Читать книгу The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice - Gordon S. Bates - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE Rehabilitation Rekindled, 1875–1910

I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail

On one of my early visits as a prison volunteer in the mid-1960s, I brought with me, at my new friend’s request, a small pocket book of sermons by Dr. Martin Luther King. I stood in line, and when it was my turn to be checked out by the gatehouse guard, I gave him the name of the inmate I was visiting and my name. (I had decided to stop calling myself Reverend Bates to initiate more honest conversations.) When all my credentials matched his records, I presented the book to be okayed. The guard took one look at the title, Strength to Love, and said, “Sorry, sir, but we don’t allow pornographic material.” Before I could argue with him, he chucked it into the wastebasket and said, “Next.” It was my introduction to one of the harsher aspects of the prisons of that era, characterized by the often-abusive exercise of arbitrary power over every aspect of the prisoner’s life. That prison culture would end by 1970, and a reformatory era would begin, but for the time being Dr. King’s book would represent the tendency all too common in every era, of judging a book by its cover.

The Connecticut Prison Association was the first such group in Connecticut to focus fully on the people in prison and the way they were treated. It would be the only agency, public or private, to do so for almost ninety years. As such, it was intimately involved with the key debates, most of the laws, and a large percentage of the inmates, as they discharged from Connecticut’s ten county jails and its single state prison.

The perspective of one private-sector agency provides a unique vantage point. The CPA looks back from 1875 over two hundred years to the first components of Connecticut’s system. It looks forward about almost a century to the creation of the modern Department of Correction and other significant changes. The story thus begins in media res.

Indeed, the Connecticut Prison Association has made unique contributions to the state’s criminal justice system; however, it did not work in a vacuum. Its work has been done and its decisions made within the cultural and criminal justice context of the two previous centuries. Since 1975, a century after its formation, CPA has been joined by dozens of similar groups that help to form the contemporary system over the past thirteen decades. The CPA story looks backward as well as forward to trace the various faces of justice in Connecticut.

Arnold Toynbee chose 1875 as the start of the modern era of Western civilization. That year the French impressionist Claude Monet unveiled his classic work, Boating at Argenteuil. An Englishman, Capt. Matthew Webb, was the first person to swim the English Channel. In the United States the initial running of the Kentucky Derby in Louisville garnered considerable attention. At the federal level Congress passed the first civil rights bill.¹

Digging a little deeper, we can find other notable occurrences in Connecticut. In 1875 the state legislature finally made Hartford the sole state capital, after having alternated the honor with New Haven for seventy-two years. The city’s literary giant, Mark Twain, gained further national fame with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the first of four major works he wrote while living in Hartford. And sports fans could cheer the winning record (54–28) of the Hartford Dark Blues. Hartford’s entry into the newly formed National Baseball Association was second only to the Red Stockings from Boston. The Dark Blues lasted only a year before moving to Brooklyn, New York. Not everything endures.

The hottest celebrity news of 1875 burned brightly in the land of steady habits for the entire year. It featured the charge of adultery by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, New York. A Protestant leader widely known for his opposition to slavery and his eloquence in the pulpit, Beecher stood accused of being intimately involved with the wife of a friend, an esteemed printer of some of Beecher’s writings. It was by every standard a scandal of immense proportions.

Beecher, simply put, was one of the most famous religious personalities in the nation. Some would have included Europe and the continent. The son of the leading Protestant cleric of the previous generation, Rev. Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward had achieved celebrity status on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to an extensive lecturing and preaching schedule. But when scandal struck in 1875, the Hartford Daily Courant (like newspapers around the country) printed daily detailed summaries of the charges and refutations of infidelity. A six-month trial failed to reach a conclusion, and interest waned.

But one obscure event in the first quarter of 1875 would endure and would impact Connecticut residents for thirteen decades and more. The event was the creation of a grassroots organization to help inmates at the Wethersfield State Prison. From the date of its formation to the present time, rarely a week has passed without media attention.

Some events have sticking power. This story is about one of them.

