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CHAPTER TWO From Newgate Prison to Wethersfield State Prison, 1775–1875

As to the places of confinement, they are retarded evolutions of the jails, which began in the little germ at Hartford in 1640 … part of a plant whose most gaudy blossom was Newgate.

— George L. Clark, History of Connecticut

One of the unique experiences that helped mold my views on criminal justice was the opportunity in the mid eighties to participate in a mock imprisonment at the former Haddam State Jail, a facility that the Department of Correction used as a training site. Along with twenty or so guard recruits, I was fingerprinted late one Thursday afternoon and booked into the old jail as an inmate. Each of us was given a uniform to wear for the next three days and assigned to a cell. Our three guards introduced themselves, one playing a softhearted custodian, one an ambivalent role, and the third a hard-nosed guard. There was the usual banter and slightly nervous joking during the first night. The next two days were filled with bare minimum meals, planted contraband, accusations of rule breaking, ragged sleep, and signs of serious competition to curry favor with one or more of the guards. The third day revealed the effects of being locked up. Just after the noon meal, in the recreation area, we were tossing a medicine ball around, when, without any warning, the hard-nosed guard appeared on the balcony and rapped three times with his keys. In an instant the ball dropped to the floor, and twenty intelligent men who knew this was a game waited in sheer deference to authority, in absolute silence for at least three minutes. In the debriefing after the incarceration ended, there was no argument that each of us had been transformed into inmates in three days.

Each of the following milestones helped to sculpt the face of justice that would characterize Connecticut at any given time. Retributive justice and rehabilitative justice were both present in greater or lesser degree in every phase of the system that emerged from the state’s founding in the seventeenth century to the present day. Together with the cultural milieu described in chapter 1, this summary of the beginnings of Connecticut’s criminal justice system is intended to put the formation and the work of the Connecticut Prison Association in its historical context.

The initial development of laws and courts to process the colonial response to crime happened between 1630 and 1700. Connecticut consistently adapted that judicial foundation in the evolution from a colony to a state. A second milestone occurred with the transformation from county workhouses into county jails. A third, and most notorious, milestone passed in 1773, when Connecticut refitted a defunct copper mine into its first prison facility, Newgate Prison. Named after an infamous prison in London (and originally spelled New Gate), the facility confined offenders in underground caverns. The place rapidly earned an international reputation as a throwback to Europe’s dungeons. Newgate’s celebrity status for its savagery provided a major provocation for Connecticut’s first true prison reform movement early in the nineteenth century, our fourth milestone. The carefully thought-out construction of a “modern” prison for Connecticut in 1827 also drew international attention, this time of a positive sort. Wethersfield State Prison marked a significant step forward in the development of an organized, deliberative approach to penology.

The formation of Connecticut’s first police forces in the urban areas of Connecticut in the late nineteenth century serves as our final milestone. Along with the laws designating who was eligible for arrest, police discretion in enforcing those regulations hugely influenced the tone as well as the substance of justice that emerged in Connecticut.

MILESTONE 1: CONNECTICUT’S FIRST LAWS, COURTS, AND WORKHOUSES

When they arrived in America, the early New England colonists of the 1620s brought with them several resources to achieve their goal of establishing an exemplary community of faith and order wherever they settled in the new land. Although differing in important ways, Connecticut derived much of its basic approach to criminal justice from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first resource was the Bible, which supplied a multifaceted religious history of ethical regulations, moral commandments, and proverbial wisdom about how to maintain a faithful, safe, and orderly community. Biblical law was the filter through which the colonists poured their long experience with the upper-class law and societal mores they had left behind. Their memories and experiences with English common law were also resources. The common law had not always been kind to the Puritans and other immigrants, especially in the Crown’s response to religious dissent. The fact that royal supervision was spotty at best, and too often yielded arbitrary decisions, increased the odds of running afoul of the common law. In general, common law worked well enough to hold the nation together and provide at least theoretical limits to royal prerogative. The colonists used the most functional and productive aspects as they adapted to their new, and very different, environment.

Relationships with those in England who had funded the Puritan emigration were still strong, despite the fact that over three thousand miles of ocean separated them. In the absence of trained lawyers and other legal experts, each of New England’s colonies utilized various parts of the unwritten common law to construct legal foundations. The results in the different colonies were practical laws to maintain order, courts to process offenders, and workhouses in which to temporarily hold debtors and those convicted of moral lapses or crimes.

The colonies were separated from one another as well as from England. Consequently, each town, as well as each colony, structured itself according to its own needs and abilities. According to legal historian Lawrence Friedman, “There were as many colonial systems as there were colonies…. Throughout the colonial period, the colonists borrowed as much English law as they wanted to take or were forced to take.”¹

For example, twenty-two of the regulations in Robert Ludlow’s Code of 1650 were taken, almost without change, from the code of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and six other laws were borrowed from other sources in the older colony. Fourteen regulations of the Connecticut code were original. Written colonial laws constituted a pattern quite different from English common law, which was rarely codified. “The first codes of the colonies were fresh-start codes … designed to put limits around potential abuses of power in a barely structured society.”²

It is easy to ridicule the laws drawn up in the early codes as unconstitutional or for behaviors taken for granted today as personal matters. In a society, however, that was struggling to survive, such codes provided a framework that church and political leaders thought essential to maintain order. They had learned in England that relying on the benevolence or the good judgment of the king or those acting on behalf of the Crown resulted in judgments based on whim, personal bias, or national considerations. A government of laws, not persons, was required by the Bible and by their experience. The fact that decisions based on whim and bias were not eliminated was taken to prove the doctrine of original sin and the need for checks and balances in the application of the law. Colonial codes laid the foundation for the American version of democracy.

