompanied goals conveying total control and submission. Much of the time, in the early stages of the new penitentiaries, there were no standardized rules. By the time the European system reached the Americas, it had been reenergized by Puritan religious principles, but the continued lack of regulation and oversight made that Puritan enthusiasm all the more dangerous. The rule of unintended consequences was realized time after time as the prison system in the United States evolved. The many points of similarity between Auburn and the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia were complicated by several essential points of difference.
The Pennsylvania System of Rehabilitative Punishment
The Quaker-led Pennsylvania plan imposed total silence and total solitude on all inmates. Prisoners were housed in separate cells, as the most likely circumstances to engender penitence. The term penitentiary came into common parlance to embody that concept. The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, built in 1790, was the first penitentiary in America, an attempt to duplicate the monastery’s penitential atmosphere of silence and solitude for felons. A separate wing was used for debtors and vagrants. The Walnut Street Jail was successful enough to warrant in 1803 a slightly larger jail on Arch Street. Neither building, however, provided ideal cell space for individual labor plus space for sleeping and reflection.
Over the next decade, plans were debated and finally drawn up for the most massive prison in America. The first inmates were received in 1829. Eastern State Penitentiary became the full prototype of the isolation system, combined with silence, labor, and discipline. “The cellblocks … radiated out from a central rotunda. A corridor ran down the center of each cellblock, with cells on either side of the corridor. Ground-level cells opened out onto small exercise yards, each of which was surrounded by a high stone fence.”25
Each cell was twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and ten feet