THE PRISONERS’ FRIEND ASSOCIATION

According to the Hartford Daily Courant, the winter storms of 1874–75 had been horrendous. Even in the beginning of March the temperature was still well below freezing, the Connecticut River remained frozen from shore to shore, and the snow remained several feet deep where it had not been plowed or shoveled. That winter, a small group of citizens kept warm by holding preliminary meetings on prison reform, an issue that had been gaining attention for over five years along the Atlantic coast, in New England, and across northern states from New York to Illinois. One meeting, held on January 30 (and possibly the first gathering) was chaired by Judge Heman Barbour, then a director of the state prison in Wethersfield. Judge Benjamin Stark of New London, the current chair of the Connecticut Board of State Charities, assisted Barbour and a delegation from Boston, including Dr. John S. Butler, the Honorable Timothy M. Allyn, E. W. Locke, and John F. Augustus. The Augustus name was known throughout New England. John’s father had given almost twenty years to the Boston courts as a volunteer probation supervisor for alcoholic offenders. He had also been the founder and editor of a newsletter called the Prisoners’ Friend, a position that the son now held. It was probably the name of his newsletter that prompted the first name of the CPA, the Prisoners’ Friend Association.²

A second meeting was held in the common pleas court of Hartford on February 16, 1875. The group proposed “Articles of Association” for consideration. There was much discussion but not about whether to organize a new prison reform agency. The only question was when to do it. The unanimous decision was to do so immediately. Judge Barbour tasked Dr. E. K. Hunt, Rev. Elias H. Richardson, Rev. Charles R. Fisher, and Attorney George M. Bartholomew to draw up the legal arrangements. It was also at this February meeting that the original “objects” of the association were compiled. They were five in number and served the agency as its foundation for over one hundred years. They were printed in the charter as follows:

1st—To benefit society by the reformation of criminals,

2nd—To assist prisoners in the work of self-reform,

3rd—To promote reformatory systems of prison management,

4th—To aid discharged convicts in living honorably,

5th—To co-operate in the repression of crime³

The group that gathered on March 9 in the midafternoon was undoubtedly glad to be inside the First Congregational Church on Hartford’s Main Street, if only to get away from the cold. The church was the oldest in town. It was also known as Center Church or the Thomas Hooker Church, so named after the pastor who had led one of the first groups of settlers of the region from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The lecture room gradually warmed up as the people assembled, until at least forty were crowded into the space. They had come from all over Connecticut, this mix of clergy, judges, lawyers, and civic leaders. A Courant reporter added, “There were a number of ladies present who showed much interest in the proceedings.” The women, unnamed, were never mentioned again. However progressive they might be on social issues, most Protestants of the time maintained a patriarchal approach to life. Men made the decisions. Women lent support.⁴

THE FOUNDERS

The meeting was chaired by the Honorable Timothy M. Allyn, a businessman and mayor of Hartford. Allyn had been a Connecticut delegate to the 1870 National Prison Reform Congress in Cincinnati, which had resulted in the formation of the National Prison Association. He had also been among those who signed the Articles of Association. It was time for the final step to be taken. The key leaders spoke fervently and acted expeditiously to create a group whose purpose would be to address the difficulties being faced by offenders at the time of release from the Wethersfield State Prison.

The reverend Elias Richardson, the current pastor of Center Church, had offered his parish to host the gathering. Richardson was known in the Hartford area as a pastor who was very concerned about the Christian’s obligation to care for the poor and outcast. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he had absorbed the New England Theology of Dr. Nathaniel Taylor, the leading theologian on the Yale faculty.