For the first few years the colonists depended on parental enforcement and frequent sermons to assure compliance with the laws. When these tactics proved insufficient, public shame was utilized, with English stocks and pillories. As long as corporal punishment was the norm, with the death penalty as the ultimate retribution through the end of the eighteenth century, any extensive use of jails was unnecessary. Capital punishment was actually used sparingly, applied only for murder, treason, and, for a brief time, witchcraft. Connecticut, not known for breaking new ground very often, focused on strengthening the moral fiber of its members against the devil.

Hartford was the setting for the first person executed in the colonies for witchcraft. Eleven people (ten women, one man) were convicted as witches in the Connecticut Colony between 1647 and 1663. All were hanged. The convictions of three more, charged in 1665, 1668, and 1692, were reversed.³

The difference was the demand by Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr. and a colleague, Gershom Bulkeley, that Connecticut abide by the rule of law that required confirmation of witchcraft by independent witnesses rather than emotional testimonies of those making the charges. Both men were steeped in the new scientific worldview created by the Enlightenment, a viewpoint that was open to new ideas and that looked for evidence, not emotional conviction, in the search for justice and truth. The two also studied alchemy and other novel branches of science. Winthrop was in a key position to bring the witchcraft frenzy to a halt in Connecticut.⁴

The death penalty became increasingly problematic in the colonies. Memories of its overuse in England provided one deterrent. A second factor was the obvious evidence that the penalty did not stop the crimes when it was applied. A third was the solemn fact that repentance was impossible once the death penalty was administered. Even in the application of corporal punishments, the goal was to chastise the offender in the hope that conversion to a better life was achieved.

The Connecticut Colony also emulated the Massachusetts Bay court structure, electing a general court at the top of the legal hierarchy. County courts, created in 1668, were subordinate to the general court. The office of the magistrate (also called the justice of the peace in England) was a local official, not necessarily an attorney, in the cities and towns and was at the bottom of the hierarchy. Decisions in many instances could be appealed to the general court, which had the final say. In 1638 the general court established a particular court in Connecticut to be the principal judicial body of the state.

Sixty years later the general court was renamed the Connecticut General Assembly and the modern terminology of the separation of powers was initiated. In 1662 Gov. John Winthrop Jr. used his ability to persuade his personal and family contacts in England to obtain a charter for Connecticut that gave the state almost complete freedom to govern itself, a unique situation among the thirteen colonies. Based on that charter, two new levels of courts were established: the court of assistants in 1665 and the county courts three years later. Separate probate courts were established in 1698 to handle such matters as wills and estates. A superior court was established in 1711. A supreme court of errors was established in 1784 and was renamed the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1965.

Connecticut became notable in several ways during its first two centuries. One was the voting power delegated to “freemen,” as Christian homeowners were called at the time. Only Connecticut (plus Rhode Island), of the original thirteen colonies, elected their governors rather than having them appointed by the representatives of the king and still had all the power of the king behind their appointments.

All colonies, it is true, elected their delegates to their versions of the general court and general assembly, as well as their town leaders. But the free election of their top leader, under the conditions granted him by the voters, gave to Connecticut an impetus to model democracy at all levels of government. It was out of this context that the Fundamental Orders were written, specifying that the citizens of Connecticut were freely associating themselves to be “one public state or commonwealth.”⁵ A second notable peculiarity was the stress laid by Rev. Thomas Hooker on the indispensable value of voluntary associations. In Bradley Chapin’s words, “In Connecticut he became the firm, articulate spokesman” of that concept.⁶

The Fundamental Orders were based on the vitality and potential of voluntary association. The idea spread throughout the expanding nation in the following decades. Connecticut, however, provided a prime example of people consciously and intentionally forming a government and subsequently other groups by free choice and voluntary consensus. Eventually, Connecticut’s delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention—Oliver Ellsworth, William S. Johnson, and Roger Sherman—played a key role in the writing and subsequent formation of the U.S. Constitution after the Revolution.

The first voluntary associations, therefore, were religious groups organizing to form a political government, along with religious groups, called churches, bonding around faith commitments without recourse to royal charter or a state church’s permission. In the nineteenth century there was an explosion of voluntary associations to pursue a multitude of social purposes. Eventually civic, financial, economic, reformatory, and other types of associations followed. The ongoing effect of such associations on the criminal justice system that evolved in Connecticut is a major theme traced through the following chapters.

MILESTONE 2: THE EMERGENCE OF CONNECTICUT’S JAILS

The jail emerged from the workhouse early in colonial history. Its role as a place not just for the alcoholic and the pauper fed a Puritan passion to control more serious immoral behavior by prompt and direct punishments. It was a passion rooted in the Anglican Christian tradition they had left behind and were seeking to make more effective in the Americas. Another motivating factor among the early colonists was the rational optimism of Enlightenment philosophies, which supported the radical idea that humanity is perfectible. It was an optimism that eventually made its peace with the Calvinist belief in original sin on the grounds that God’s grace could overturn even the most devilish human tendencies.⁷ This combination of reason with faith and scripture guided the Puritans as well as other immigrants in many parts of society. Establishing a just recompense for sinners was gradually fused with the idea of perfecting the human being, through punishment if necessary.

The logic of the workhouse, developed in England in the early nineteenth century, was equally persuasive in the Americas, but it posed several layers of dilemmas, which have never been fully resolved. If the workhouse disciplines were not systematically strict and harsh, the belief was strong that offenders would soon view it as an alternate way to avoid living on the streets. If the jail regimen were not even more stringent, what leverage would the workhouse master have over rebellious paupers? Finally, since the workhouse was supposed to be a very shameful experience, “what margin of shame was left for the jailbird?” Punitive conditions at every moment had to be imposed.⁸

The most powerful idea, however, governing the use of the workhouse, and the subsequent jail, was the association of punishment with hard labor. It was not a new idea. The Puritans had always held hard work up as way to praise the Creator, but its systematic application as an additional penalty to those arrested only gradually took hold in America. Connecticut passed legislation to construct a separate and deliberately punitive workhouse in 1727, and it was completed in 1730.

