the bank robbers, and the coldblooded murderers. The poor who stole to feed their families were mixed in with them, along with the fallen women, the innocent ones, and the outlaws who fought the establishment and lost. In both appearance and folklore, prisons have had a certain aura of romance attached to them.
Jails, by contrast, would be represented in our metaphoric theater by a platform in a corner of the basement. There would be dim lighting, with only a few people in the audience. Punitive retribution would be practiced behind curtains, with no reviews in the daily paper. The conditions would be considered deplorable if anyone in the audience cared. Due to the noise from center stage above, the cries for relief did not penetrate beyond the basement walls. There was little romance even in fictional jail confinement. Its inhabitants, the dregs of society, drew little empathy.
Two other features have historically made jails susceptible to stagnation and abuse. One is that jails have usually been small facilities. The other is that jails have held inmates who were convicted of less serious crimes and were sentenced for very short periods. The small size and the constant turnover meant fewer programs and less time for whatever programs were initiated. The English criminal justice system, though it had been cruel, provided the only structure with which the colonists were intimately familiar to protect their new society. Consequently, by 1630 the official records of the Boston Bay Colony contained a “lawful corrections” provision, which specified traditional crime categories and most of the conventional array of punishments currently being used in the homeland. They clearly carried their culture with them, even as they intended to reform it in accordance with holy scriptures.11
Unlike the ill-fated settlement in Jamestown, the thirteen colonies were responding successfully to the massive challenges of a harsh climate, importing or raising a food supply, and gradually suppressing or driving out the original inhabitants of the Americas. Within a few decades reality reared its head over idealism. Obedience within the fold of colonial laws had been uneven from the beginning, and as the population increased, it became worse. One contributing factor was the immediate tendency (and often a necessity) to huddle together in protected, tightly packed villages, which grew, with further immigration, into towns and then cities. Urbanization has been accompanied by increased friction, competition for limited resources, and conflicts of all kinds since urbanized civilization began millennia ago. It would continue to worsen in the colonies.
In the Americas it was natural for the immigrants of all persuasions to urbanize immediately. The first buildings were forts. The subsequent villages, with homes, a church, and activity centers, were surrounded by wooden walls. Not far beyond the walls lay the wilderness, and in the Bible-centered world of New England the wilderness was where Jesus was tempted and bad things happened. The New England wilderness was not something to be admired and preserved. It was a primeval place to be tamed and settled or avoided. The Native Americans who inhabited it were at best primitive humans and, at worst, minions of the devil.
By itself, then, wilderness was viewed not only by Puritans but also by the vast majority of immigrants to the Americas as wild, dangerous, and filled with “savages.” The cultural assumption, almost unquestioned, was that the endless forests they found were clearly meant by God to be cut down, the land cultivated, and the empty places replaced by houses and businesses, parks and streets. The village, town, and city were precisely where civilization became real and blessed by God.
The City of God described by Saint Augustine was the perennial Puritan New England model. Consequently, a premium was placed by those in authority and on the apparatus needed to minister to and control those who broke the laws. Those who would not capitulate and convert were exiled to share the wilderness with the beasts and the Native Americans, both of whom were threats to life, liberty, and godly conduct.
The resolution eventually lay in creating a permanent jail (or gaol) and gradually expanding the use of incarceration. In 1635 Boston opened its first jail. Five years later, on April 10, 1640, the general court of Connecticut stated emphatically, “Forasmuch as many stubborn and refractory Persons are often taken within these libertyes, and no meet place yet prepared for the detayneing & keeping of such to their due & deserued punishment, it is therefore Ordered that there shall be a House of Correction built, of 24 foote long & 16 or 18 foote broad, with a celler, ether of wood or stone … which is to be done by the next Courte, in September.”12
The general court of Connecticut was set up to act as the only judicial body in the colony. In 1664–65, however, a different structure was created: the county, analogous to the English shire (from which the office of sheriff derived). Hartford, New Haven, Fairfield, and New London were designated as counties, for the two express purposes of settling local judicial matters and providing a jail to hold prisoners for trial. A quarter of a century later, in 1667, a law was passed that ordered the ten counties to follow Hartford’s lead—to “provide and maintain … a prison or house of correction” by December of the next year—or face a fine of twenty pounds.13
The seventeenth-century terminology indicates that terms such as prison, jail, or house of correction were still interchangeable. All were titles that had been used in England since the sixteenth century, among other labels such as asylum, workhouse, and bridewell. Only bridewell failed to make the lexicon of justice in America. By the end of the seventeenth century, the term jail was the most commonly used to designate the county facilities.
The detention of offenders until their date of trial was the initial purpose of jail in the Americas. That purpose was foremost in Connecticut through much of the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth centuries. Morality crimes such as being a rebellious child toward one’s parents or elders, masturbating, breaking Sabbath, cursing, using tobacco in public, and performing bestiality were subject to arrest and conviction. Although witchcraft was eventually rejected by society, as we have seen, it remained on the law books. The death penalty was also a viable option, though that sentence was less and less often imposed.
The penalties exacted for many offenses short of homicide, especially in rural areas, tended to emphasize the disgrace and shame of conviction, using the whip, the pillory, or the stocks (“a measured brutality”) to expose individuals to ridicule and cultivate repentance. Restoration of stolen property was enforced. Bartlett adds that “only rarely was the penalty of imprisonment added” during colonial times.14
The pace of urbanization of Connecticut was steady but slow in the seventeenth century, as settlers had to establish farms out of land meant for forests, not crops. Had stones and rocks been a commodity, every citizen in the state could have been wealthy. As it was, Connecticut’s lack of arable land led to two steady trends. The first was an exodus toward the “Western Reserve” in Ohio and elsewhere, where good land was available.
A second trend was a movement of people of all sorts toward the cities of Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Fairfield and the smaller towns in between. With these demographic adjustments going on, crime categories and the laws slowly changed from those based on personal moral lapses to those based on the protection of private property. A new goal became more and more operative, namely a revitalization of the order and social control necessary for businesses to prosper.
The jail was the repository for growing arrest rates as the United States moved toward the Revolution against England. The delinquents came primarily from the servant class, usually captives imported from Guiana in the West Indies to serve as slaves, and from an increasing number of vagrants from out of state. The result was an offender population that invariably exceeded the capacity for which the county jails had been built. A revolving-door syndrome had begun.
Lawrence Friedman, in his review of American criminal justice, is caustic about the systemic neglect of those in jails. After reviewing the proliferation of reform laws and organizations from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Friedman concludes that, while prison became the focus of reform, jails became the forgotten tool of criminal justice. The result was a “squalid
