The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates

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The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice - Gordon S. Bates The Driftless Connecticut Series & Garnet Books

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as a prison than it had been as a copper mine. Both were expensive operations to run, and neither the mine nor the prison was easy to create out of solid bedrock. Its vaunted value as an escape-proof prison became riddled by the embarrassing number of escapees.

      The first inmate, John Hinson, arrived in 1773 and fled within three weeks, giving the lie to the natural assumption that Newgate was escape-proof. Hinson climbed out by means of a seventy-foot airshaft that was supposedly too small and slippery for a human to ascend. There were more escapees, yet two years later Gen. George Washington commandeered the prison as a federal site to hold treasonous Tories and deserters from the Continental Army. Such war-related inmates, among the other offenders, including a few women by the early 1780s, characterized the population until the war ended in 1783. “From the first,” states Orlando Lewis in his 1922 history of American prisons, “the prison was the scene of violence, stupid management, escapes, assaults, orgies and demoralization.”21

      Although fifty feet underground, over half the prisoners escaped in the first ten years. Riots occurred in 1881 and 1882, with buildings burned and lives lost. The logic of rebellion was not hard to comprehend. The temperature in the mine was constantly between forty-eight and fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, with ground water percolating along all the mine seams and channels. At night, most of the inmates were chained to the damp walls. During the day, when they weren’t working, they were occasionally able to sit or lie on the rock floor, which was usually wet with ground water.

      The average tunnel height of about five feet, five inches, meant there were few places where prisoners could stand fully erect in many of the horizontal mineshafts. All but the shortest of inmates had to walk hunched over or crawl on the rock floors to move around. Absolute darkness prevailed day or night, except for the few times when one of them smuggled in tallow to form short-lived candles. Prisoners were ill-clad, ill-fed, and generally ill-cared for.

      The first jailer, or keeper, was Capt. John Viets, a landowner and farmer who had been head of the Simsbury militia for a time. When he was appointed in 1773 by the prison overseers accountable to the general court, it was apparently due to his proximity to the site. Viets ran a tavern across the road from the mine entrance. Described as a congenial man, he believed he could easily combine two jobs. One account states that he was overly empathetic to the inmates, a supposition that goes far to explain the numerous escapes that occurred while he was acting warden.22

      From the beginning, the inmates were completely unsupervised when sent back down below. As many as 30 to 40 prisoners would be kept at times in the largest cavern, twenty-one feet long by ten feet wide and just over six feet high, with the remainder scattered in the various tunnels. The numbers of those incarcerated increased steadily to over 160. Some were chained. For over fifty years the strong could and did prey on their weaker and more easily terrified companions.

      By the time the legislature and the political leadership in Connecticut realized Newgate’s growing despicable reputation and began work to replace it, the mine-prison had become one of the most notorious prisons in the world—a disgraceful blot on both Connecticut’s and the nation’s image as humane societies. The biblical metaphor of a godly country and a land of steady habits, so cherished by Connecticut’s founders and residents since 1620, was permanently stained by Newgate Prison. After the Revolution was over, conditions in the mineshafts and caverns worsened, despite several attempts to improve life for those incarcerated there. By 1825 the Newgate Prison scandal was so widely decried that continuing operations proved politically and morally unacceptable to Connecticut’s leaders and to those advocating for prison reform. Before it closed, Newgate had become America’s version of the worst dungeons used in ancient Rome, in Europe, or in America’s mother country. It was not until the 1820s that Connecticut citizens raised their voices in behalf of prison and jail reform. Only after some clear choices were available, combined with the pressure of the Newgate notoriety, did Connecticut make its move into the era of modern prisons. Newgate Prison was classified as a national landmark in 1972.

       MILESTONE 4: PRISON REFORM IN CONNECTICUT

      The idea of building a modern prison in Connecticut at the beginning of the nineteenth century originated in work done long before in Pennsylvania, Boston, and New York. The colony established by William Penn set the standard in American prison construction. In 1770 a major segment of the colony’s population, the Quakers, resumed their long-standing crusade for a nonviolent approach to crime control, a crusade initiated in 1681, when the colony was founded. Penn’s compassionate legal framework of freedoms for “Sylvania” lasted only as long as he was alive. Upon his death the legislature reversed many of Penn’s liberal laws and established a highly retributive justice system, restoring the death penalty and severe corporal punishments. The reversal to a more punitive justice system in Pennsylvania symbolizes a general pattern that has recurred frequently in America.

      Since colonial times there have been strong rehabilitative movements that have held sway with the promise of reducing crime by restoring criminals to law-abiding behavior. When rehabilitation has faltered or come under strong attack, however, the baseline tendency throughout the United States has been to trust in the power of harsh incarceration to break the antisocial spirit in current offenders and to deter others who have not yet broken or been caught breaking the law. Various combinations of punitive approaches and subordinate rehabilitative efforts have marked the evolution of American crime control.

      The Quakers learned a valuable lesson by the reversal of Penn’s laws. Instead of building their crusade around governmental authority, in 1776 they formed a voluntary organization called the Philadelphia Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners. Its express purpose was to care for those convicted and promote the passage of more compassionate laws. The Revolution against England, however, diluted the new agency’s energy, and it disbanded shortly after its formation. Once the American Revolutionary War was ended, efforts resumed to create an enduring agency.

      In 1787 the Pennsylvania Prison Society was formed. Still in existence, it is the oldest American voluntary association focused on penology and prison reform—its timeline exceeded only by the John Howard Association, which today is more active in Canada and the United Kingdom than in the United States. The Pennsylvania Prison Society is still highly productive and respected nationally and internationally. It has remained the gold standard for voluntary agencies seeking a balanced and enduring approach to improving and reforming state criminal justice systems in each successive generation. Other private nonprofit agencies have at times exceeded the Pennsylvania Prison Society’s energy and budget, but none has ever surpassed it in staying power, effectiveness, and creative output.

      With the formation of the Pennsylvania Prison Society a corner had been turned. Three decades later, in Boston, a Congregational minister named Louis Dwight became an ardent convert to prison reform while distributing bibles for the American Bible Society. He started a lengthy evangelistic journey for the society in the early 1820s, and as a Yale Divinity School graduate, he chose as a starting point a place with which he was familiar: the New Haven Whalley Avenue Jail. Dwight was horrified at conditions he found. Next he visited the Bridewell Jail in New York City, which further disturbed him. His tour then took him through numerous county jails and more than a few prisons, as he traveled down the Atlantic Coast and westward. At the conclusion of his journey, in 1825, he returned to Boston with a vision and a plan. With some friends he formed the Boston Prison Discipline Society, a group that acted more aggressively to move prison reform forward in the early nineteenth century than any other in the country.23

      Dwight was an indefatigable evangelist, not just for the Christian church but also for a new, more humane but disciplined approach to criminal justice. He became a veritable “Johnny Appleseed” of the prison reform movement. Having seen, firsthand, the atrocious state of affairs in both county jails and penitentiaries on his journey, he visited Connecticut’s Newgate Prison in November 1825 and was still not prepared for the horrors he beheld. His lobbying in Connecticut was crucial in moving the legislation for a new prison through the House,

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