The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
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POLICE FORCES
A final milestone in the development of Connecticut’s criminal justice system occurred shortly after the opening of the Wethersfield State Prison. Hartford (1836) and Bridgeport (1837) began to replace their constables and night watchmen with a more authoritative employee, called a policeman. The impetus to take that step probably came from two basic sources: a local escalation in crime and word from England in 1829 that Sir Robert Peel, home secretary in the British Cabinet, had persuaded Parliament to pass the Metropolitan Police Act, creating a police force to protect London’s streets and businesses. On the first point, from 1830 to 1870, civil disorder had increased. The social context was the unrest over the pressure from abolition advocates, mob reactions in the streets in response to economic problems, and public oppositions to the number of saloons and the rise in alcoholism.42
In the recession that followed the War of 1812, according to historian Page Smith, “drunkenness was, indeed, America’s national malady.” Smith, oddly enough but typical of many historians, makes no reference to crime or jails or prisons, despite the connection with social turmoil.43 Lawrence Friedman, on the other hand, states that cities across the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century were “realms of vice and evil,” places of danger, violence, mobs, and riots, all related to the social issues that plagued a nation just emerging from its second war in fifty years and heading toward a civil war.44
As to the second point: the stories of unarmed “bobbies” or “peelers,” named for Robert Peel, captivated America’s attention. By 1850 police units had been set up in most American cities. The need for a police force at the state level did not arrive on the Connecticut scene until 1895, when a Law and Order League formed. It lobbied for a means to control gambling rackets and liquor-law violators. In 1903 the Connecticut legislature authorized a state police force to do just that. Its duties eventually were widened to include supervision of the state highways and responses needed to counteract interstate crime.
It was after the Civil War that police officers became regular players in the formation of a complete criminal justice system. As enforcers of the laws passed to protect persons and property, they had a natural tendency to implement a retributive attitude toward crime on behalf of the wealthier segments of the population, who had so much to lose if crime was not controlled. Police in the 1880s and 1890s were especially hard on vagrants, tramps—the homeless.
Lawrence Friedman provides a wise assessment of the double-edged sword that constituted law enforcement in the late nineteenth century. The private use of force was not eliminated by the creation of police forces earlier in the century. Vigilantes, lynch mobs, and individuals taking the law into their own hands were still in the news, showing “ferocious powers of survival.” But the very presence of a localized civilian army to penetrate the urban areas and stem personal vengeance and lawlessness posed a need for careful checks and balances. As the nation grew and matured, a fourth, unofficial part of the criminal justice system arose to prevent police violence and irregularities in law enforcement.45
A NEW ERA IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SET TO BEGIN
These five milestones of Connecticut’s developing criminal justice system were all in place by 1870. The stage was set for the formation of Connecticut’s oldest criminal justice agency. America, throughout the nineteenth century, had changed drastically. Politically, the Jacksonian era was ending, and by 1850 the dark clouds of war were gathering, issuing in the greatest loss of life suffered within the United States in its history. In the 1860s the Civil War devastated the nation, and the high hopes of Reconstruction begun under Lincoln were lost in the compromises made by President Grant.
Within the criminal justice system, the most heralded advance in the reformatory movement during the nineteenth century occurred in 1870, when more than a dozen voluntary prisoner aid associations, calling themselves the National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline, met in Cincinnati for the express purpose of forming the National Prison Association. In his opening address as the first president of the congress, Rutherford B. Hayes declared, “It is our wish that the people, everywhere, may be brought to feel that prison discipline ought to be placed upon the only solid and sure foundation—a foundation whose chief cornerstone is the golden rule: As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them.”46
As 1875 approached, issues of crime and punishment and penology continued to occasionally grab local news headlines throughout Connecticut. The murders of the two wardens and debates about financial mismanagement swirled about the state prison during the first few years of the 1870s. On top of these issues, and the questions of the facility’s age and an expanding population facing the prison, the Connecticut legislature considered, but rejected, a plan in 1872 to build a new prison. The voices calling for a more retributive system to put a stop to crime were never silent in legislatures, bars, and churches. The rehabilitation ideal was still little more than a vague dream in 1875 Connecticut, as the CPA began its work.
CHAPTER THREE Rehabilitation Rekindled, 1875–1910
I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
On one of my early visits as a prison volunteer in the mid-1960s, I brought with me, at my new friend’s request, a small pocket book of sermons by Dr. Martin Luther King. I stood in line, and when it was my turn to be checked out by the gatehouse guard, I gave him the name of the inmate I was visiting and my name. (I had decided to stop calling myself Reverend Bates to initiate more honest conversations.) When all my credentials matched his records, I presented the book to be okayed. The guard took one look at the title, Strength to Love, and said, “Sorry, sir, but we don’t allow pornographic material.” Before I could argue with him, he chucked it into the wastebasket and said, “Next.” It was my introduction to one of the harsher aspects of the prisons of that era, characterized by the often-abusive exercise of arbitrary power over every aspect of the prisoner’s life. That prison culture would end by 1970, and a reformatory era would begin, but for the time being Dr. King’s book would represent the tendency all too common in every era, of judging a book by its cover.
The Connecticut Prison Association was the first such group in Connecticut to focus fully on the people in prison and the way they were treated. It would be the only agency, public or private, to do so for almost ninety years. As such, it was intimately involved with the key debates, most of the laws, and a large percentage of the inmates, as they discharged from Connecticut’s ten county jails and its single state prison.
The perspective of one private-sector agency provides a unique vantage point. The CPA looks back from 1875 over two hundred years to the first components of Connecticut’s system. It looks forward about almost a century to the creation of the modern Department of Correction and other significant changes. The story thus begins in media res.
Indeed, the Connecticut Prison Association has made unique contributions to the state’s criminal justice system; however, it did not work in a vacuum. Its work has been done and its decisions made within the cultural and criminal justice context of the two previous centuries. Since 1975, a century after its formation, CPA has been joined by dozens of similar groups that help to form the contemporary system over the past thirteen decades. The CPA story looks backward as well as forward to trace the various faces of justice in Connecticut.
Arnold Toynbee chose 1875 as the start of the modern era of Western civilization. That year the French impressionist Claude Monet unveiled his classic work, Boating at Argenteuil. An Englishman, Capt. Matthew Webb, was the first person to swim the English Channel. In the United States the initial running of the Kentucky Derby in Louisville garnered considerable attention. At the federal level Congress passed the first civil rights bill.1
Digging a little deeper, we can find other notable occurrences in Connecticut. In 1875 the state legislature finally