or vagrancy,” as well as a repository of “brawlers, thieves and countless others.”15
Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the jails of Connecticut proliferated and underwent very little change as new counties were formed. With a more complex society, the criminal justice system continued to expand. Each county was required to build a jail if one was not already in operation. Connecticut’s office of sheriff was created in 1750, when courts were established in all five counties for the purpose of settling both civil and criminal matters. Initially appointed by the governor and living off a fee structure, sheriffs at some point became an elective office with a state salary. Sheriffs often had significant additional powers from time to time, including serving writs, boarding vessels, even raising a militia if called on by the justice of the peace. The office of sheriff eventually evolved into a “keeper of the peace” under the direction of the courts, whose main work was to arrest offenders and make sure they showed up in court if not confined.16
As the nineteenth century began, the jail was the hidden foundation of the criminal justice system in Connecticut. Ten county jails existed across the state. Simsbury housed one state prison, Newgate, named after a notorious prison in London, England. An array of courts now heard cases, including city courts, probate courts, county courts, the superior court, and a supreme court of errors. Police forces were formed or considered in most cities, following England’s example, and county sheriffs steadily gained in political power.17
Two major ideas concerning the county jails surfaced in Connecticut in the 1830s. One was the need for a state facility for the insane, who were, until that time, held in the county jails. After many attempts to pass the necessary legislation, an institution for the mentally ill was built in 1865 in Middletown. The need for county jail rehabilitation also garnered attention and approval. Hartford County built a new jail in 1837, incorporating many of the features of the state prison, particularly its industrial “contract system,” in which prisoners were leased to private contractors to manufacture a variety of articles. One new jail, however, could not cover all the gaps.
The warden of the state prison, Amos Pilsbury, offered, with the consent of the Connecticut legislature, to pay any county $1,000 out of his own pocket to help build a similar jail.18 Pilsbury’s plan, however, which had been so successful in making the prison a profitable enterprise for the state, failed in the jail setting. Jail sentences were too short for job training to have any effect; too many inmates had no work experience, not to speak of manufacturing experience; and the majority had poor work habits. Such defects could be overcome over time in a prison context but proved too great a hurdle in the jails. Ironically, jail contracts also deflected more contracts away from the prison than had been expected, reducing its overall profitability. The revitalization of the jails envisioned by Pilsbury was never realized.
Conditions in the county jails continued to limp along, with few improvements for the next century. Genevieve Bartlett’s 1935 report to the CPA annual meeting concerning the plight of the county jails ends with five “Suggested Changes in County Jail Procedures.” At the top of the list is a recommendation to distinguish the use of the jail as a detention center for those awaiting trial and use it only to confine those who had been convicted. Those waiting to go to court, she maintains, are the most neglected people in the system and should have a spectrum of services provided for them. After all, they had not yet been proven guilty of any crime. The concept was never adopted.
Bartlett’s next documented change suggests the creation of “crime clinics” to gather facts related to the reduction of crime. That idea would resurface in the 1950s and have a brief period of activity. A third recommendation mentions a focus on rehabilitation from the time of arrest, with a “complete analysis of the physical and mental state of the delinquent and his relation to society.” That idea never materialized. The fourth proposition involves the “abolition of the workhouse.” The state should make separate provisions for the feeble-minded, the recidivist (or career criminal), and the vagrant, all of whom were mixed haphazardly with those awaiting trial. Vagrants and the mentally ill should not even be mixed together. This most fundamental of Bartlett’s written suggestions, it would not see fruition for a century. Finally, she urges the creation of a “State Farm for Misdemeanants.” In such a setting, there would be a much better chance to restore some of the offenders to society.19
The idea of a farm connected to jails and prisons had very attractive features and eventually became a reality at future prisons in Niantic (for women), Enfield (for lower-risk felons) and a reformatory in Cheshire (for young adult males).
MILESTONE 3: NEWGATE PRISON
As mentioned earlier, Newgate Prison was opened in 1873 on the site of an abandoned copper mine. Several Connecticut entrepreneurs, as early as 1705, had discovered copper ore in a ledge of rock in Simsbury, Connecticut (part of the present town of Granby). Manufacturers had initiated a statewide search for commercial metals to manufacture more durable farming and factory tools at home rather than importing them from Europe. A number of vertical shafts and horizontal caverns were eventually dug out of the Metacomet Ridge, a huge wall of volcanic trap rock that geologically parallels the western side of the Connecticut River Valley. The copper proved to be of fair enough quality at the start of operations, which encouraged more investment of time and money by its owners. Eventually the venture proved not to be cost-effective. The ore was very difficult to extract and of limited extent. The hope for a seam of gold never materialized. By mid century the most easily available copper layers were largely depleted, and further mining was considered a waste of time and energy.
Two decades later, in 1770, Simsbury was in the news again. Connecticut (like other northern states) was shifting away from publicly situated corporal punishment and replacing it with sentence terms in jails and prisons. It was not alone in that shift of attitude. “Throughout the Western World during the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment intellectuals challenged the death penalty,” an aspect of a slow revolution occurring around the subject of human rights.20
Clearly, by 1750 the county jails were unable to house all the convicted offenders being adjudicated by the courts. Once put forward as a proposal, the abandoned mine appeared to offer a natural and (for the ever cost-conscious legislators) relatively inexpensive site for a prison.
When put into operation in 1773 Newgate Prison was considered a major humanitarian step forward because imprisonment was, for the first time, to be substituted for all capital offenses except homicide. Functioning as both a jail and a prison, the population of Newgate rose and fell over its first few years, as escapes and inmate rebellions exposed its deficiencies and the brutality of its disciplines. Horse thieves, burglars, robbers, chronic drunkards, and counterfeiters, including women and aged inmates, were not only confined underground in terrible conditions; they were also subject to harsh corporal punishments, including the dreaded treadmill. Incarceration by itself was not yet considered a sufficient penalty, and the public debate over the most effective and moral approach to crime intensified.
Newgate’s rural setting and harsh discipline had two advantages, from the vantage point of the Connecticut legislature: it was vividly distinguished from the county jails around the state, and it reflected the emerging consensus that the county jails were too easy for some of the most serious criminals and that they deserved not only a severely separated place but a discipline of the hardest labor and conditions available. Newgate seemed to satisfy both desires. The state’s offer to buy the lease and create a new prison was accepted by the mine owners as a happy conclusion to a failed business.
The lease for the Simsbury property was purchased by the state of Connecticut in 1773, about the same time Philadelphia’s equally famous Walnut Street Jail was designated as a prison meant for the worst of the worst. Newgate too would hold the most serious lawbreakers. In actuality, however, it ended up serving much the same purpose as the larger county jails in Hartford and New Haven, holding a variety of inmates, including federal political prisoners, for varying