The Connecticut law was called “an act for restraining, correcting, suppressing, and punishing rogues, vagabonds, common beggars, and other lewd, idle, dissolute, profane and disorderly persons, and for setting them to work.” The long list of offenses included “subtil [sic] craft,” which apparently signified various unwelcome actions, such as gambling games, “jugling [sic], fiddlers, stubborn children and brawlers.” The master of the House of Correction had full power to put offenders to hard labor, use fetters or shackles, whip prisoners (not to exceed ten stripes), and withhold food whenever necessary to maintain good order.⁹

The combined workhouse and jail in Hartford served the whole Connecticut Colony for almost a century. The terms were interchangeable during that period. The facility was to be self-supporting, with the master of the workhouse getting one-third of the income from the labor done and the rest of the income going to the inmates or their families. Like many of the early colonial jails, the workhouse was linked to a tavern with the innkeeper as the master, to generate further income. The outcome in Connecticut was no more successful financially than workhouses had been in England. In both countries alcohol was readily available to the inmates, and drunkenness was frequent. Innkeepers, given such a position, considered inmates to be a captive clientele. The common use of alcohol made sense since the purity of the water could never be guaranteed. Eventually, by 1742, as jails became more common in the larger towns such as Hartford, the combination of tavern and workhouse was ended and inmates were confined in the official county jails.

Despite the presence of county commissioners, supervision was random and the jails continued to function as ultrasevere workhouses, with inmate labor unquestioned and unfettered by any restraints. The early belief in the reforming and redeeming power of prison labor was constantly undermined and diminished almost from its beginnings but especially in the later reform eras. Neglected and ignored by the public and the fragmented criminal justice system, jails were almost without exception characterized by a highly punitive and brutal pattern of treatment. There was little if any accountability as to what work was done, who was forced to do the work, or what limits should be set.

In 1935, on the sixtieth anniversary of the CPA, a member of the agency wrote a thorough report, The County Jail in Connecticut, for the agency’s committee on the jails. The writer’s name was Genevieve Kinne Bartlett, and she lost no time getting to the heart of the matter. She stated that the county jail had “failed in its two objectives of reforming the prisoner and of making a self-supporting institution.”¹⁰ They not only did not deter crime; they made criminals by mixing all kinds of offenders together without supervision and without help for the weak and defenseless. Such a condemnation of the jails was not new. It had been voiced before and would be voiced in all subsequent decades. In England, where the prototype of the modern jail originated under Henry II in the twelfth century, and in seventeenth-century America, where the early colonists tried to reinvent it, the jail has been an ambiguous response to crime and a nightmare to millions of offenders. Whether prisons or jails came first historically depends on the definition given to each. In terms of the original purpose, to simply hold offenders until some penalty could be administered, the difference between jails and prisons is primarily one of size (prisons larger, jails smaller) or length of confinement (prisons longer, jails shorter).

Connecticut’s story is typical and instructive. Jails took form after 1650 in most of the larger towns. They were essentially unregulated, but, unlike later prisons, jails were virtually hidden from public view. Consider the metaphor of a theater to distinguish the respective visibility of jails and prisons. Within that metaphor, the prison would occupy center stage in the auditorium. Its various reformations, from retribution to rehabilitation, would take turns in the spotlight, being celebrated and condemned. Huge audiences would be applauding or bemoaning the play and the players.

For over two centuries prisons have been the fortresses that separated the “bad” from the “good” and, ideally, made society safer. Within their populations they housed the stealthy burglars, the bank robbers, and the coldblooded murderers. The poor who stole to feed their families were mixed in with them, along with the fallen women, the innocent ones, and the outlaws who fought the establishment and lost. In both appearance and folklore, prisons have had a certain aura of romance attached to them.

Jails, by contrast, would be represented in our metaphoric theater by a platform in a corner of the basement. There would be dim lighting, with only a few people in the audience. Punitive retribution would be practiced behind curtains, with no reviews in the daily paper. The conditions would be considered deplorable if anyone in the audience cared. Due to the noise from center stage above, the cries for relief did not penetrate beyond the basement walls. There was little romance even in fictional jail confinement. Its inhabitants, the dregs of society, drew little empathy.

Two other features have historically made jails susceptible to stagnation and abuse. One is that jails have usually been small facilities. The other is that jails have held inmates who were convicted of less serious crimes and were sentenced for very short periods. The small size and the constant turnover meant fewer programs and less time for whatever programs were initiated. The English criminal justice system, though it had been cruel, provided the only structure with which the colonists were intimately familiar to protect their new society. Consequently, by 1630 the official records of the Boston Bay Colony contained a “lawful corrections” provision, which specified traditional crime categories and most of the conventional array of punishments currently being used in the homeland. They clearly carried their culture with them, even as they intended to reform it in accordance with holy scriptures.¹¹

Unlike the ill-fated settlement in Jamestown, the thirteen colonies were responding successfully to the massive challenges of a harsh climate, importing or raising a food supply, and gradually suppressing or driving out the original inhabitants of the Americas. Within a few decades reality reared its head over idealism. Obedience within the fold of colonial laws had been uneven from the beginning, and as the population increased, it became worse. One contributing factor was the immediate tendency (and often a necessity) to huddle together in protected, tightly packed villages, which grew, with further immigration, into towns and then cities. Urbanization has been accompanied by increased friction, competition for limited resources, and conflicts of all kinds since urbanized civilization began millennia ago. It would continue to worsen in the colonies.

