The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
leaders in the early 1870s to form a new organization to help a group of people, labeled as criminals and convicts, who most of society detested. Just as important, I wondered what prompted them to seek to reform the policies and practices of criminal justice that most of society preferred to ignore. The CPA’s annual reports gave only hints of the internal motivations (e.g., religious beliefs or humanitarian inclinations were occasionally mentioned) that were prompting their actions over a period of thirteen decades.
Let’s briefly examine six of those cultural factors or forces at work in 1875 and highlight some of the major ingredients that, in combination, constituted the intellectual and moral setting that surrounded the CPA’s founders in 1875.
CRIME
Criminal, or at least antisocial, activity has long been a major problem at the center of humanity’s self-conscious existence in groups. In the sense of violating unwritten but conscious norms, the broad concept of crime may even have predated settled communities. Whether judged on religious or rational points of view, harmful behavior has never been acceptable in any organized society. Based on newspaper reports, a reaction to the scourge of criminal activity was among the more compelling factors motivating the CPA’s founders.
George Clark provides the first detailed description of Connecticut’s justice system from 1630 to 1900, a story of jails, prisons, witchcraft turmoil, schools for boy and girl delinquents, reformatories, and evolving laws to control crime. Since the Civil War, crime had been a growing problem in Connecticut. While there is no method by which the state crime rate can be determined in the late nineteenth century, crime was, at least occasionally, very much in the news. On January 29, 1873, for example, the Hartford Daily Courant carried a letter from Francis Gillette, former United States senator and father of the famous actor William Gillette. In it Gillette called attention to the cost of a new state jail, estimated at $150,000, and defended that expense by describing the current jail as antiquated and “totally inadequate to accommodate the increasing number of criminals. “Is it not an insufferable shame and reproach to our boasted civilization that a necessity should exist for enlarged jails and prisons?” he wrote.4
A new county jail was built in 1874 on Seyms Street in Hartford. Its maximum capacity was 204 offenders, including a wing of cells to confine 36 women. The population of the Connecticut State Prison in the town of Wethersfield, around 210, had not grown appreciably since it was built in 1827 to replace the former copper mine in Granby known as Newgate Prison. The numbers do not sound impressive to modern ears, but the fact that the two facilities had continued to house over an increasing number of inmates every year was sufficient to remind Hartford citizens that crime was a dark reality that threatened, in Victorian religion’s terms, the ruination of a moral society.
Crime takes many forms, and the definition of what constitutes a crime lies at the heart of the debate about whether convictions and punishments are appropriate, fair, and morally justified. In its simplest form, crime is what federal, state, city, or town law proclaims is illegal. Noted historian of criminal justice, Lawrence M. Friedman, reminds his readers, “crime … is a slippery, variable, protean concept; and criminal justice is equally variable, mutable, time dependent, culture dependent.”5
In colonial times, with written categories of crime in use that date back to English common law traditions, the prevailing response to crime had been the use of public shaming techniques and more drastic measures. Foremost among the shaming techniques was to have the offender, either standing or sitting, confined in a wooden device called the stocks, where the arms and legs protruded through holes and were locked in place. The punishment took place on the town green and could last for a few hours or a few days, with neighbors and others passing by constantly, free to deride or throw objects at the offender. A similar device, called a pillory, differed in that it confined the head and the wrists or arms, with the offender standing. Over a period of hours, or days, the punishment was not only a shaming technique but also a very painful one.
The application of the death penalty between 1650 and 1850 was considerably harsher and for more crimes in the New Haven Colony than in the Connecticut Colony centered on Hartford. A contemporary Connecticut scholar, Dr. Lawrence Goodheart, discovered that where New Haven’s code listed twenty-three capital crimes, Hartford courts listed eighteen, and they were regarded with less biblical literalism and greater leniency than had been the case in England.6
The New England colonies varied in the intensity of their desire to minimize crime in its towns and villages. Rather, in writing their own seventeenth-century codes of law to adapt to new conditions in the Americas, Puritans were quite flexible. “The Puritan mind filtered out of the Bible what was usable and appropriate for their wishes and their days.”7 Our interest is in how that filter worked in Connecticut.
Late responses to crime in Connecticut, as it has been in virtually every era, were a combination of two historical options, retribution and rehabilitation. Each imparted a particular appearance or facade to the actual justice administered by the courts and correctional facilities. Each appeared frequently in the nineteenth-century debates about the primary purpose of both individual punishment and the entire criminal justice system. Retributive sentences that removed the offender from society for a set period were developed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and eventually replaced the stocks and pillories. But by 1830 a revolutionary type of prison was constructed in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, which called into question the assumption that confinement was simply for punishment. The Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania preferred isolation as the basis of reform. The Auburn State Prison in New York chose to use a congregate system to engender good work habits among inmates. The Wethersfield State Prison in Connecticut sought a middle ground to foster attitudinal changes in offenders.
The retributive approach thus gave way to the belief, both religious and pragmatic, that rehabilitative measures, if used properly, would accomplish more changes and be profitable as well. In the new prisons various methods were employed to achieve the desired changes, such as Bible study, hard labor, the imposition of silence and isolation, preaching, education, counseling, and friendship. The range of means used to rehabilitate often depended on the degree of retribution that was covertly, or openly, insinuated into the rehabilitative regimens. Religion had much to do with that choice.
RELIGION
The importance of religion as a factor in the development of public attitudes toward offenders and criminal activities cannot be overstated. Religion is at the root of almost all personal and social mores, moral rules, civil law, and practical attempts to control human behavior. Even when not directly responsible, religion invariably molds the attitudes and actions applied within societal life.
The most pervasive religious force (and for a long time the dominant one) in early New England was the Puritan version of Christianity. Puritan Protestantism was only one religious tradition in New England and Connecticut, but its literalistic biblical view of law and sin, punishment and redemption, governed (sometimes unconsciously) the choice of means used to eradicate sinful behavior and guarantee salvation of the offender. Read in terms of their mission, the intention of the Puritans was to save the sinner even if the methods had to be harsh, even brutal, at times. Historian Jill Lepore reminds us that this often became a justification for a vicious application of mercy, seen most vividly in the Puritan denial of the humanity of Native Americans and a denigration of them in the American story. She writes, “The ways of the Puritans are not our ways. Their faith is not our faith. And their wars are not our wars.”8 Puritan Christianity impact on colonial and American culture was immense, but it was often rooted in values and attitudes that denied the status of human being to those deemed evil or worthless.
John Winthrop, a lawyer and organizer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached a classic sermon aboard the Arabella during the voyage across the Atlantic. His message formed the foundation of the Puritans’ subsequent behavior: “They were to be knit together as a single body in which the private interests would be subordinated to public concern.”9 Only by being obedient to God’s commands could they build the “city on a hill” that was Winthrop’s ultimate spiritual goal. Puritan scholar Perry Miller, emphasizing the positive, summarizes the Puritan