institutions.
In 1862 a Congregational minister with the biblical name of Enoch Cobb Wines became secretary of the New York Prison Association. Born in 1806, he was a man of immense energy and bold vision. He set about exploring the possibilities of international and national organizations to foster prison reform. The first national Congress of Prisons was held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870 with Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio as the first president. Enoch Wines also helped to convene the first International Congress in London in 1872. He was the leading reformer of the nineteenth century, active until his death in 1879. So important was he that the National Prison Association (NPA), which he had helped to found at the 1870 congress, began to disintegrate after his death.
His son, Dr. Frederick H. Wines, an equally forceful and innovative organizer, took his father’s place at the head of the NPA in 1883. His position was never challenged. In one summary of Frederick’s life, his endeavor to implement a scientific and rational approach to prison reform is lifted up as a prime example of his intent to move criminal justice forward on the basis of proven scientific evidence and not on guesswork: “A major effort of his activities was seeking to curb the use of prisons as a social laboratory with prisoners as guinea pigs…. In 1898 he announced: ‘I do not believe in inherited crime any more than I believe in the imaginary criminal type.’ ”28
In New England a swelling chorus of Protestant liberal theologies in the latter part of the century joined the efforts of the National Prison Association to redefine offender reformation, reject public punishments, and promote careful and systematic rehabilitation of offenders. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, prison reform was on the upswing for the first time since the first quarter of that century, when the first penitentiaries were built to promote rehabilitation. The 1870 Cincinnati meeting acted as a stimulus for additional states to join the call for more civilized prison management. The publicity around the NPA’s push for reform hit its first high point when Rutherford B. Hayes went from being the initial head of a prison reform organization to being elected as the president of the United States. Hayes served from 1876 to 1881 and played an active role for years.
As a respected general in the Civil War and an ex-president of the nation, Hayes surrounded the reform movement in the 1880s and into the 1890s, until his death in 1893, with a powerful aura of respectability and moral persuasion, a contribution often ignored rather than heralded at the time. No other politician since has taken so great and consistent interest in penal reform. In 1893, among the eulogies of his character and worth as a military leader and statesman, another former Civil War general from Ohio, Roeliff Brinkerhoff, spoke of Hayes’s commitment to the common task of finding a resolution to the “prison question,” an issue of vital importance to America: “The country can survive under high tariff or low tariffs, under free coinage or restricted coinage, but it cannot 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