In the Americas it was natural for the immigrants of all persuasions to urbanize immediately. The first buildings were forts. The subsequent villages, with homes, a church, and activity centers, were surrounded by wooden walls. Not far beyond the walls lay the wilderness, and in the Bible-centered world of New England the wilderness was where Jesus was tempted and bad things happened. The New England wilderness was not something to be admired and preserved. It was a primeval place to be tamed and settled or avoided. The Native Americans who inhabited it were at best primitive humans and, at worst, minions of the devil.

By itself, then, wilderness was viewed not only by Puritans but also by the vast majority of immigrants to the Americas as wild, dangerous, and filled with “savages.” The cultural assumption, almost unquestioned, was that the endless forests they found were clearly meant by God to be cut down, the land cultivated, and the empty places replaced by houses and businesses, parks and streets. The village, town, and city were precisely where civilization became real and blessed by God.

The City of God described by Saint Augustine was the perennial Puritan New England model. Consequently, a premium was placed by those in authority and on the apparatus needed to minister to and control those who broke the laws. Those who would not capitulate and convert were exiled to share the wilderness with the beasts and the Native Americans, both of whom were threats to life, liberty, and godly conduct.

The resolution eventually lay in creating a permanent jail (or gaol) and gradually expanding the use of incarceration. In 1635 Boston opened its first jail. Five years later, on April 10, 1640, the general court of Connecticut stated emphatically, “Forasmuch as many stubborn and refractory Persons are often taken within these libertyes, and no meet place yet prepared for the detayneing & keeping of such to their due & deserued punishment, it is therefore Ordered that there shall be a House of Correction built, of 24 foote long & 16 or 18 foote broad, with a celler, ether of wood or stone … which is to be done by the next Courte, in September.”¹²

The general court of Connecticut was set up to act as the only judicial body in the colony. In 1664–65, however, a different structure was created: the county, analogous to the English shire (from which the office of sheriff derived). Hartford, New Haven, Fairfield, and New London were designated as counties, for the two express purposes of settling local judicial matters and providing a jail to hold prisoners for trial. A quarter of a century later, in 1667, a law was passed that ordered the ten counties to follow Hartford’s lead—to “provide and maintain … a prison or house of correction” by December of the next year—or face a fine of twenty pounds.¹³

The seventeenth-century terminology indicates that terms such as prison, jail, or house of correction were still interchangeable. All were titles that had been used in England since the sixteenth century, among other labels such as asylum, workhouse, and bridewell. Only bridewell failed to make the lexicon of justice in America. By the end of the seventeenth century, the term jail was the most commonly used to designate the county facilities.

The detention of offenders until their date of trial was the initial purpose of jail in the Americas. That purpose was foremost in Connecticut through much of the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth centuries. Morality crimes such as being a rebellious child toward one’s parents or elders, masturbating, breaking Sabbath, cursing, using tobacco in public, and performing bestiality were subject to arrest and conviction. Although witchcraft was eventually rejected by society, as we have seen, it remained on the law books. The death penalty was also a viable option, though that sentence was less and less often imposed.

The penalties exacted for many offenses short of homicide, especially in rural areas, tended to emphasize the disgrace and shame of conviction, using the whip, the pillory, or the stocks (“a measured brutality”) to expose individuals to ridicule and cultivate repentance. Restoration of stolen property was enforced. Bartlett adds that “only rarely was the penalty of imprisonment added” during colonial times.¹⁴

The pace of urbanization of Connecticut was steady but slow in the seventeenth century, as settlers had to establish farms out of land meant for forests, not crops. Had stones and rocks been a commodity, every citizen in the state could have been wealthy. As it was, Connecticut’s lack of arable land led to two steady trends. The first was an exodus toward the “Western Reserve” in Ohio and elsewhere, where good land was available.

A second trend was a movement of people of all sorts toward the cities of Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Fairfield and the smaller towns in between. With these demographic adjustments going on, crime categories and the laws slowly changed from those based on personal moral lapses to those based on the protection of private property. A new goal became more and more operative, namely a revitalization of the order and social control necessary for businesses to prosper.

The jail was the repository for growing arrest rates as the United States moved toward the Revolution against England. The delinquents came primarily from the servant class, usually captives imported from Guiana in the West Indies to serve as slaves, and from an increasing number of vagrants from out of state. The result was an offender population that invariably exceeded the capacity for which the county jails had been built. A revolving-door syndrome had begun.

Lawrence Friedman, in his review of American criminal justice, is caustic about the systemic neglect of those in jails. After reviewing the proliferation of reform laws and organizations from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Friedman concludes that, while prison became the focus of reform, jails became the forgotten tool of criminal justice. The result was a “squalid mass … of men and women picked up for drunkenness or vagrancy,” as well as a repository of “brawlers, thieves and countless others.”¹⁵

Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the jails of Connecticut proliferated and underwent very little change as new counties were formed. With a more complex society, the criminal justice system continued to expand. Each county was required to build a jail if one was not already in operation. Connecticut’s office of sheriff was created in 1750, when courts were established in all five counties for the purpose of settling both civil and criminal matters. Initially appointed by the governor and living off a fee structure, sheriffs at some point became an elective office with a state salary. Sheriffs often had significant additional powers from time to time, including serving writs, boarding vessels, even raising a militia if called on by the justice of the peace. The office of sheriff eventually evolved into a “keeper of the peace” under the direction of the courts, whose main work was to arrest offenders and make sure they showed up in court if not confined.¹⁶

