The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
and there were only seventeen students when Wayland took over the dean’s position. Thirty years later, when Wayland left Yale Law School, there were three hundred students, and the school was ranked on a par with the best law schools in the land. Francis Wayland was progressive in every public facet of his life, embracing the new science of evolutionary biology and serving as the president of the American Social Science Association in 1880. His death in 1904, after twenty-eight years as president of the CPA, left a void, which no one at the time was able to fill.
Wayland was well known in and outside of Connecticut. Most important, he was politically connected, knew how to organize effectively, and could create consensus in the midst of controversy, three qualities indispensable to the success enjoyed by the CPA during his presidency. His legacy was not based on rhetoric, brilliance, or innovation, but on lending his objective legal mind to champion prison reform in the midst of a relatively hostile public and press for criminal-law reform within a reluctant legislature.
Working in tandem with John Taylor, Wayland’s academic and judicial status created a unique quality. Their combined voices added substance and credibility to the CPA’s chosen role and blunted any charge of sentimentalism and amateurism against the agency’s leadership. The agency probably could not have survived without both of them providing consistent guidance and stability through the first three decades. The two men gave to the agency the solid core that is indispensable to ultimate success for any organization.
IMPLEMENTING THE AGENCY’S OBJECTIVES
The objectives of the association set the work to be done in its largest context: the prevention of crime and the protection of society. The narrow focus on helping the individual offender upon discharge was always seen through the wide-angle lens of systemic reform of the prison and the criminal justice components.
Together with a few volunteers who composed the CPA’s Standing Committee on Visitation and Discharges, Taylor set up a monthly meeting with the warden, chaplain, and other officers of the prison. Each discharged individual was up for consideration to be assisted by the CPA. They discussed such items as the character of the prisoner, the amount of monetary aid available (not necessarily to be handed out), the type of work for which the individual was suited, and the destination to which he was most likely expected to return. The majority had no home to go to, nor any promise of a job.
In many of his reports Taylor’s comments illustrate how subjective the process of extending assistance can be in this all-too-human arena. He was sure that he knew how to read the men he met as they prepared to leave Wethersfield. Not having psychologists around to confer with or social workers to do background checks, he tended to help most fully those able to impress him with their willingness and industry, not simply through their record but through his own intuitive reading of their intentions.
Taylor had the benefit of the warden’s judgment, of course, and for a few years until the process became too unwieldy, he had the opinions of the members of the CPA visitation committee to help him. But the final decisions and the amount of assistance he offered were based primarily on his personal insight into the character of people presented to him and on his own deep well of intelligent compassion. It was a feature of the work that did not change much during his long tenure with the agency. Before his life ended John Taylor became a highly respected example of that experiential method throughout New England and the United States. Indeed, all of his colleagues doing similar work had to depend on their own judgment and ability to make the daily decisions about who to help and how.
In the background, but of considerable importance, were the people who made up the membership of the four committees that shepherded the CPA’s work. The division of duties was appropriate to the task, beginning with an executive committee, chaired by Wayland.16 The CPA was a statewide organization from the outset. Members were matched to particular counties: James Hughes for Hartford, Noah Porter for New Haven, Lafayette Foster for New London, Henry Towne for Fairfield, Origen Seymour for Litchfield, Charles Hill for Middlesex, William Jillson for Windham, and Alfred Goodrich for Tolland County. Wayland made committee assignments: a committee on finance was composed of John Corning, Henry Towne, and William Franklin; a committee on crime and laws included Thomas Gibbon, Henry Towne, and James Hughes. A committee on visitation and discharges lists George Woods, William Berry, John Browne, William Ayres, and John Belden.
Most striking about the list is the prominence of judges and attorneys, a pattern that held in all future organizational structures. It was not accidental. In 1875 the judicial component of the criminal justice system was well poised to recognize the need for prison reform. It was also the judges and senior attorneys of the day who had the political connections to help make systemic reformation happen. There are numerous hints and suggestions indicating that the CPA’s leadership had corresponded with the Pennsylvania Prison Society (which dated back to 1787), the Boston Prison Discipline Society (formed in 1825), and the Correctional Association of New York (formed in 1844). All these agencies and many more attended the annual meetings of the National Prison Association and had many opportunities to hear one another speak and to exchange views on methods and systems of criminal justice, as the nineteenth century gave way to the growing complexity of society in the twentieth century.
The reform movement faced an uphill struggle within the general public. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the prevailing attitudes toward crime and criminals among the public ranged from vengeful anger to apathy. Legislative reform required an equivalent or stronger passion combined with considerable legal knowledge and negotiating skills to counteract such opinions. Judges and attorneys committed to reform were essential to give the rehabilitative ideal credibility to supplement the moral and practical energy provided by clergy and prominent business owners active in the reform movement.
The Connecticut legislature, of course, had attorneys among its members. Reformation on many issues often started with insightful legislators. In prison reform, however, that rarely happened. Few attorney-legislators came from a background in criminal law, and those who did were usually former prosecutors whose electability to the legislature was partly based on a record of locking people up. They generally favored the retributive system, in which they usually recommended as severe a sentence as the law allowed and the jury could be persuaded to impose. Helping offenders get a new start was not usually among their interests or listed in their portfolio of talents as legislators.
The executive branch of government was an even less likely source of reform. Governors, and the administrators they appointed, were often people trained in law, but as elected officials they were subject to pressure from public opinion on a daily basis. Consequently, they tended to be reluctant to get involved or viewed helping criminals as a negative in the compilation of their resumes. Francis Wayland, formerly a lieutenant governor, was the exception that proved the rule. It is incontrovertible that without the leadership and expertise of judges and criminal-law attorneys at every stage of CPA’s evolution, the achievements of the agency and systemic improvements in criminal justice would not have been possible.
AN OPEN COMMITMENT TO HUMAN POTENTIAL
In 1879 John Taylor’s report reflected the thinking of a man who had decided, on one hand, that he was not going to be a pushover on prison reform; on the other hand, he had not lost his confidence that what he was doing was morally right and that it was, in the end, going to be effective. For the next three decades it was his repeated conviction that the men serving time and being discharged from the state prison were worthy of his time and energy. He never stopped believing that, with some exceptions, enough of them would respond to his caring for their basic needs: shelter, food, clothing, and a job.
There is no evidence that Taylor saw ethnicity as an issue or held any particular prejudices about the Irish, Germans, Swedes, or any other group of immigrants that tended to make up the bulk of the inmates at the prison. He seemed to trust that most would react positively to his kindness and a promise of continued support. If the men he worked with failed after their release, it wouldn’t be because they lacked someone in whom they could trust and to whom they could turn. In realistic but hopeful words at the end of his 1881 report, after five years on the job, he explained how he often did not introduce men to an employer as an ex-convict, which worked most of the time, allowing him to assert a view that he