The Hartford Daily Courant reports that Reverend Richardson spoke “earnestly and well” to the group while the nominating committee was completing its roster. In the midst of his supportive statements, he referred “to the need of society to organize itself against the criminal class whose emissaries are always waiting at the prison gate to lead back into crime those who have completed terms of imprisonment for crime.” His comments reflected a combination of Christian caring on the one hand and Protestant self-righteousness, class prejudice, and religious compassion on the other. It also reflected old distinctions based on class and nationality that were being sharpened on a daily basis by the realities of the new urban populations.⁵

A changing society was all too obvious in the years following the Civil War. Connecticut was quickly becoming, with Rhode Island and Massachusetts, a crossroads of change: demographic, industrial, religious, and in many other ways. Most visible was the steady increase in outsiders. Hartford’s population in 1840 had been a little over fifteen thousand. Forty years later it was more than fifty thousand. Families and individuals, freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ten years before, had emerged from the South to mingle on the streets of Connecticut’s major cities with the flood of European immigrants, chiefly Irish, but also Germans, Italians, and Scandinavians. Hartford’s political and religious leaders, like those of other large Connecticut cities, were especially aware of the resulting hubbub in the streets. The threat of disorder and crime could not be ignored.

Reverend Richardson’s words, no doubt, expressed a genuine religious as well as humanitarian desire to help those imprisoned. He did so, however, from a position of unquestioned moral superiority. Seeing offenders as part of a separate class of people was not a new attitude in 1875, and it has been part of the response to crime and the criminal in every succeeding generation. What mattered most at this meeting, however, was Richardson’s willingness to be part of the projected organization. His desire to confront the whole issue from a moral basis was significant. As the meeting got down to nuts and bolts, Richardson readily agreed to be one of the three Hartford County directors.

The Honorable Heman Barbour also emerged as a leader. Judge Barbour had been head of the probate court for the Hartford district from 1858 to 1863. He had resumed his law practice and attained a highly respected position in the capital city. He was the first of a long line of leaders with judicial experience who would take a deep interest in the organization formed on this day and the issues it addressed. Barbour’s mother named him after her brother, the Rev. Heman Humphrey, a distinguished minister in Massachusetts, who finished his career as president of Amherst College. Judge Barbour, unfortunately, was in poor health when he assumed his responsibilities within the CPA, and he died three months later. That he was passionate enough to agree to be the group’s first president despite his condition is an indication of the level of interest in the endeavor.

Also present was a man already known in the state and beyond, Rev. Noah Porter of New Haven. His sister had founded Miss Porter’s School in Farmington some thirty years earlier, and in one generation it had become an elite training school for young women. At the time of the meeting, Noah Porter was even more famous as the illustrious president of Yale University. He was at the height of an academic and ministerial career that spanned over sixty years. A nephew and protégé of Heman Humphrey, Porter was already respected as a preacher and biblical scholar by the time of his graduation from Yale in 1828.

Reverend Porter’s sermons, which spoke eloquently against slavery and in favor of civil liberties, received wide distribution. He feared an oppressive government more than individual lawbreaking and advocated repeatedly for the legal protections of habeas corpus and a trial with all the other safeguards the law offered. After pastorates in New Milford and Farmington, Connecticut; and in Springfield, Massachusetts, he had returned to the faculty at Yale and was elected president in 1871. An author of scores of essays, books and articles, he gained worldwide notice as the editor of numerous editions and revisions of Webster’s dictionary.⁶

Two other notables completed the core group. One was Dr. Joseph Cummings, who had just completed seventeen years as the president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Cummings succeeded Judge Barbour in June as the CPA’s second president. Like his predecessor, he also served for a brief time, only four months, but his departure was due to political rather than medical reasons. In 1876 he would make an unsuccessful bid to be governor of Connecticut. After his defeat, he resumed his former calling as a Methodist pastor and served in several churches of the region. Although he absented himself from the Prisoners’ Friend Association, the backing he gave as an academic, a clergyman, and a political leader was influential in encouraging support for the organization from those who were still on the fence about the venture.⁷

Without doubt, the most important founder in terms of longevity with the CPA was Judge Francis Wayland. He succeeded Cummings as the president of the Prisoners’ Friend Association in the fall of 1875. Wayland had not been present during the initial planning sessions, but once he joined in the formation of the group, he brought a sense of stability and energy into it that was essential to its survival during the early years.