As the nineteenth century began, the jail was the hidden foundation of the criminal justice system in Connecticut. Ten county jails existed across the state. Simsbury housed one state prison, Newgate, named after a notorious prison in London, England. An array of courts now heard cases, including city courts, probate courts, county courts, the superior court, and a supreme court of errors. Police forces were formed or considered in most cities, following England’s example, and county sheriffs steadily gained in political power.¹⁷

Two major ideas concerning the county jails surfaced in Connecticut in the 1830s. One was the need for a state facility for the insane, who were, until that time, held in the county jails. After many attempts to pass the necessary legislation, an institution for the mentally ill was built in 1865 in Middletown. The need for county jail rehabilitation also garnered attention and approval. Hartford County built a new jail in 1837, incorporating many of the features of the state prison, particularly its industrial “contract system,” in which prisoners were leased to private contractors to manufacture a variety of articles. One new jail, however, could not cover all the gaps.

The warden of the state prison, Amos Pilsbury, offered, with the consent of the Connecticut legislature, to pay any county $1,000 out of his own pocket to help build a similar jail.¹⁸ Pilsbury’s plan, however, which had been so successful in making the prison a profitable enterprise for the state, failed in the jail setting. Jail sentences were too short for job training to have any effect; too many inmates had no work experience, not to speak of manufacturing experience; and the majority had poor work habits. Such defects could be overcome over time in a prison context but proved too great a hurdle in the jails. Ironically, jail contracts also deflected more contracts away from the prison than had been expected, reducing its overall profitability. The revitalization of the jails envisioned by Pilsbury was never realized.

Conditions in the county jails continued to limp along, with few improvements for the next century. Genevieve Bartlett’s 1935 report to the CPA annual meeting concerning the plight of the county jails ends with five “Suggested Changes in County Jail Procedures.” At the top of the list is a recommendation to distinguish the use of the jail as a detention center for those awaiting trial and use it only to confine those who had been convicted. Those waiting to go to court, she maintains, are the most neglected people in the system and should have a spectrum of services provided for them. After all, they had not yet been proven guilty of any crime. The concept was never adopted.

Bartlett’s next documented change suggests the creation of “crime clinics” to gather facts related to the reduction of crime. That idea would resurface in the 1950s and have a brief period of activity. A third recommendation mentions a focus on rehabilitation from the time of arrest, with a “complete analysis of the physical and mental state of the delinquent and his relation to society.” That idea never materialized. The fourth proposition involves the “abolition of the workhouse.” The state should make separate provisions for the feeble-minded, the recidivist (or career criminal), and the vagrant, all of whom were mixed haphazardly with those awaiting trial. Vagrants and the mentally ill should not even be mixed together. This most fundamental of Bartlett’s written suggestions, it would not see fruition for a century. Finally, she urges the creation of a “State Farm for Misdemeanants.” In such a setting, there would be a much better chance to restore some of the offenders to society.¹⁹

The idea of a farm connected to jails and prisons had very attractive features and eventually became a reality at future prisons in Niantic (for women), Enfield (for lower-risk felons) and a reformatory in Cheshire (for young adult males).

MILESTONE 3: NEWGATE PRISON

As mentioned earlier, Newgate Prison was opened in 1873 on the site of an abandoned copper mine. Several Connecticut entrepreneurs, as early as 1705, had discovered copper ore in a ledge of rock in Simsbury, Connecticut (part of the present town of Granby). Manufacturers had initiated a statewide search for commercial metals to manufacture more durable farming and factory tools at home rather than importing them from Europe. A number of vertical shafts and horizontal caverns were eventually dug out of the Metacomet Ridge, a huge wall of volcanic trap rock that geologically parallels the western side of the Connecticut River Valley. The copper proved to be of fair enough quality at the start of operations, which encouraged more investment of time and money by its owners. Eventually the venture proved not to be cost-effective. The ore was very difficult to extract and of limited extent. The hope for a seam of gold never materialized. By mid century the most easily available copper layers were largely depleted, and further mining was considered a waste of time and energy.

Two decades later, in 1770, Simsbury was in the news again. Connecticut (like other northern states) was shifting away from publicly situated corporal punishment and replacing it with sentence terms in jails and prisons. It was not alone in that shift of attitude. “Throughout the Western World during the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment intellectuals challenged the death penalty,” an aspect of a slow revolution occurring around the subject of human rights.²⁰

Clearly, by 1750 the county jails were unable to house all the convicted offenders being adjudicated by the courts. Once put forward as a proposal, the abandoned mine appeared to offer a natural and (for the ever cost-conscious legislators) relatively inexpensive site for a prison.

When put into operation in 1773 Newgate Prison was considered a major humanitarian step forward because imprisonment was, for the first time, to be substituted for all capital offenses except homicide. Functioning as both a jail and a prison, the population of Newgate rose and fell over its first few years, as escapes and inmate rebellions exposed its deficiencies and the brutality of its disciplines. Horse thieves, burglars, robbers, chronic drunkards, and counterfeiters, including women and aged inmates, were not only confined underground in terrible conditions; they were also subject to harsh corporal punishments, including the dreaded treadmill. Incarceration by itself was not yet considered a sufficient penalty, and the public debate over the most effective and moral approach to crime intensified.

Newgate’s rural setting and harsh discipline had two advantages, from the vantage point of the Connecticut legislature: it was vividly distinguished from the county jails around the state, and it reflected the emerging consensus that the county jails were too easy for some of the most serious criminals and that they deserved not only a severely separated place but a discipline of the hardest labor and conditions available. Newgate seemed to satisfy both desires. The state’s offer to buy the lease and create a new prison was accepted by the mine owners as a happy conclusion to a failed business.

