Sing Sing the methods of discipline included the “bath,” in which a multigallon tub of ice-cold water was dumped at once on the head of a recalcitrant prisoner standing naked beneath it. The force of the water alone could cause a concussion, and, when repeated, sometimes more than once, the brain function was permanently diminished. Other corporal punishments were added as time went on until the reports to the public became intolerable. New York and the nation were realizing once again a hard truth about the human capacity to be cruel.28
Thomas Mott Osborne, one of the most notable of twentieth-century prison reformers, put it succinctly, “One system [Cherry Hill] had approached the problem [of controlling crime] from the mental side; aiming to solve it by making men think right. The other system [Auburn] had approached the problem from the physical side; aiming to solve it by making men act right.” He concluded that both approaches ignored the fact, which Osborne considered crucial, that the basic problem of crime and punishment was moral and required a moral solution involving the offender from the beginning of incarceration to the point of discharged.29 Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1833, made the distinction thusly: “the Philadelphia system produces more honest men and that of New York more obedient citizens.”30
CONNECTICUT’S CHOICE: THE AUBURN PLAN
In 1827, when Connecticut made its choice of approach in favor of the Auburn system, of course, a clear understanding of the full deficiencies of either approach was still in the future. Two factors drove the choice. One was state pride, generating the need to redeem Connecticut’s reputation arising from the abysmal stories of their own Newgate “dungeon.” Connecticut was determined to show the world that its prisons were not inhumane warehouses but productive places of reform. The second factor was the strong political desire to build the most profitable and least expensive prison possible. With Louis Dwight’s passionate encouragement on both counts, the state’s leaders decided that the best move was to adopt the Auburn model. Building on that plan also meant that the facilities needed would be in place at least a year ahead of anything built along the complex lines of the Philadelphia system, which required multiple skilled professionals to install all the features to house inmates in individual cells, assure absolute isolation, and provide space enough for each to have a work station. The Auburn way was by far the logical choice for frugal Yankees.
In May 1826 the Connecticut House of Representatives officially accepted the offer of property on the south side of the Wethersfield Cove off the Connecticut River as the location for a new prison. The action was followed a month later by a Connecticut Senate endorsement. Construction began in July with the laying of a brownstone cornerstone from the Portland quarries across the Connecticut River. Moses Pilsbury, a warden in New Hampshire, was hired as the first head of the new institution.
Eleven months later twenty convicts were brought down from Newgate Prison to begin the first wall. In July 1830 Moses would be succeeded by his son, Amos, and the Pilsbury name would become well known throughout the region over the next forty years. There are conflicting reports of the number of inmates transferred from Old Newgate, but Denis Caron’s research, which seems to be the best available, concludes that the first resident inmates arrived in late June, twenty in number, followed by twenty more in August and the remaining eighty-one in September.31
On October 1, 1829, the new state prison in Wethersfield began operations. There would be silent, congregate work and meals during the day and silence in the cells at night. Each cell was seven by three and a half by seven feet, with oak doors three inches thick. An eighteen by fourteen–inch grating allowed food to be passed through, and a flue in the ceiling provided ventilation. A visitor to the prison three months after it opened was impressed that in this “excellent establishment … hard labor and silence were rigorously enforced throughout the day, with solitary meals in the cells, and where all social intercourse amongst prisoners is effectually interdicted.”32 Each inmate was given a Bible and religious services were scheduled for each Sunday morning and evening. Moses Pilsbury himself read the Bible to inmates on numerous occasions while he was warden, and by 1831 a full-time chaplain had been appointed.33
A visitor to Wethersfield State Prison in 1835 commented that the mild discipline being used within the Auburn system was quite a contrast to the situation at New York’s Sing Sing Prison. The Connecticut institution was praised for cultivating in the prisoners the hope of eventual release and the desire to hasten that end. Each prisoner had to work off the cost of his arrest, with good conduct rewarded. The lack of flogging was cited as well as the firmness with which the prison regimen was managed. As for the racial distribution within the prison population, free blacks were estimated at approximately 25 percent of the state prison population. The same visitor commented on a national policy that tolerates the exclusion of blacks from honest employment because white owners and employees will not work with them, yet penalized them for lack of a job. Such a situation “prepares men for the penitentiary … while laboring at the diminution of crime. But what shall we say of its justice, which thus forces its subjects into by-paths, and then punishes them for the deviation?”34
The overall result was a prison whose atmosphere was highly regulated, strongly disciplined, but relatively gentle. The decision to greatly reduce, if not eliminate, whipping, flogging, and other standard punishments among a relatively small population was an achievable goal. In another 1835 document, this one titled, Report on the Penitentiaries of the United States by, William Crawford, Wethersfield was praised highly for its reduction of corporal punishment, implying that whipping was seldom, if ever, used. Silence was enforced, but not so rigidly as to take away an offender’s humanity. The total picture renders “this penitentiary more deserving of attention than perhaps any other … in the United States.”35
But criminal justice, like many other fields of endeavor, is replete with examples of unintended consequences. Wethersfield would by no means escape criticism or public investigation. Norris Osborn, writing a multivolume history of Connecticut, reported that while Wethersfield was at first regarded as among the best of American prisons and a model of the Auburn type, it soon showed evidence of an institution far from perfection. He cites too many close interrelationships between the administrators, the shop overseers, and the outside contractors; a lack of proper heat and ventilation; inadequate food; and political interference. Within three more decades a legislative investigatory committee established that many cells were without light and ventilation; that the chapel was “uninviting”; that even the quarters for the warden and his staff were “disgraceful”; that bed linens went unchanged for over six weeks; that baths were available infrequently; and that there was no provision for outside exercise.36
Of course, this adherence to a higher standard was not a pioneering effort in the strict sense. The minimal use of corporal punishment was not unusual from the humanitarian perspective. It had been rejected as inhumane and non-Christian by reformers in Europe, England, and America. Corporal punishment had been minimized by William Penn and was not permitted in New York City’s Newgate Prison. But in terms of the evolution of American morals, the restrictions on corporal punishment went counter to colonial history and counter to common sense.
The Pennsylvania system had gotten around the use of physical punishment by the means of total isolation of all inmates at all times. Prisons using the Auburn system, on the other hand, utilized all manner of brutal tactics as punishments or as incentives for inmates to work harder at their jobs. For the Wethersfield State Prison to limit corporal punishment in the regulations of the institution was highly unusual, even if it was not the first or the only institution to do so. It remains a notable example of a moral revolution reaching its most practical implementation without fanfare.
Nevertheless, the rejection of corporal punishment posed a real dilemma for Connecticut in the face of the realities of incarceration. To begin with, advocates on all sides of the prison reform issue agreed that each and every crime was itself an act of violence, from breaching the peace to murder, and deserved to be punished. The perpetual cry from all sides was that crime had to be dealt with
