other humans, the experience would be exhilarating.
It was a system that appealed greatly to European nations, many of whom had learned that fewer problems arose when inmates did not assemble in groups. Most prisons in France, Germany, and Belgium in the nineteenth century were built along the lines of Eastern State Penitentiary. They also learned by experience what the advocates of the Pennsylvania model discovered, that total isolation and silence, if prolonged, would lead to insanity rather than penitence.
In the United States the other colonies watched with interest to see how each model worked in reality. Concern about the destruction of offender minds and spirits was raised during the debates and certainly played a role in the choices made. For political leaders, money and space were at issue. For moral leaders, the concern was which system promised the most rehabilitation. The Auburn system was the most common choice.
The New York (Auburn) System of Punitive Rehabilitation
Observing the situation in Pennsylvania, New York State made the decision in the first decade of the nineteenth century to go with a “congregate” rather than a “separate” plan. New York City’s political and correctional leaders had built the state’s first prison in 1797. They had also labeled it “Newgate” after the English prison by that name. It was located about a mile and half above city hall in Manhattan. The name was chosen for the same reason Connecticut used it, to invoke terror in the minds of the inmates housed there. Its congregate housing was more like a dormitory. With ten to twenty men in each apartment, it was soon overcrowded. Criticisms arose about the apparent hardening and recidivism of the inmates incarcerated there.
A call for a new prison emerged within a year from New York’s political sector. A new facility was authorized in the town of Auburn, located in the north-central part of the state at the top of Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region. Auburn’s first buildings in 1816 had congregate apartments for the men to sleep in, but the discipline imposed was even worse than in the Pennsylvania model. The New York legislature ordered that the worst prisoners should be confined in solitary cells on a permanent basis without any labor. The result was another horror show that eventually became intolerable, even to the most hardened of observers. Inmates became mentally and morally ill. They became a permanent burden to the state. Three years later, under orders from the governor, New York constructed the model with separate cells. The windowless cells on the interior became one of Auburn’s hallmarks, but the isolation was still without any work schedule. Again, there was an alarming increase in mental health and inmate deaths. Because the cells were used only at night, Auburn’s administrators found it necessary to use various control methods in addition to corporal punishments to control inmate behavior. The lockstep and the striped uniform had their first use in the Auburn system. Retribution trumped rehabilitation once again.
The original prison’s final buildings were completed in 1829, the same year as Eastern State Penitentiary. But, during those two decades, as both Eastern and Auburn were being built, Connecticut took the opportunity to assess the results. It was not alone in analyzing the choices. Throughout the northern states the debate as to which was the best system was fierce.
It would be a gross understatement simply to say that the Boston Prison Discipline Society’s director, Louis Dwight, strongly favored the Auburn system. He idealized it in the extreme. For religious reasons and social reasons, he saw the salvation of society in the Auburn model. From his evangelical perspective, religious redemption was the primary purpose of both punishment and incarceration, and he believed the Auburn approach offered the best combination of factors to improve almost every offender.
Dwight’s argument was simple. Auburn imposed the same severe discipline as Eastern State. The difference was that inmates were separated in silence for penitence at night, but brought together during the day to labor in workshops. Silence was maintained, and the work done was believed to inculcate order, conformity, and good work habits. The arrangement prevented (or tried to prevent) any communications, verbal or otherwise, between inmates even while they worked or ate, but at the same time, theoretically, gave them an opportunity for human association in the workshops.
The Auburn result: complete isolation at night and highly regulated congregate activity during the day. It seemed to Dwight to be the perfect approach to the devout life for everyone. He prayed and worked for the application of these rigorous principles not only to prisons but also to colleges, academies and even the home. In his mind, it was through such common discipline that the United States might become the nation that God intended it to be. Dwight was extending the goal of John Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay. Wherever people would listen, Dwight preached that message indefatigably until his death.
Louis Dwight’s evangelism made a huge impact in Connecticut. The practical differences between the two systems, however, finally determined the choice made by Connecticut. In the land of steady habits, the religious motivation was extremely important and rarely dismissed, but it did tend to be vague and uncertain in its outcomes. Much more persuasive to the frugal Yankee mentality were the quantifiable economic benefits that seemed likely to follow the Auburn methods. For supporters in the legislative, business, and political realms, the New York model, by 1825, had all the advantages of the Pennsylvania system plus an even more attractive payoff, not that Auburn’s form of discipline had been any freer from criticisms than its counterpart in Cherry Hill. It was indeed fortunate that New York had a dozen years to experiment before Connecticut seriously started its process to choose its own approach. A closer look at the Auburn prison indicates why.
In 1823 Governor Joseph C. Yates had made a personal visit to Auburn and, shocked by the inhumane disciplines, immediately pardoned most of the inmates in an unprecedented political reaction. By the late 1820s Auburn had evolved into a prison based on the combination of total silence and congregate labor. In a bizarre twist, however, the obsession with absolute silence brought about a need for constant surveillance and a zoo-like atmosphere within. Keepers at night tiptoed shoeless up and down the cell blocks to detect whispers. In the lockstep created at Auburn, inmates’ heads had to be turned toward the keeper so he could see any lip movements. An especially Orwellian feature was a two-thousand-foot passageway behind the workshops with narrow slits for peepholes, allowing officials to watch for misbehavior among the laboring convicts, such as masturbation or humming. The passageway behind the cells became a tourist attraction. Six to eight thousand people a year enhanced prison revenues by paying twenty-five cents admission, with a guidebook available for another quarter.
Over the years, a dazzling assortment of wares came out of Auburn: nails, barrels, clothing, shoes and boots, carpets, buttons, carpenters’ tools, steam engines and boilers, combs, harnesses, furniture, brooms, clocks, buckets and pails, saddle trees, wagons and sleighs, threshing equipment, and even rifles. At one point in the 1840s, worms and mulberry trees were brought in, and the prison entered the silk production business.
This wide variety of products was what caught the attention of Connecticut’s legislators, along with the fact that Auburn-style prisons had a lower cost of construction. Given these monetary advantages, opponents found it hard to refute the advantages of the Auburn system over the Pennsylvanian. Either system might lead the inmate to be repentant, but the Auburn method would also definitely make the offender part of a cost-effective and profitable factory by day. What more could people ask of a prison? Other states reached the same conclusions, and before long the Auburn interior cell-block design became the standard for most of America’s prison architects.
Theory, of course, always runs up against realities, and the Auburn system was no exception. As it turned out, with the number of inmates involved (over 450 by 1829), Auburn’s administrators began to argue, successfully, that the prison’s achievements were possible only with the frequent and brutal assistance of the whip and other corporal punishments. That last factor, the need to use an increasingly violent set of penalties for disobedience, was to reach its zenith in the unparalleled brutality exhibited in New York’s notorious Sing Sing Prison before the end of the nineteenth century.
