Prison, Moses Pilsbury, in 1827. Its purpose at the outset was two-fold: first and foremost, labor was a way for prisoners to pay back the cost of incarceration. Second, labor was part of the prison discipline, the best and only way (in the opinion of most prison correctional staff) to inculcate good work habits in prisoners who never had developed them and actively resisted them.
The fact that the monetary rationale for prison labor was uppermost among legislators and in the general public was evidence of the subtle manner in which retribution regained its vitality after 1900. Hard-liners were always visible among the prison staff and certainly among conservative politicians of both parties. They were not alone. Even some progressive reformers pressed for hard labor to be imposed, acquiescing in the assumption that a significant percentage of offenders must lack either willpower or good work habits. Hard labor, with the emphasis on hard, was the necessary hammer to instill new patterns. The antebellum rhetoric of reform of Wayland, Taylor, and a host of others persisted as an undercurrent, but its capacity to persuade gradually diminished. The exchange of retribution for rehabilitation was a pattern that would be repeated in the decades ahead.
Prison labor took place inside the walls of the Wethersfield State Prison, just as it had in the workshops of the Old Newgate Prison. The prisoners at Wethersfield, following the Auburn plan, worked in silence in congregate workshops inside the walls. That deprivation gradually eased, and by turn of the century some talking was allowed if it pertained to the work. Wayland and Taylor were strong supporters of Connecticut’s approach to prison labor. At the 1883 meeting of the National Prison Association, Wayland praised the profitability of Wethersfield State Prison, but, not surprisingly, he insisted that fiscal gain was less important than the value it added to the offenders. “There is better order and less punishment than in any other prison…. The sanitary condition is as good…. As to the reformatory effect he is taught regular hours of labor … the importance of obedience to orders … (and) prevented from the use of intoxicating liquors.”37
Wayland derided those who would try to abolish productive labor in Connecticut’s state prison. In 1888, he proposed a resolution to the National Prison Association in Boston, which was immediately adopted, to the effect that the association support prison labor “as an indispensable factor in the work of prison reform.” Changes that permitted idleness inflicted “irreparable injury upon the prisoner, the working man and the state.”38
Among the nation’s prisons, four different methods were utilized, commonly called the state account, the piece-price, the lease, and the contract systems. They were not rigidly separate categories, and often one or more overlapped in any given state. There were lengthy debates in the annual congresses of the National Prison Association on which was the easiest to implement, the most productive to use, and the most profitable to the state. A simple description of each illustrates Connecticut’s choice.
In the state account, the “factory” work was performed inside the prison, with the machinery owned by the state and the goods produced for sale outside. Many states preferred this system because the state governed the custody, the care, the discipline, and the labor of the prisoner. It was also a challenge and often a financial stretch to find space to put the machinery, to maintain it, and to adapt to changing needs in whatever product line was being produced.
A second popular system often used, though not often in Connecticut, was called the “piece-price” approach. In it, each prisoner earned a certain amount of pay for each article or object made. The location of the manufacturing could be inside the prison or out in the community. Depending on that choice, the government or the manufacturer supplied the material and machinery. How much of the earnings was put in the inmate’s account and how much was retained by the prison differed according to the contract signed with the manufacturer and the policies of the prison. The challenge of this approach was the logistics of keeping track of the items produced and maintaining quality control with the various manufacturers involved.
A third type of prison labor was called a “lease” system, in which the state leased prisoners to an outside party, often on an annual basis. Once leased out, the prison usually had little or no say in what work was done or how it was managed and often did not desire that authority. Responsibility for the clothing, food, medical care, transportation, and guards needed in the work was handed over to the factory, the farmer, or the mine official.
The lease system originated in the South and was used most extensively there. It was also the most easily abused of the four choices. Here the inmate was leased to a mine owner, a manufacturer, a farmer, or the public works department of a town or county. Rarely did any of the money go the offender, who more often than not did not survive the brutality to live through the end of the contract. The morality (or lack of it) of the lessor alone determined the level of care or violence practiced. An almost inexhaustible supply of prisoners were guaranteed by the state in combination with local laws, which were expanded to facilitate arrests and convictions. In many towns and counties of the South, an offender could be arrested, according to laws passed for that purpose, for any one of dozens of violations. Leniency on the sentence would be promised if the offender agreed to work off the cost of the penalty. More violations would extend the sentence until there was no hope of ever paying the debt, except by death.39 The majority of lessors were free to conclude that there was little need to worry about how long a prisoner stayed alive. The lease system was the setting in which the notorious chain gangs emerged, usually to work on roads or in agricultural settings.
The effect of the lease system in the southern states fell most heavily on poor whites and newly freed African Americans seeking homes and jobs. It seems these populations were more frequently arrested for trespassing, vagrancy, drunkenness, or lack of identification. The offenders were leased to factories or plantations to work off their sentence. Once there, conditions became brutal, and resistance meant added time and beatings until the offender, more often than not, found himself indentured for life or until he died from abuse. Slavery had discovered a new, and much more protected, venue.40
Connecticut used the fourth system, called the “contract system,” and employed it without cessation from 1827 to the mid-twentieth century. In its earliest form, the goods were manufactured inside the prison, with materials, machinery, and work instruction provided by the contractor. The prison retained responsibility and authority for the disciplinary side of the prisoner’s life. Some of the work was done inside the prison, directed by skilled factory employees.
The contract system called for a per diem charge to the contractor for each inmate employed. In its later forms some prisoners were sent out to work in factories in the community, accompanied by guards. The financial profit was positive some years, and the state lost money other years, but the system was maintained in spite of resistance from free labor supporters. The system did not work perfectly, but in a small state like Connecticut, the contract system was quite feasible and often profitable.
Although he was open to all but the lease system, Francis Wayland praised the Wethersfield State Prison as a model of contract labor. He boasted in 1883 that when “ ‘agitators’ against the contract system were fully notified at the beginning of the contract process, invited to be present to state their objections … not a human being presented himself, not one.”41
Wayland was most eloquent about the value of constructive work for prisoners, as he had witnessed it in Connecticut. Before the 1888 meeting in Boston of the National Prison Association, he argued that the bill being presented to the NPA was extremely important because prison labor affects every part of prison reform and the total well-being of every prisoner.42 Wayland was correct. Prison labor is a complex subject worthy of being studied on its own merits. Here the point that demands attention is not simply that the CPA leaders chose one system or another, but that they, along with most prison reformers, never questioned the involuntary use of prisoners’ labor, either in terms of its benefit to the state or in its correlations to slavery.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution
