CHAPTER ONE Connecticut’s Cultural Context, 1875

      The Nature of American society in its various historical and sectional stages has emerged from a consideration of the geographical, industrial, and cultural factors that have determined penal trends.

      — Blake McKelvey, American Prisons, 1936

      In 1969 I had an interview with a twenty-six-year-old man named Paul. He spoke fairly good English, although Spanish was his native tongue. He was articulate but not the con-artist type I would meet many times in the future. He was in for manslaughter. I didn’t ask what the occasion of his crime was. That wasn’t my style, but he revealed it anyway. He had been drinking one evening, he explained without much elaboration, with his girlfriend. They got into an argument about the music they were listening to, and it woke up his girlfriend’s daughter, a six-year-old. The youngster came out of her bedroom crying, and he told her to stop and go back to bed. He and his girlfriend resumed the argument, which made the daughter cry even more loudly. One thing led to another, and in his angry need to control the situation, he slapped his girlfriend; then, turning on the youngster, he picked her up and flung her across the room. Her body hit a bookcase, splitting her skull. She died before he or her mother could reach her.

      One late afternoon two weeks before I met with Paul, I had returned home to find a shouting match in full swing in our living room. My wife, Wanda, and our nine-year-old Cindi were yelling full blast at each other and not for the first time. My solution was to take over. I told Wanda to shut up, and I picked up Cindi and took her upstairs. Yelling at her for making her mother cry, I used all my strength to throw her on her bed. She barely missed the headboard.

      I have no idea what was said during the remainder of Paul’s and my time together. He was nearing his parole date, so I probably told him I’d be in touch on one of my next visits to arrange transportation. (That was one of the concrete tasks the CPA did for released inmates.) He wanted to know if he could be paroled to Puerto Rico, and I would have said I’d look into it. But I knew somewhere in my gut that I would never see an inmate down in a hole again while I stood on the solid ground. And I realized, maybe for the first time, that I could use a rope.

      Until approximately 1950, American historians, with rare exceptions, did not examine criminal activity unless it affected national politics or was notorious enough to become a news item. Connecticut is fortunate. Two twentieth-century state historians took the time to describe the penal institutions and the court systems of the previous century. George L. Clark, writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, examined a variety of cultural, economic, and social facets in A History of Connecticut: Its People and Institutions. His chapter on the state’s prisons mentions the Connecticut Prison Association (then almost forty years old). Clark’s book is important for a second reason: it describes Connecticut’s penal institutions in the context of the “inventions, discoveries and industries of the nineteenth century” and discusses a variety of facets of the state’s culture, including other philanthropic groups, alcohol abuse, the Temperance Movement, the insurance industry, the fine arts, and the rise of the modern city.¹

      Norris Galpin Osborn, a decade later, edited a five-volume History of Connecticut in Monographic Form. The last volume contains “The History of Connecticut Institutions,” by Edward Warren Capen, which includes several sections on the insane criminal, a category of information neglected by George Clark. Both Clark and Capen were reportorial in their comments. Neither attempted a critical examination of the jails, prisons, or courts.

      My education in the various disciplines of criminal justice began when I read David Rothman’s investigation of the origins of American asylums for the deaf and prisons for convicted criminals. Rothman, I discovered, was a professor of social medicine in the 1960s at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In his first book, The Discovery of the Asylum, he speculates (with more than a hint of sarcasm) that national historians, with so much more positive topics to write about, had assumed that social reforms (like the asylum he discusses) were simply political programs and not worth the bother of serious historical attention.²

      In Rothman’s second book, Conscience and Convenience, he was more direct, stating, “To a remarkable degree, American historians have ignored these programs for the criminal, the delinquent and the insane. There is not a single history of probation or parole or indeterminate sentences, not more than two or three accounts of prisons, mental hospitals or training schools in the twentieth century, and only a handful of studies of juvenile court or outpatient clinics.”³

      Rothman’s general point, published in 1980, can now be viewed as part of the change in historical writing that began earlier. A number of excellent studies of American prisons had been written in the earlier parts of the century. They were, to be sure, specialist voices crying in the wilderness. Most historians who mentioned the nation’s response to crime did so by concentrating on the exceptional crime rather than taking the time to investigate ordinary crime. Usually, organized crime or celebrity crime was the focus. Less attention was paid to wider cultural forces that have influenced, on one hand, the formation of law enforcement, courts, and prisons; and, on the other hand, the creation of private-sector groups designed to help prisoners and advocate for prison reform. Yet those same forces were, in fact, helping to determine which kind of justice system would emerge out of America’s post–Civil War response to crime.

      The question of motivation was one of the initial questions that initially led me to research the history of the Connecticut Prison Association. I was curious about what