The lease for the Simsbury property was purchased by the state of Connecticut in 1773, about the same time Philadelphia’s equally famous Walnut Street Jail was designated as a prison meant for the worst of the worst. Newgate too would hold the most serious lawbreakers. In actuality, however, it ended up serving much the same purpose as the larger county jails in Hartford and New Haven, holding a variety of inmates, including federal political prisoners, for varying lengths of time. Newgate was even less successful 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, Senate, and the governor’s office.²⁴

Dwight’s influence was felt in other states too, and he was gaining additional advocates with similar agendas. Englishman William Crawford made a similar tour of American prisons in 1834 and drew similar conclusions. In New York some leading citizens formed the third statewide voluntary reform group, called the Prison Association of New York, founded on the information and enthusiasm it had gained from nearby Philadelphia and Boston.

Louis Dwight’s views found ready acceptance in Connecticut. A trio of Connecticut proponents implemented the call for a new prison: Martin Welles, John Russ, and John Peters. Welles, a Hartford attorney, was the foremost advocate, authoring most of their reports and undoubtedly others. In 1825 the general court voted to close the Simsbury mine shafts and build a new institution. It was not without significant opposition, but the session finally voted to allocate $500 and purchase land from the heirs of Justus Riley of Wethersfield. The primary motivation: a new prison might mitigate and eventually remove the stigma of Newgate, and it held out the hope of being less expensive, always an attractive feature where tax dollars are involved.

DEBATES OVER PRISON MANAGEMENT: PENNSYLVANIA VERSUS NEW YORK

In the mid-1820s prison reform leaders in Connecticut struggled to choose between two competing prison models. Some opted for the system adopted by New York’s new prison in Auburn, a sleepy upstate town. Others preferred the Pennsylvania system being erected in Cherry Hill outside Philadelphia. Both approaches represented the view of reformers such as Louis Dwight that incarceration was intended not just as a place of confinement but also as a hospital to heal sinners through meditative conditions and constructive work.

The exemplary Pennsylvania and New York prisons had both been developed on four pillars of prison reform: silence, solitude, labor, and obedience. All four features had their roots in the religious concepts of sanctuary and redemption as they had evolved in the Middle Ages. The religious roots are worth remembering for both positive and negative reasons. On the positive side, many, if not most, prison and jail reformers over the past few centuries have emerged from a spiritual setting and claimed, often authentically, to seek spiritual goals in the treatment of offenders. On the negative side, religion has also supplied much of the moral passion behind the punitive attitudes toward those who resist or disobey the laws of society.

The disciplines of labor and obedience, solitude and silence, had originated in the monastic communities. By the nineteenth century they were part of a total culture of the Christian church for over a thousand years. Two features of monastery life, however, distinguished it from the secular jail or prison. First, within the monastery the correctives used were limited by the rules of the order, and the monks living in individual cells were accustomed to a certain amount of isolation. In some monasteries of the Trappist or Cistercian type, complete silence was observed at all times. Consequently, the penalties administered usually consisted of reductions in food, clothing, and blankets, along with additional work assignments and prescribed periods of study and prayer. Whipping was rarely used but self-flagellation and the wearing of heavy, bristly hair shirts were not uncommon as ways of punishing the body.

Second, regardless of the discipline imposed, both the abbot and the monk being punished usually shared the goal of repentance and a return to the normal regimens. The monk was part of the community voluntarily and had taken a vow of total obedience to the abbot. Discipline was not unexpected. Silence, solitude, labor, and obedience were part of a cohesive whole and, when fully accepted, became a spiritual discipline.

Unlike the monastery, there has seldom been anything resembling a shared goal in prison life. The imprisoned offender has been placed against his will into an institution designed to be oppressive, where vague limits accompanied goals conveying total control and submission. Much of the time, in the early stages of the new penitentiaries, there were no standardized rules. By the time the European system reached the Americas, it had been reenergized by Puritan religious principles, but the continued lack of regulation and oversight made that Puritan enthusiasm all the more dangerous. The rule of unintended consequences was realized time after time as the prison system in the United States evolved. The many points of similarity between Auburn and the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia were complicated by several essential points of difference.

The Pennsylvania System of Rehabilitative Punishment

The Quaker-led Pennsylvania plan imposed total silence and total solitude on all inmates. Prisoners were housed in separate cells, as the most likely circumstances to engender penitence. The term penitentiary came into common parlance to embody that concept. The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, built in 1790, was the first penitentiary in America, an attempt to duplicate the monastery’s penitential atmosphere of silence and solitude for felons. A separate wing was used for debtors and vagrants. The Walnut Street Jail was successful enough to warrant in 1803 a slightly larger jail on Arch Street. Neither building, however, provided ideal cell space for individual labor plus space for sleeping and reflection.

Over the next decade, plans were debated and finally drawn up for the most massive prison in America. The first inmates were received in 1829. Eastern State Penitentiary became the full prototype of the isolation system, combined with silence, labor, and discipline. “The cellblocks … radiated out from a central rotunda. A corridor ran down the center of each cellblock, with cells on either side of the corridor. Ground-level cells opened out onto small exercise yards, each of which was surrounded by a high stone fence.”²⁵

Each cell was twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and ten feet high. Windows were eight feet above the floor, allowing light in but no view out. The larger cell size allowed the inmate to be active with productive work, room to walk about, sleep, and be reflective about his crime. Eastern State Penitentiary represented a modern form of ultimate incarceration. The cell became, in effect, a tomb. The operative principle was complete silence. The inmate’s life was to be turned forcibly inward for meditation, reading, reflection, and repentance.

