The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates

      INTRODUCTION Two Faces of Justice

      Good history begins with a good story.

      — James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact

      In 1875 Connecticut had one prison (built in 1829), ten county jails (some of which dated back more than a century), and a board of pardons under the governor’s direction. The state’s county courts had been abolished in 1855 in favor of stronger superior courts. Court business increased after the end of the Civil War, and courts of common pleas were established to deal with less serious legal issues. Not all Connecticut towns had a full complement of courts; juvenile cases were still handled in adult courtrooms. As of 1875 organized police departments had been around only in America’s major cities, including Hartford and New Haven, for less than fifteen years.

      The state’s criminal justice system was fragmented, generally unprofessional and unregulated. In 1875 the newly formed Prisoners’ Friend Corporation was the only organization in the state, public or private, whose sole focus was to help form and reform the growing field of criminal justice. The founders changed the name to Connecticut Prison Association the following year. Over the next thirteen decades CPA was either a primary advocate or an active participant in every major criminal justice policy change.

      My experience with the Connecticut Prison Association spans from 1964 to 1997. As a CPA prison volunteer I visited inmates in the state prison for five years and sponsored two offenders. I was then enlisted to direct the agency’s volunteer programs and did so for eleven years. In 1980 the CPA Board selected me to be the executive director, a post I held for seventeen years. Participating in the work of a private, secular agency exposed me on a regular basis to the realities of crime and punishment for probationers, inmates, and parolees and for all who work in the system. The benefits of public and private partnerships were evident soon after I joined the CPA staff. From the time I first entered the Somers Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in 1964, I became fascinated with the role a voluntary agency could play in a public arena. Much of the creative energy expended in the evolution of criminal justice in Connecticut and in the United States is due to the work done by agencies like CPA.

      A voluntary association that has lasted for over one 140 years as of 2015, in a field as complex as criminal justice, deserves recognition and appreciation. Nonetheless, hagiography was never my intent. I was more interested in questions about what kinds of people were motivated to form CPA. What kept it moving forward? Who paid for its work? I was curious about how a private-sector agency had operated in conjunction with a public system notorious for excluding rather than including outsiders, especially those perceived as amateur meddlers or do-gooders. And I wanted to find out, what has been accomplished by the agency in each successive era? Where and why did CPA fail? How has the CPA’s original agenda changed over the years? And how has the CPA’s approach to criminal justice issues fit into, or conflicted with, the approach of criminal justice professionals and others at the state and national level?

      Connecticut can boast of many “firsts,” but in the field of criminal justice Connecticut was never viewed as a pacesetter. The “land of steady habits” has been, usually, a minor footnote for national historians supplementing the systems created by Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Florida, California, and other large states. Partial descriptions of Connecticut’s approach to law enforcement, as well as brief histories of its courts and correctional components, are available on their respective websites. But if we look at CPA’s existing annual reports from 1880 on; newspaper articles from the same period; references to the CPA in books or articles by professional historians; references to Connecticut’s criminal justice system, including adult and juvenile courts and such services as probation, parole, and alternatives to incarceration; interviews with criminal justice professionals in Connecticut’s system; and extensive reading in the events, issues, and lives around which the story of the United States has been told and retold, we uncover a more comprehensive description of Connecticut’s criminal justice evolution since colonial times.

      Although the Connecticut Prison Association is not a huge agency, and Connecticut is not a large state, both recapitulate in their histories the fundamental choices that must be made to construct, manage, or reform the components of a criminal justice system. It is the accumulation of those choices that determines what laws are passed, how they are interpreted, and whether they have been applied fairly and effectively to offenders, to victims of crime, and ultimately to the benefit or detriment of society. In a metaphoric sense the history of CPA reveals the perennial struggle to determine what face of justice has been dominant in Connecticut in each successive era since 1875—a lens through which to trace the development of Connecticut’s correctional facilities, its adult and juvenile courts, and such services as probation, parole, and alternatives to incarceration.

      In fact justice is the key word in this book’s title. The most basic meaning of justice today involves fairness: the careful process of giving to each person, group, or societal segment what belongs to each or what each deserves. Fairness, however, like justice, has no single definition. The actual process of deciding what is fair or deserved is often quite complicated.

      One of my mentors, Connecticut judge and former state legislator Robert Satter, writes that while the pursuit of justice is humbling and immensely frustrating, a judge has no choice but to pursue it with diligence and integrity. “A judge,” states Satter, “is like an artist. The former cannot create justice any more than the latter can paint beauty. Each can only hope to approximate the objective of their labors.”¹

      The legal pursuit of justice has a significant amount of subjectivity, no matter how many “facts” have been assembled through case law and witness examination. In every case, judges must eventually render judgment on the basis of applicable laws. If they are worthy of their office, the final goal is some approximation of justice. Judge Satter shares his personal approach: “Even if I cannot define it, I discern it in each case to be my sense of what is fair, what is fitting and appropriate in the law and under all the circumstances. But how do I know if I have achieved it? … The ambiguity and elusiveness of justice do not, however, make striving for it less important.”²

      The term Reformatory Justice in the book title, often linked today to correctional institutions for youth, was chosen on the basis of its presence in the original objectives of the CPA. The Articles of Association, written in 1875, contained five objectives, number three of which was “to promote reformatory systems of prison management.” The term is never defined in subsequent annual reports of the CPA, indicating, perhaps, that its meaning was obvious at that time. The work of the agency over time, however, indicates that the term included the legislative response to crime, the sentencing practices of the courts, the ways that jails and prisons operated, and the two mechanisms of release after imprisonment, probation and parole. The CPA never limited itself to simply assisting offenders to return to society in a healthy way. Its work in every generation was systemic, with the sole exception of law enforcement, which did