The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
survive a demoralized people, with crime increasing like a tide that knows no ebb.”29
Zebulon Brockway, warden of the much-admired Elmira Reformatory in New York State, was another star on the rise in 1870. Born in Lyme, Connecticut, Brockway gained his start as a clerk and guard at the Wethersfield State Prison and rose to be an assistant to Warden Amos Pilsbury. In 1861 he was called to be head of the Detroit House of Correction. Brockway’s innovations in prison discipline were revolutionary, based on reformatory ideals he had culled from his own experience and research. Brockway is credited with rethinking not only the standard prison disciplines being practiced for the previous two centuries, which focused on corporal punishments and rigidly harsh living conditions, but also the need for release mechanisms that gave offenders a better chance of becoming constructive citizens. He instituted a graded approach to prison discipline. The most restrictive stage offered no liberty to the inmate, the second stage allowed partial freedoms within the prison, and the last stage permitted the inmate to leave on parole under supervision. It was the first organized parole system in America.30
Among the youngest wardens in the county at age forty-three, Brockway was invited to make a major address at the 1870 Congress of the National Prison Association. Called “The Ideal of a True Prison System for a State,” Brockway’s speech laid out the three essential elements of the reformatory philosophy: indeterminate sentencing, experienced and authoritative leadership in prison management, and humane conditions for prisoners.
Brockway’s speech, and the forty-one rehabilitative “Principles” adopted by NPA at the end of the 1870 meeting, became a blueprint for American penologists. The National Prison Association met annually, except for a brief hiatus in the late 1870s after the death of its founder, Enoch Wines, but it regrouped in 1883 under Frederick Wines and resumed its yearly debates. The NPA would eventually be renamed the American Prison Association in 1954 and by the middle of the twentieth century became the American Correctional Association, by then primarily a trade association for professionals in prisons, jails, parole, and probation. Private-sector agencies are encouraged to participate, but they rarely exercise any leadership in the organization in the modern era.
As the national prison reform movement was getting under way, two developments took place in Connecticut—Hartford and Wethersfield. Both added critical background to the CPA’s formation. One was the building of a new county jail on Seyms Street in 1874. Hartford’s jail had functioned as the county jail for a number of years, and the expansion of it was an indication of more “crime” occurring and a growing offender population being processed by the courts. Like the Pennsylvania Prison Society and New York Prison Association, both of which initiated programs at both the jail and prison level, the CPA immediately involved itself in the problems being faced by inmates of the Hartford County Jail as well as those discharged from the state prison.
The other issue was a new series of scandals surrounding the Wethersfield State Prison. Hopes were high when the prison was established in 1827 that the prison would not only avoid the abominable conditions of Newgate Prison in Granby but exemplify the best possible prison management. In fact, the Wethersfield prison administration never did live up to the expectations. In his 1924 “History of Connecticut Institutions” Dr. Edward Warren Capen warned that in the mid-nineteenth century, Wethersfield had slipped from its status as one of the best prisons in the country to one where the very organization of the institution was suspected of nepotism: “The Warden, deputy, shop overseer, and contractors were at times nearly related. Lack of heat and ventilation, and improper food caused illness and death.”31
Prisons and jails are by their very nature negative environments for both inmates and staff, no matter how many creaturely comforts are provided or how enlightened the administration at any given time. Only those who work within such structures know experientially just how negative and difficult it can become and how easily its atmosphere and organizational structure can be corrupted. From the start Wethersfield State Prison had periodically been marred by disorder and charges of mismanagement. Well before 1875 there was a great deal of sentiment for change within the facility and for more resources from the community.
An 1872 report of the Connecticut’s legislative committee appointed to examine the state prison recommended that a new one be built as soon as possible.32 The legislature and the governor ignored it. But one other recommendation did get immediate attention, principally because it cost almost no money. The governor established a State Board of Charities in 1873 and appointed three men and two women as members. They were authorized to visit annually each Connecticut institution, public and private, to determine if the inmates were being treated humanely. There is no evidence that the State Board of Charities delved into the problems of prison management or other systemic criminal justice issues. But the National Prison Association would provide plenty of opportunity to address such issues with a knowledge base wide enough to suggest systemic solutions.
Connecticut was not oblivious to the national and international associations that had developed and the formation of voluntary prisoner-aid associations in New York, Maryland, and New Hampshire. The work of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, formed in 1787 and widely respected, was viewed more as an anomaly, not a pattern to be followed. The Boston Prison Discipline Society took form in 1825, and the New York Prison Association in 1845. Similar associations were formed in Maryland and Delaware in the next two decades.
In 1871 the Connecticut legislature formed a Prison Reform Commission to investigate the progress being made in prison reform. Appointed to that commission were Dr. G. W. Russell and Charles Dudley Warner (publisher of the Hartford Daily Courant) to represent Hartford and Probate Judge Francis Wayland (who had been the lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1869) to represent New Haven. Their specific assignment was to examine the Wethersfield State Prison and similar institutions in other states “to see if there are any deficiencies in our way of treating criminals.”33
Prison reform was picking up speed.
PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE
The influences of European penology and scientific discovery were considerable in New England from the eighteenth century on. Insights and theories from both philosophy and science, conceived in the previous two centuries, were known and debated in the United States long before the CPA began its journey. The founders of the new American government mined the works of English, French, and Italian thinkers for ideas and rhetoric to formulate their foundational documents.
Three philosophers, the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), the English social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and the Italian penologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), among many others, were particularly influential in the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For example, the right to a public and speedy trial, to be judged by peers, to dismiss jurors for various reasons, to examine the witnesses, to not be subjected to coerced confessions, and to be informed of accused acts and who is making the accusations are all protections drawn from the works of classical criminology.34
Beccaria’s work, On Crimes and Punishment, published in 1764, speaks to many universal issues of his day. He was an early advocate of swift rather than delayed punishments to be most effective against crime. In his essay he declares the death penalty unnecessary and counterproductive and discusses better ways to deal with human behaviors such as suicide and dueling rather than codifying them as illegal. Word of his work spread rapidly in Europe and in America. In Connecticut the New Haven Register printed Beccaria’s book in its entirety over seven months in 1786.
Our interest is in Beccaria’s assertion of two principles that became part of the foundation of subsequent penology. The first is that the punishment of convicted criminals is justified only when it strengthens the social contract between members of society. The second is that reformatory penalties are more likely to be effective than punishments based on retribution or revenge. Penalties designed to be reformatory are less likely to further alienate criminals and make them worse. Rehabilitation rather than retribution would therefore serve the greatest good of the community. Both principles would appear in the prison reform movement of the 1870s in the United States.
In the nineteenth century, rational penology was given another thrust