The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
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years (1884–87), both Wayland and Taylor lifted Connecticut’s approach to greater visibility outside of the state. Wayland was now on the Executive Board of the National Prison Association, and Taylor served on the NPA’s Standing Committee for Discharged Offenders. In addition to their annual reports to the CPA, they each spoke at the annual NPA congresses. Wayland was especially vocal nationally, with extended arguments for the reformatory point of view. John Taylor’s comments and reports were generally less complex and more practical, as he explained his “paternalistic” system of assistance, clearly intending that qualifier to be heard as the positive, compassionate way a father would help a son who was just learning how to fend for himself in a world that did not easily accept him back.
Both Wayland and Taylor consistently explicated the value of four reforms they were championing: the initiation of indeterminate sentences, the value of constructive labor, the need of a probation system, and the foundational importance of helping the individual offender. These four topics tell us much about the major debates of the time in which they were offered and quantify the achievements of the CPA in its first thirty-five years.
These four reforms also remind us that, from the beginning, the CPA was as interested in systemic reformation as it was in personal rehabilitation. Becoming the prisoners’ friend in 1875 not only involved extending a helping hand to offer them another chance; it also meant advocating for appropriate changes in the prison conditions that surrounded offenders during their confinement and examining society’s role in producing crime. The offenders’ own responsibility for their misdeeds was accepted as a given. But the criminal justice system was not thereby off the hook. Individuals and the system were of one piece. The CPA attempted to deal with it all.
THE INDETERMINATE-SENTENCE DEBATE
The most important change many reformers promoted was the need to replace the simple fixed-sentence structure—which went back to colonial days—with a system of “indeterminate sentences.” For well over one hundred years criminal sentences in the United States had stipulated a definite minimum and a definite maximum time. Francis Wayland’s rational Christianity (shared by most reformers of the time) offered a nicely combined analysis of the situation: the problem lay in rigid judicial timelines delivered by judges with unjudicial temperaments.
The same year that Wayland talked to the CPA annual meeting, he took his message to the national stage. Drawing on a medical analogy to supplement his criticism of the judicial process, he told an audience at the 1883 National Prison Association what most of them already believed: crime must be understood as a moral, treatable disease. “The object of punishment I believe to be two-fold, to protect society by confining and reforming the prisoner.” The path to reformation lay in sentences that had neither a minimum nor a maximum limit. Only those who oversee custody day by day were in a position to ascertain, after their experience with personal treatment, what the limits should be for any particular prisoner.28
Wayland literally meant what he said. A judge himself, he was convinced that judges lacked the necessary insight, experience, and close observance of the offender to allow them to determine what length of sentence an offender should receive. He believed, also, that the reformed prisoner should be released when and only when he had proven to the prison officials (the only people with the knowledge and wisdom to determine the authenticity of that proof) that he was a reformed man, that he was morally cured. The criminal who was not able to demonstrate change would stay locked away, for the rest of his life if necessary. Wayland’s solution was to have sentences without limits at either end.
Wayland was not alone in these conclusions. At this juncture of science and morality, the notion of rehabilitation was reaching its peak. Wayland’s opinions were shared by a multitude of wardens, academicians, and lay practitioners. The weakness in the fixed-sentence system was that it dealt only with the crime. (The rationale is similar to the “three strikes and you’re out” policy of the 1990s in several states, which imposed a life term after three separate felony convictions.) By contrast, the strength of the indeterminate system was that it went to the source of the crime. It was designed to focus on the criminal’s background, that is, the accumulated attitudes, spiritual defects, and other deficiencies that led to criminal activity. There would be other reforms proposed and instituted in the coming years, but the individualized approach of indeterminate sentencing became the backbone of the prison reform movement for the next one hundred years in America.
In Connecticut Wayland (and, to a degree, John Taylor) moved the CPA to the center of the reform movement. Wayland’s approach, however, was never that of a purist. It was a blend of the classic retributive type of justice and the new rehabilitative justice. He believed in the individual assessment of every prisoner. Toward those categorized as “incorrigible,” his attitude was as harshly punitive as his concern for “reformable” offenders was compassionate. Once offenders were deemed incorrigible (by the warden and other prison staff), Wayland’s preference was the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In an 1887 speech to the National Prison Association, he declared that “the presence in the community (of those labeled incorrigible) was as painful as it was palpable…. The members of this class or guild are openly at war with all that society holds dear and is bound to protect and are a perpetual and dangerous menace to the law-abiding citizen.”29
In that same year Wayland drafted an “incorrigible law” for the Connecticut legislature with the support of the CPA Board of Directors. Under its provisions, if an offender was convicted for the third time for a crime requiring at least two years in prison, he was deemed incorrigible. The proposed penalty was the addition of twenty-five years after the expiration of the third sentence. It was passed with few objections, and when questions were asked, he replied that his answer would be confinement until death or until the offender showed conclusive proof of complete reformation. “The disease is deadly; the treatment must be heroic.”30
The use of indeterminate sentences had already begun and was well under way outside Connecticut, in Colorado, Indiana, and Illinois during the 1890s. In Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire indeterminate sentences were in use by 1900. Most of the states professing a rehabilitation approach retained some of their determinate or fixed-sentence structure and resisted, in one way or another, the idea of completely abandoning that system. The indeterminate sentence, regardless of how it was defined, was applied in a variety of ways by judges reluctant to give up their discretion.
Connecticut passed its first indeterminate-sentence statute in 1901, fifteen years after Wayland, Taylor, and others had initially proposed it. It was a partial application of the idea with many qualifiers, an indication of the latent resistance to the prison reform movement. John Taylor’s reports for the next few years invariably included several paragraphs pleading for a fuller implementation of the law. One aspect he especially regretted was the omission by judges of any stipulation of parole supervision. “Unfortunately,” he wrote in 1903, “many prisoners come into the prison with sentences so arranged that the possibility of applying the essential principle of the indeterminate sentence (the parole) is practically or literally eliminated.”31
The difficulties continued. Despite the support of the warden of the Wethersfield State Prison, Albert Garvin, who had assumed the position in 1899 and was highly regarded, the legislature refused to act. It is a matter of daily regret,” Taylor wrote a few years later, going more to the heart of the matter, “that the indeterminate principle in the law … has not had a fair opportunity to demonstrate its power for good…. Court officials persist in clinging to the long ago discredited method of practically fixed sentences.”32
The debate revolved around one question: should the punishment fit the criminal or the crime? The indeterminate-sentence statute was the culmination of the modern reformatory quest for individualized justice. Its full implementation across the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century marked a watershed in the battle with the ancient desire to punish the crime. Wayland occasionally used the analogy of a dangerous snake to make his point. “Now to sentence rattlesnakes or copperheads to three months imprisonment every time they should bite a man, and then turn him loose to bite again, would be almost exactly what our criminal law has been doing in all cases for which capital punishment was not decreed. The reform we propose