Literally and figuratively, Wayland became the public image of the agency over the course of the next twenty-nine years. Already an established political and legal presence in the state, Francis Wayland was a man to be reckoned with. He not only added credibility by dint of his own reputation; he also took over the reins of the organization as a leader who knew how to get things done, in the community and in the legislature.⁸

Wayland had been a probate court judge for the New Haven district for five years, from 1859 to 1864. He was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1869. He returned to academia when Yale University Law School called him to be a professor in 1872. Subsequently, Wayland was named dean of the Law School, a position he held throughout his long tenure with CPA. In the state, region, and nation, Wayland was involved in public service continually. Invariably, he seems to have risen to the presidency of all the organizations with which he was connected. In addition to serving as president of CPA for three decades, he was also the president at one time or another of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut State Prison, the National Prison Association, the Organized Charities of New Haven, Connecticut General Hospital in New Haven, and the two military academies at West Point and Annapolis.

It is no exaggeration to conjecture that few people were better known in New England, or more involved in more levels of the community, than Francis Wayland between 1870 and the time of his death in 1904. While Porter and Cummings added considerable luster to the new agency, Wayland also added stability, legal expertise and political savvy.

Newspaper accounts and the annual reports available from 1889 indicate that scores of other prominent citizens were attracted to the CPA’s cause. Charles Dudley Warner, owner and publisher of the Hartford Courant and a close friend of Mark Twain’s, became deeply involved. Former governor James E. English of New Haven also showed more than passing interest in the new group. In sum, at the center of the organizational process was an impressive array of church leaders, lawyers, civic leaders, attorneys, and judges from all corners of Connecticut.⁹

By six at night, on March 9, 1875, the organization had been officially formed. Bylaws had been adopted, officers had been chosen, and an executive committee appointed. It included representatives from the counties of Hartford, New Haven, New London, Litchfield, Tolland, Windham, and Middletown and some representatives from individual towns such as Farmington, Vernon, Danbury, and Milford. Later, as the legal technicalities were worked out, it would be referred to as the Prisoners’ Friend Corporation.

When the meeting at Center Church ended around suppertime, the objectives of the group had been agreed to and the initial shape of the agency designed. The members undoubtedly went away to their separate homes with some unanswered questions, but with a genuine sense of satisfaction. They had gotten the process of organization underway with a level of enthusiasm and creativity that has dimmed from time to time but never abated.

THE FIRST CRITICAL CHOICE: JOHN C. TAYLOR AS AGENT

After months of planning and organizational meetings, the CPA’s founding group made its first personnel decision. There is no record of any conversations about the process with the Boston Prison Discipline Society or with the other similar agencies that had been formed in New York, Maryland, and Philadelphia. The new agency’s leaders had talked with John Augustus, the legendary Boston boot maker who even then was considered the “father of probation.” Also in their midst were two people who had attended the big 1870 American Prison Reform Congress in Cincinnati, described in the second chapter. At least one member of the founding group, Francis Wayland, was a director of the Wethersfield State Prison at the time and had been active on behalf of the legislature in assessing prison conditions. Among the founders themselves, as judges and clergy, some probably had other contacts within judicial and clergy networks from whom they garnered advice on the kind of person they needed to run the Prisoners’ Friend Association. It would have been fascinating to listen to their discussions, arguments, and recommendations as they made their choice.

Without any fanfare, a man named John C. Taylor was hired as its first agent and its secretary on March 11, 1875. Nothing is recorded about why he was chosen, what qualities he had that made him stand out, or whether he was the only person considered for the position. It is entirely possible, given the nature of the work to be undertaken and the novelty of it for the times, that few others wanted the job. Since a military form of discipline was considered at the time to be the appropriate regimen for a prison, what led the founders to choose him most likely lay in Taylor’s established character as a military veteran. There is no information about what might have made the job appealing to him except that he had recently returned from California and was searching for a career.

Like almost all who would eventually follow in his footsteps for the next fifty years, Taylor was a complete novice in criminal justice. He had never worked around or with offenders before. Although relatively young (thirty years old at the time of his hiring), he had undoubtedly matured beyond his years thanks to his participation in the war. Like many other veterans who survived, he had come away with a vivid experience of both the good and the evil of which humanity was capable.

