groups to effect changes in the treatment of adults and youth offenders in the community. Modern studies have also described the CPA as a “benevolent” or social influence type of voluntary agency, which is usually formed to seek some palliation of suffering or the provision of support for a segment of the population.
To fully understand the CPA within the context of voluntary associations, it is helpful to recognize that beyond the delivery of actual services such organizations are necessarily involved in the exercise of power. That is true particularly of associations that request and receive public funding or that act as advocates for some segment of the public. Social influence associations, in particular, even those not focused on advocacy per se, are apt to expose areas of genuine human need, which in turn can be traced to basic forms of injustice that demand change.
The resulting tensions, especially if they are reported in newspapers or other media, can cause both embarrassment and resentment externally within the governmental and legislative arenas or internally within the social service networks. Those tensions can become severe, as government officials seek to deny, redefine, or redress those deficiencies. They can be resolved only with the use of the political or moral power that is present on either side of the dispute. As James Hunt makes clear, “The forms of association which exist in a society in a historical moment are the forms of power in that society, and an effective social ethic requires the organization of power for its purposes and in the forms that permit the realization of its purposes.”53
Summarizing the thought of James Luther Adams, the foremost American proponent of voluntary associations, Hunt argues that there are three obligations for the responsible citizen: first, to educate or reeducate the general citizenry about social injustice; second, to participate in associations that deal with social injustice, especially as it affects underprivileged groups; and third, to facilitate a public discussion of new possibilities in social policy and the organization of society.54 Only those voluntary associations that learn how to assess their degree of power, how to leverage it, and how to manage it intelligently in the midst of their cooperation and competition with other voluntary agencies are going to persist over time. By all those standards the voluntary association called the Connecticut Prison Association has been one of the most successful voluntary associations in Connecticut during the past 150 years.
This brief survey of the cultural context that prevailed in Connecticut in the 1870s suggests, despite a natural concern about the impact of crime as the population grew, restorative justice retained strong roots dating back to colonial times. The Puritan emphasis on God’s grace, coupled with a deep-seated mission to save the lost, imparted to all of New England a sustained religious emphasis on caring for the offender’s spiritual and physical well-being. The New England Theology, led by Nathaniel Taylor and amplified by the radical teaching of Horace Bushnell, both of whom used biblical sources to stress the capacity of the individual to change and evolve, offered a new morality that was scientifically plausible. Sin was no longer the simple explanation.
Human choice made both crime and restoration not only possible but also plausible. The new penitentiaries of the early nineteenth century had constituted a good beginning but had lost sight of their mission. The energy of the prison reform movement after the Civil War found sustenance in the newly enlightened humanitarianism springing from seminal philosophers in Europe, in the obvious failures of punitive incarceration, and in the potential power of voluntary associations to lead the way to reformation of the individual by reforming the prisons. Restorative justice had much in the culture to support it in 1875.
On the other hand, support for retributive justice increased in the mid-1870s, following the Civil War. As the oldest method of dealing with crime, punishment had the inherent value of common sense. Just as parents had to discipline their children to make them realize the errors of their ways, so society had to react quickly and as harshly as necessary to at least curb the inclination to commit crimes. In the battle over free will versus predestination, a majority of the population, the clergy, and the political leaders still leaned toward the presumption that criminals were born, not made. Reformation schemes struck them as throwing good money away on a hopeless romantic notion and essentially immoral project.
If chaos was to be avoided, a steady current of voices protested, crime must be controlled by all the force that society could muster. If criminals were born that way, the new science of heredity gave many the idea of cutting off future crime at the source by sterilization. For others it would be enough to make survival less likely through punitive incarceration. If criminals have committed crime by choice, then they should pay the consequences of law-breaking. Much of the evidence accumulated in the subsequent chapter underlines the presumption that the retributive face of justice was bred in the bones of many segments of society that sincerely believed that severe punishment was needed to protect property, maintain order, and make sure the criminals, not the citizens, were filled with fear.
The intellectual context of the CPA story indicates that the two faces of justice were both in evidence in 1875. Justice, of course, is never merely an intellectual debate. Justice takes practical forms in laws, courts, custodial facilities, and various kinds of services in the community. It also emerges from a number of cultural mores, attitudes, religious beliefs, economic developments, and laws passed in Congress or at the state level. All shape the channel through which the waters of progress are supposed to flow.
The door was opening for a new reformatory phase of activity in the Connecticut criminal justice system to improve conditions within the prison and a chance for an honest living for those being discharged. The Prisoners’ Friend Association was in the works. The new phase would be initiated this time by a private agency designed by judges and clergy, backed by the governor, and welcomed by the warden of the beleaguered Wethersfield State Prison.
CHAPTER TWO From Newgate Prison to Wethersfield State Prison, 1775–1875
As to the places of confinement, they are retarded evolutions of the jails, which began in the little germ at Hartford in 1640 … part of a plant whose most gaudy blossom was Newgate.
— George L. Clark, History of Connecticut
One of the unique experiences that helped mold my views on criminal justice was the opportunity in the mid eighties to participate in a mock imprisonment at the former Haddam State Jail, a facility that the Department of Correction used as a training site. Along with twenty or so guard recruits, I was fingerprinted late one Thursday afternoon and booked into the old jail as an inmate. Each of us was given a uniform to wear for the next three days and assigned to a cell. Our three guards introduced themselves, one playing a softhearted custodian, one an ambivalent role, and the third a hard-nosed guard. There was the usual banter and slightly nervous joking during the first night. The next two days were filled with bare minimum meals, planted contraband, accusations of rule breaking, ragged sleep, and signs of serious competition to curry favor with one or more of the guards. The third day revealed the effects of being locked up. Just after the noon meal, in the recreation area, we were tossing a medicine ball around, when, without any warning, the hard-nosed guard appeared on the balcony and rapped three times with his keys. In an instant the ball dropped to the floor, and twenty intelligent men who knew this was a game waited in sheer deference to authority, in absolute silence for at least three minutes. In the debriefing after the incarceration ended, there was no argument that each of us had been transformed into inmates in three days.
Each of the following milestones helped to sculpt the face of justice that would characterize Connecticut at any given time. Retributive justice and rehabilitative justice were both present in greater or lesser degree in every phase of the system that emerged from the state’s founding in the seventeenth century to the present day. Together with the cultural milieu described in chapter 1, this summary of the beginnings of Connecticut’s criminal justice system is intended to put the formation and the work of the Connecticut Prison Association