Once the iron door closed on these offenders they were rarely allowed to make a sound, hear a sound, speak, or see another person until the moment of their release. The guard’s shoes were covered with soft cloth during rounds. One exception was Sunday sermon, delivered to inmates by the chaplain, standing at the head of the wing. The prisoners stayed in their cells. Except for rare access to visitors, or occasional words to guards, inmates had no opportunity to speak to another human being. In most cells the only daylight came from a small skylight opening in the ceiling, which came to be known as the “eye of God.”²⁶

Unlike the jails on Walnut and Arch Streets in Philadelphia, both of which were modified residential houses on city streets, Eastern State was a huge twelve-acre $780,000 stone-walled facility out in the countryside, with seven cell blocks radiating out from a central hub containing an observation tower. The prison resembled in some ways the design of the panopticon prison, designed in 1791 by the brilliant English lawyer-philosopher Jeremy Bentham, but never built in England. The penological principle behind the panopticon (literally “everything in view”) was implemented only in the English prison in Milbank, in 1821, and never replicated. It was only approximated in America.²⁷ Within the Eastern State Penitentiary, absolute isolation and silence prevailed, and prisoners were under constant surveillance by those in charge. The creators and wardens, however, insisted that the use of total silence and solitude was not intended as punishment and should not be perceived as such. The basic strategic goal was to keep offenders separate in their cells and busy in their silence so that the total experience might prevent the incorrigible convicts from influencing the inexperienced or weaker prisoners.

A second strategy was to minimize situations that might necessitate corporal punishments. By keeping the convicts separated, there would be no congregate life to spawn conflicts. Third, isolation in a large cell with a workstation would enable the diligent to practice a trade. In theory, it would engender in all a total sense of gratitude at the time of release. When the opportunity finally came to mingle and speak again in normal discourse with 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.

At 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 sternly and effectively. In turn, criminal populations were filled with difficult and violent persons, hardened in many cases by the lives they had led and the abuses they had suffered. How to control such a population over long periods within a limited, enclosed space was a huge, intensely practical problem that could not be ignored. If corporal punishment was not to be used, or used sparingly, what would be the ultimate method of control in the Wethersfield State Prison?

The public act authorizing the new Connecticut prison stated the answer. The warden who was

safeguarding said Prisoners and keeping them at hard labor … may confine them at their labor or punish them, by putting fetters and shackles on them, and by moderate whipping, not exceeding ten stripes for any one offense,—or by confinement in dark and solitary cells: which punishment may be inflicted, in case they be stubborn or disorderly, or do not well and faithfully perform their task, as they can be reasonably required, or in case they shall not submit to such rules and orders, as shall be, from time to time, established for the well ordering and governing of said Prison.³⁷

The use of solitary confinement did not break any new ground. In fact, it was simply another application of the existing use of silence and separation. The cells in both the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems already functioned as a form of solitary confinement every day. Every inmate experienced that treatment at night in the Auburn style prisons, and all day, every day, in Pennsylvania, where it applied to the entire prison existence and so had no intentional purpose related to any single act by the prisoner.

In Connecticut Warden Amos Pilsbury’s use of the darkened cell succeeded as much as it did precisely because it was apparently used as a very careful and controlled response to specific infractions. Pilsbury was a hands-on warden who reacted immediately to infractions of the rules. The instant application of solitary confinement took the inmate out of a relatively normal, congregate life among other inmates and deprived him of sunlight, human companionship (however silent), and regular sustenance. Within the culture created by Pilsbury, the persona of a fearless father figure who could be either hard as stone or compassionate as a mother, apparently proved to be an effective approach most of the time.

Geographically, the location of the state prison on the Wethersfield Cove of the Connecticut River satisfied the accepted axiom that being near a river was highly preferable to provide access for quick transportation of both raw materials and finished products made by inmate labor. Two New York jails were originally located directly on the Hudson; the Auburn State Prison flanked the Platte River, feeding one of the Finger Lakes; and Boston’s Charlestown Prison was built on the shore of the Charlestown River.

Wethersfield, also built in large part by its first inmates, was a completely walled prison for maximum security. Its walls were twenty feet high, three feet wide at the base and two feet wide at the top, made of brownstone from Portland, Connecticut. Under the Auburn system, the wall served not only to minimize the possibility of escapes; it also assured total visual and auditory seclusion from the outside world.

Such confined space was assumed to facilitate reflection and repentance. Silence inside prevented communication between inmates, furnishing two of the three Auburn pillars of prison discipline. The Auburn-style interior cell blocks, as well as the workshops, were built of bricks. Upon completion, Wethersfield State Prison was considered one of the finest prisons in the United States, if not the world, the perfect prison for both punishment and reformation. Its estimated cost to Connecticut: approximately $30,000. The first cell-block building held 232 offenders in single cells. By 1830, thirty-two of those cells were dedicated to female inmates. This last facet was particularly important historically, since Connecticut was among the first states to demonstrate that women could be incarcerated along with men and be subjected to the same regimen and discipline, a concept that was almost completely doubted and resisted elsewhere.