What we know of his parents and early childhood is found in the brief biography that appeared in the souvenir booklet printed at the 1902 dedication of the Civil War cannon from Taylor’s regiment that sits outside the state capital building to this day. His father was engaged in business in New York City, and it was there that John Taylor was born on March 24, 1845. His family moved to Bethel, Connecticut, when he was a young boy. Since his army records list him as a resident of Bethel, it can safely be presumed that he spent his adolescence and teen years in that town. The brief biography in the cannon dedication brochure indicates that his first teacher was “ex-Governor George E. Loundsbury” (elected for a one-year term in 1899), who had taught school in western Connecticut before entering Yale Divinity School.¹⁰

Taylor was sixteen in the fall of 1861, when the Civil War began. In an act of youthful bravado, he impressed his friends by going to Hartford to sign up for infantry service. Although a volunteer unit accepted him, the U.S. Army turned him down because he was too young. He admits that it was humiliating to return to Bethel. Before the end of the year, he returned to the state capitol and successfully offered his services. He used a common trick among teenagers, writing the number eighteen on a piece of paper, placing it in his shoe and claiming that he was “over 18.” Being able to pull that off indicates that he was big enough physically to handle a man’s work and brash enough in temperament to bluff his way through unusual situations.¹¹

In January 1862 Taylor was assigned to the First Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, in which he served for the next three and a half years. He mustered out in September 1865, with the rank of sergeant. Working with a regimental colleague, Maj. Samuel P. Hatfield (a college graduate who had written many of the reports of the regiment), Taylor organized and published a compendium of the unit’s activities during the war. It became a “valued book of reference in all military circles,” according to one anonymous opinion, praised for “its careful and laborious accumulation of facts.”¹²

Reading the history that bears his name is mind-boggling in its detail and in the complexity of the unit’s travels and travails. It is a study in military maneuvering, reversals, and uncertainty, as Lincoln’s generals sought to comprehend and react to Gen. Robert E. Lee’s aggressive strategies. It is also a record of incredible human endurance and unsurpassed valor by combatants on both sides. The daily reports indicate that they did a lot of hurrying up and waiting, as units of the federal army positioned themselves in response to constantly changing orders. They camped or cleaned weapons much of the time and then moved in frantic bursts of energy as they skirmished with elements of the Confederate army in the first half of 1863.

In July of that year, their orders took them next on the five-hundred-mile march from Virginia to the crucial battle of Gettysburg and back. At the end of that critical conflict, still not aware of how important their narrow victory was in the total scheme of events, they hauled their hundreds of cannon and tons of ordnance back to Washington once again over muddy and rutted roads by horsepower and on their backs. Their reward was praise from General George Burnside and a long period of relative rest as part of the defense of Washington. In June 1864 the company was given the opportunity to share in the penultimate battle of the war in Virginia, the siege of Petersburg. When it ended in March 1865, the regiment was disbanded and sent home. Each man probably wondered why and how he had managed to come out alive when so many others had been killed or seriously wounded in body and mind.

Taylor went to California immediately after mustering out in order to “grow up with the country.” He spent at least three years there, according to his interview with a Hartford Courant reporter in 1906, an exchange that brings his personality to life and tells us a little about traveling after the Civil War. A route through the Panama Canal was chosen to avoid attacks by road agents and Native Americans. He disembarked from the steamer in San Francisco and went from there to San Jose, enjoying the “universal experience of immigrants.” While mule packing in the rugged terrain, a major earthquake occurred, which seismologists later said was marked by larger land movement than the famous 1906 quake that almost destroyed San Francisco. The fact that he had survived the “Great California Earthquake of 1868” made Taylor a source of widespread interest almost forty years later, as the nation followed the newspaper reports of the even greater earthquake of 1906. To the city folk of Hartford, his words must have seemed exotic and fascinating. The report of one of his speeches in the Hartford Courant indicates a man able to describe a harrowing situation with precision, humor, and an offhand allusion to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist:

