The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
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the long delay in writing. He has had work about every day since he came home…. He sends his kind regards to you and hopes to hear from you.20
After 1903 Taylor’s optimism decreased and his discouragement grew. An increased workload, the continued return to crime by so many offenders, and resistance to prison reform by prosecutors and judges combined to weigh him down.
THE NATIONAL PRISON ASSOCIATION
The national prison reform movement that had begun boldly in 1870 was faltering. The forty-one rehabilitative principles adopted at that meeting had been a clarion call for change, but the changes were like planted seeds that lacked consistent irrigation and cultivation to grow. Additional congresses of the National Prison Association were held in 1872 in Baltimore, 1874 in Saint Louis, and 1876 in New York. Attendance, however, had declined, and the emotional intensity had lessened at each gathering. The association rehashed the same issues year after year with few visible outcomes. As powerful and intelligent as the leadership had been over the first twenty-five years, the NPA had failed to organize itself across the country to translate the practical, progressive principles it had enumerated in 1870 into federal legislation and local change.21
The possibility of disbanding the National Prison Association had become real by the middle of the 1870s. The perennial charge, from more conservative groups, of being soft on criminals could not be ignored. In the 1874 NPA meeting the president of Washington University in Saint Louis gave an opening address clearly seeking to counter that perception: “We desire to fall into no weak sentimentalism. We would not shrink from making men suffer. We ask no cossetting and foolish indulgence for those who need to learn that as a man sows so shall he reap…. But we insist upon it that the criminal … shall be treated as a human being, having the same natural rights as the rest of us, not necessarily worse than many of ourselves, capable of being redeemed from guilt and degradation, and therefore to be taught while he is punished, by the arguments of hope more than fear, to be trained, even in prison, to the rational use of liberty, and so to be prepared for his restoration … to a noble and better life.”22
Unfortunately, weak sentimentalism and foolish indulgence was too often the way the public perceived the push for a rehabilitative system. Then, in 1879, the major flaw of the national organization was revealed. Too much of its strength lay in its top leadership and especially in it principal founder and charismatic president, Dr. Enoch C. Wines. His death in 1879 was unexpected and traumatic, judging from the multitude of testimonies issued by his colleagues. It is obvious from their comments that, almost single-handedly, he had initiated and laid the organizational foundation for the worldwide movement for prison reform that catapulted into the news after 1870. As the secretary and agent of the New York Prison Association before becoming the first secretary of the National Prison Association, Wines was the most eminent and easily the most eloquent prison reformer in the United States. Supporting the idea that history in many instances is biography, it took four years to regroup from his death. By 1883, however, the NPA had recovered its passion and resumed its biennial congresses with even greater motivation and impetus.
In Connecticut, by the fall of 1877, the CPA was on stable ground. The economy was improving and fiscal support for the agency had grown. The several committees appointed by the agency were hard at work, and, most important, E. B. Hewes, warden at the state prison, publicly praised their accomplishments. Nonetheless, John Taylor felt it necessary to write a letter to the Hartford Daily Courant to specifically counter the rumors that the CPA was “coddling criminals” and “weakening prison discipline.”23
Taylor assured the Courant readers that he and the CPA’s directors were working closely with the warden of the state prison and that the agency had no intentions or desire to interfere with the discipline or management of the prison. Their sole aim (and his as their agent) was restricted to aiding discharged convicts in their own efforts to reestablish themselves in honest and productive lives. No more, no less. Indeed, he stressed, the CPA did not even choose the offenders they worked with: “only such as are recommended by prison officials are examined by the committee.” The warden and the chaplain had “freely promised to cooperate in the work.” Moreover, in a statement that seems designed to underscore the claim that the CPA was not overstepping its bounds, Taylor wrote, “The Connecticut Prison Association has no connection with the Board of State Charities,” a new organization charged with examining the conditions of life within the prisons and jails.24
As the CPA’s stability increased, its leaders gradually became more interested in what was happening inside the Wethersfield State Prison. But in this early stage it was understandably careful to protect its flanks. Ultimately, as a state-sponsored group, the CPA could not take on the mantle of being a “watchdog” agency. All the changes it affected in the years ahead, or tried to affect, would be from inside the system. The principles proclaimed in 1870 carried not only the National Prison Association but also state and regional reform agencies for the next one hundred years. The CPA engaged much of its energy and skill in promoting all three.
SETTLING IN FOR THE LONG HAUL
During the late 1870s John Taylor and Francis Wayland hit their stride in the operation of the Connecticut Prison Association. The agency’s financial crisis was resolved in part by a concerted effort to recruit more supporters, but at $2.00 per membership the increased income was probably less important than the added political leverage it gave the organization. The Hartford Daily Courant reported the CPA had hired Rev. Howard Mead for a six-month period in the summer of 1875 for a stipend of $1,000.00. Mead’s charge was to organize local chapters of the agency throughout the state.25
John Taylor would apply part of his time to add to the focus on recruitment of new CPA members, but the struggle to survive continued, indicating that the outreach had not been successful enough. Three years later the balance on hand at the beginning of the year was a grand total of $24.83! Along with a $300.00 grant from the local philanthropy organization the Watkinson Foundation and $559.95 brought in by membership dues, the CPA was able to give Taylor the balance of his salary in 1880 and meet all but $152.00 of its expenses for 1879. It dispersed $1,115.75 to 95 (out of 135) discharged inmates. In 1881 the state provided $1,800.00 and in the following year, $2,000.00. The CPA’s financial stability in 1882 was rescued by an additional stipend granted by the Connecticut legislature of $900.00 (Judge Origen Seymour is later given credit). Seventy-four contributors provided another $778.50. Together the two sources enabled the CPA to pay all bills except a $30.80 balance due to John Taylor. The next year the state allotment rose to $1,200.00.26
The state would gradually increase its stipend, though not every year. The numbers of discharged inmates, however, increased more rapidly. The state stipend was a two-edged sword. It was the critical support needed to survive the tail end of the great recession that plagued the first half of the 1890s. It also tended to lessen the pressure to expand the agency’s membership. In the annual reports from 1879 to 1882, Francis Wayland was content to simply acknowledge key people who had passed away or to express gratitude for the work being done by the agency. In 1883 he felt secure enough to speak out about international prison reform and the benefits of well-ordered prisons.
Wayland’s intellectual strength was his vision of prison reform and a sentencing system that would facilitate rehabilitation. His weakness was that he paid little attention to mounting a convincing interpretation of the CPA’s goals to the general public. He saw the larger goal clearly. He did not worry about building an effective foundation of public opinion to support it. Specifically, Wayland began to teach the penology of reformation as the replacement for the long-standing penology of retribution. Modern penology, he professed, should focus on both incarceration and release equally, or it will be impotent. In 1883, seven years after assuming the presidency, he articulated for the first time his understanding of prison reform. It is, he said, one of the prime endeavors of a civilized society. “Imprisonment for crime should be not only a deterrent, but reformatory; it should not only restrain physically, but renovate morally…. But the permanence of the work of reform … depends almost entirely upon the influences which surround the prisoner on his return to society.”27 That demand is reasonable, he argued, on the basis of enlightened Christianity, common sense, and