of Puritanism gradually became dominant. From Thomas Hooker to Nathaniel Taylor, an evolving Puritanism promoted, even as it was absorbed into the culture and was therefore less obvious, a more rational sense of proportionality in criminal sentencing. The evolving approach featured a growing confidence in the capacity of people to change and for offenders to change for the better.
PRISON REFORM
The roots of intentional prison reform can be found in the last half of the eighteenth century in England. John Howard led the way. A country gentleman, Howard was appointed the high sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. Upon inspecting the jail of his shire or county, he became appalled with the nasty conditions and set about rectifying them, an unprecedented action at the time. His own moral conscience was touched when he discovered that most of his jailed wards were either too poor to pay their taxes or had violated some minor royal edict. Two years later he toured hundreds of jails and prisons at his own expense, noting with great detail the deficiencies and inhumanities of each one.
In 1777 Howard sent a detailed treatise, State of the Prisons, to Parliament. His vivid descriptions of the toxic and dangerous conditions in the prisons and jails galvanized Parliament to unusually prompt action. The Penitentiary Act of 1779, among other improvements, mandated single-occupancy cells in all English prisons and the use of the title penitentiary houses to identify all such institutions from that point on. It was a propitious beginning, but the actual conditions within the jails and prisons were slow to change for the better, despite the law.23
Between 1800 and the Civil War, stimulated by John Howard’s legacy and the work of other English and European reformers, energetic strides were taken in the United States to initiate new prison architectures and reformatory management methods. Pennsylvania’s Quakers led the way. Although they had been subjected to oppressive treatment, hatred, and rejection in many other colonies, under the protection of William Penn, Quakers began a reform movement in 1790, just after the conclusion of the Revolution. The Walnut Street Jail, established in Philadelphia in 1773, was renovated to be America’s first penitentiary. A three-story building, it was small (twenty-five by forty-five feet) and contained eight six-by-nine-foot cells. Although intended to incarcerate offenders who displayed depraved morals, dangerous characters, unruly dispositions, or disorderly conduct, as well less unruly offenders, it was the first implementation of the rehabilitative principles of isolation through solitary confinement (each cell held only one prisoner), of discipline through hard labor, and of incarceration as punishment, not for punishment.24 In other words, the time served was the complete penalty. Additional punishments, though never eliminated, were officially discouraged.
In 1829 a new prison was built in a section of Philadelphia called Cherry Hill. It had been in the planning stage for more than twenty years, and when constructed the Eastern State Penitentiary became the most expensive—$780,000—and architecturally complex prison in the United States to that date. Its wheel-type design, featuring a central control hub with cell blocks as the spokes of the wheel, had a capacity of up to 450 inmates when it was built in 1829. The management method of Eastern State Penitentiary was a strict combination of silence and isolation.25
No corporal punishment was allowed or needed, since the inmates were never in contact with other offenders or with staff. The whole purpose of the prison was well-intentioned rehabilitation, but the end result was horrific. The system drove many of the inmates insane. Within a decade the prison disciplines were modified to reduce the total silence and isolation. The purpose remained the same. Unexpectedly, few other prisons in the United States copied the Pennsylvania plan. European nations, on the other hand, felt the methods used were excellent and, with modifications, implemented their own versions.
Taking their cue from Pennsylvania’s experience, New York State embarked on its attempt at a reformatory prison. Several lessons emerged from the Eastern State Penitentiary experience. New York concluded that total isolation was counterproductive. Too many inmates could not tolerate the loneliness, and the program did not produce any significant work products. In addition, perhaps most important to many New York political leaders, the cost was far too much to build and to maintain.
New York decided that the Auburn State Prison—at the northern end of Owasco Lake in the upstate Finger Lakes region—would use a congregate system of prison labor, with inmates working together in workshop style rather than individually in their cells. Silence would be maintained at night when inmates were “locked-down” in individual cells and during meals. During the day, at work, some words could be exchanged with staff but not with other inmates. The Auburn plan worked fairly well from the standpoint of the state’s desire for economic profit from prison labor. It was praised for its workshop production. With the low overhead and captive workforce, the prison actually made a profit. Striped uniforms and the lockstep (a shuffling slide step with one hand on the shoulder of the next man) were initiated at Auburn. The purpose of the labor and silence seemed to encourage prayer, meditation, and eventually improved behavior. On the other hand, staff increasingly inflicted corporal punishment—as a way of wielding total control.26
Also, in 1829, a new prison was built in Wethersfield, Connecticut, which embodied the Auburn system. The design was a rectangular fortress, whose walls were made of brownstone blocks quarried from nearby Portland, Connecticut. Its cells were much smaller than those in Pennsylvania. Other prisons were built with the same plan in Boston and at Sing Sing, on New York’s Hudson River. The era of rehabilitative institutions peaked just as the Civil War began in 1661. Then retribution, prompted by the war mentality, returned to the forefront.
Detailed descriptions of the New York and Pennsylvania approaches to prison architecture and discipline will be introduced in the next chapter. It is sufficient to say here that each design represented what came to be called the penitentiary system of incarceration. The facilities existed to reform the offender, with loss of liberty as the main punishment. As reported by Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville after their tour of the United States in 1833–34, each “rests upon these two united principles, solitude and labour. These principles, in order to be salutary, ought not to be separated: the one is inefficient without the other.”27
The penitentiary system, as it put into practice the theory of moral conversion, ran into persistent problems and unintended consequences between 1830 and 1870. Successful conversions were infrequent; corporal punishments were reintroduced to maintain discipline; conditions within the prison walls were minimally humane and declined steadily. Instead of penitence, prisoners saw more violence, madness, and suicide. In the Wethersfield State Prison, the situation deteriorated during and after the Civil War, with financial scandals adding to the disciplinary issues.
Reform movements were gaining strength in several other mid-Atlantic states such as Maryland and Delaware, where prison associations were organized by groups of citizens similar to the origin of the Connecticut Prison Association. During the American Civil War, thousands of men from the Union and the Confederacy experienced terrible conditions as prisoners of war. As word spread of the horrible fate of those captured from each side, the gradual growth of awareness in the public elicited a revulsion against such treatment of war prisoners and a change of attitude about the moral issues involved in the incarceration of civil offenders. Reform movements arose around concerns raised by the plight of thousands of homeless people throughout the United States (including former slaves, street urchins, alcoholics, and mentally unstable persons). Hundreds were arrested for vagrancy, breach of peace, loitering, and a host of minor and major crimes.
Confinement increased as newly developed police forces in all the states, including Connecticut, attempted to clear the streets of all who caused problems for businesses or aroused fears among the settled populace. The conclusion of the war between the states ended one set of issues around war and peace but opened up a wide spectrum of new issues dealing with mental health, the integration of former slaves, those who could not or would not work, the cost and purpose of jails and prisons, and criticisms of the ways offenders were punished