Over the next 150 years the state prison underwent massive changes, adding new buildings and adapting to new developments in penology and the dominant cultural perception of what was required to control crime and punish both misdemeanants (generally, those with sentences of one year or less) and felons (those with sentences over one year). Financially, the first fifty years of the prison’s existence were the most successful. It operated at a profit, sometimes a very substantial profit.³⁸

In terms of administration, however, there were a succession of scandals at the Wethersfield State Prison, the most notorious being the alleged mismanagement of the financial books by Amos Pilsbury in the early 1830s and the accompanying charge of mistreatment of inmates. Pilsbury was exonerated on both charges. A committee dismissed most of the evidence against the warden and commended his reappointment. Warden Pilsbury returned to Wethersfield within eighteen months, served until 1845, and earned plaudits in the New York State correctional system.³⁹

Inside the walls of the prison, life went on as it had from the time of its construction. The routine of working in groups during the day and living in separate cells, initiated on the first day of operations, remained the same more or less year after year. A cemetery just for inmates had its first burial in 1828. There were continuous improvements. In 1830 a new addition to the main cell block provided sixty-four cells for males and forty-eight for females, plus a new kitchen and a hospital ward for women patients. Sixteen cells were approved and built in 1835 for “insane convicts”; gas lighting was installed twenty years later, and fire hydrants in 1869. A new dining hall, built in 1901, allowed congregate meals for the first time. In the early 1930s safety matches were distributed to the inmates, radios were available for purchase, weekly baths were begun, and a better quality of clothing was issued.⁴⁰

The Auburn plan adopted by those planning the Wethersfield prison continued to be the management model of choice, as existing states felt compelled to build new prisons. Other states constructed the same walled fortresses, usually with silence imposed day and night, interior cell blocks, and congregate activities. The ranks of professional administrators and guards grew apace and gradually became more professional, though still far from modern standards.

During the remainder of the nineteenth century, Connecticut’s state prison would witness three staff murdered by 1888, including two successive wardens, Daniel Webster in 1862 and William Willard in 1870, both killed by inmates. In 1875 Wethersfield State Prison remained a notable but ambiguous example of Connecticut’s attempt to run an open, progressive prison with a regimen both strict and humane.⁴¹

MILESTONE 5: CONNECTICUT’S FIRST POLICE FORCES

A final milestone in the development of Connecticut’s criminal justice system occurred shortly after the opening of the Wethersfield State Prison. Hartford (1836) and Bridgeport (1837) began to replace their constables and night watchmen with a more authoritative employee, called a policeman. The impetus to take that step probably came from two basic sources: a local escalation in crime and word from England in 1829 that Sir Robert Peel, home secretary in the British Cabinet, had persuaded Parliament to pass the Metropolitan Police Act, creating a police force to protect London’s streets and businesses. On the first point, from 1830 to 1870, civil disorder had increased. The social context was the unrest over the pressure from abolition advocates, mob reactions in the streets in response to economic problems, and public oppositions to the number of saloons and the rise in alcoholism.⁴²

In the recession that followed the War of 1812, according to historian Page Smith, “drunkenness was, indeed, America’s national malady.” Smith, oddly enough but typical of many historians, makes no reference to crime or jails or prisons, despite the connection with social turmoil.⁴³ Lawrence Friedman, on the other hand, states that cities across the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century were “realms of vice and evil,” places of danger, violence, mobs, and riots, all related to the social issues that plagued a nation just emerging from its second war in fifty years and heading toward a civil war.⁴⁴

As to the second point: the stories of unarmed “bobbies” or “peelers,” named for Robert Peel, captivated America’s attention. By 1850 police units had been set up in most American cities. The need for a police force at the state level did not arrive on the Connecticut scene until 1895, when a Law and Order League formed. It lobbied for a means to control gambling rackets and liquor-law violators. In 1903 the Connecticut legislature authorized a state police force to do just that. Its duties eventually were widened to include supervision of the state highways and responses needed to counteract interstate crime.

It was after the Civil War that police officers became regular players in the formation of a complete criminal justice system. As enforcers of the laws passed to protect persons and property, they had a natural tendency to implement a retributive attitude toward crime on behalf of the wealthier segments of the population, who had so much to lose if crime was not controlled. Police in the 1880s and 1890s were especially hard on vagrants, tramps—the homeless.

Lawrence Friedman provides a wise assessment of the double-edged sword that constituted law enforcement in the late nineteenth century. The private use of force was not eliminated by the creation of police forces earlier in the century. Vigilantes, lynch mobs, and individuals taking the law into their own hands were still in the news, showing “ferocious powers of survival.” But the very presence of a localized civilian army to penetrate the urban areas and stem personal vengeance and lawlessness posed a need for careful checks and balances. As the nation grew and matured, a fourth, unofficial part of the criminal justice system arose to prevent police violence and irregularities in law enforcement.⁴⁵

A NEW ERA IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SET TO BEGIN

These five milestones of Connecticut’s developing criminal justice system were all in place by 1870. The stage was set for the formation of Connecticut’s oldest criminal justice agency. America, throughout the nineteenth century, had changed drastically. Politically, the Jacksonian era was ending, and by 1850 the dark clouds of war were gathering, issuing in the greatest loss of life suffered within the United States in its history. In the 1860s the Civil War devastated the nation, and the high hopes of Reconstruction begun under Lincoln were lost in the compromises made by President Grant.

Within the criminal justice system, the most heralded advance in the reformatory movement during the nineteenth century occurred in 1870, when more than a dozen voluntary prisoner aid associations, calling themselves the National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline, met in Cincinnati for the express purpose of forming the National Prison Association. In his opening address as the first president of the congress, Rutherford B. Hayes declared, “It is our wish that the people, everywhere, may be brought to feel that prison discipline ought to be placed upon the only solid and sure foundation—a foundation whose chief cornerstone is the golden rule: As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them.”⁴⁶

As 1875 approached, issues of crime and punishment and penology continued to occasionally grab local news headlines throughout Connecticut. The murders of the two wardens and debates about financial mismanagement swirled about the state prison during the first few years of the 1870s. On top of these issues, and the questions of the facility’s age and an expanding population facing the prison, the Connecticut legislature considered, but rejected, a plan in 1872 to build a new prison. The voices calling for a more retributive system to put a stop to crime were never silent in legislatures, bars, and churches. The rehabilitation ideal was still little more than a vague dream in 1875 Connecticut, as the CPA began its work.