We were staging along the western slope of the Sierras, and stopped to change horses and get a meal at an adobe building used as a stage station…. Without warning the house began to rock and quiver, clocks and other loose articles tumbled to the floor…. We were in a steep ravine, precipitous mountain cliffs on either side, overhanging masses of rock, and everything in sight … rolling and pitching…. It seemed as though the mountains would come together like a vice and crush everything shut in the narrow ravine…. I certainly thought it was all over in that range of hills in ’68 and have no Oliver Twist appetite for more…. When it comes to choosing between war and earthquake, I promptly rise to remark, give me Hartford.¹³

Taylor was a solid member of the community. The Farmington Avenue Congregational Church listed Taylor as a member, and he was also active in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. He rose through the offices of the Robert O. Tyler Post of the Grand Army of the Republic to serve as its commander. Taylor had much going for him at the time of his selection: he was a seasoned veteran, an honored historian, a man who had experiences on both coasts of the United States.¹⁴ He enabled the Prisoners’ Friend Association to gain at once an image of patriotic heroism, solid judgment, authoritative leadership, unblemished reputation, and a no-nonsense approach to problems.

John Taylor was not without limitations. Based on his reports and other writings, he was neither philosophical nor ambitious. While he eventually became involved in the reform of the sentencing system and supported the creation of a probation program, he did not look much beyond his particular job of helping the individual inmate or speculate much about the causes of crime.

When John Taylor first walked onto the Wethersfield State Prison grounds in the spring of 1875, however, he brought with him much the same combination of attitude and knowledge that characterized many of the founding members of the Prisoners’ Friend Association. He was absolutely confident in the mission he was undertaking, and he was almost completely ignorant of the prison culture he was entering. He had a massive learning curve ahead.

THE SECOND CRITICAL CHOICE: FRANCIS WAYLAND AS PRESIDENT

Like many another fledgling group, the CPA started with great enthusiasm only to discover two facts: one, that funding for the work was not easy to come by; and, two, that a consensus about the direction of a new organization was not easy to maintain. Leadership was turning over rapidly. The Prisoners’ Friend Association was also being questioned as unwieldy. The ability to pay John Taylor his meager salary was becoming more and more doubtful. In the fall of 1875 a special collection of five dollars per board member provided some assurance for a few months “in case the treasury should not be replenished.”¹⁵

Yale University’s president, Rev. Noah Porter of New Haven, called a meeting at Center Congregational Church in New Haven in December 1875 to garner further support for the agency by creating a local auxiliary to the Prisoners’ Friend Corporation. Within a few weeks citizens in Hartford summoned a similar meeting in January 1876 at an unspecified location. They would create another auxiliary to focus on the Hartford Jail. Ideas for solidifying the work of the new reform group were plentiful, and the interest was intense. They needed a leader that would commit for a long period, one who could reshape the original organization into an agency that people across the state would rally around. That leader proved to be the dean of Yale University Law School, Francis Wayland.

Wayland was born in Boston on August 23, 1826. His father, also named Francis, served as president of Brown University from 1827 to 1855. The younger Wayland graduated from Brown, attended Harvard Law School, and practiced law in Massachusetts from 1850 to 1858 and then in New Haven for four years, before acting as judge of probate in that city. After one year as lieutenant governor in 1869–70 on the Republican ticket with Marshall Jewell, he returned to the probate court until 1873, when he agreed to join the Yale Law School faculty.

The Yale Law School had just been upgraded from a one-room department of the university. The room had served as the library, classroom, debate room, and lounge. There had been only one professor since 1865, and there were only seventeen students when Wayland took over the dean’s position. Thirty years later, when Wayland left Yale Law School, there were three hundred students, and the school was ranked on a par with the best law schools in the land. Francis Wayland was progressive in every public facet of his life, embracing the new science of evolutionary biology and serving as the president of the American Social Science Association in 1880. His death in 1904, after twenty-eight years as president of the CPA, left a void, which no one at the time was able to fill.

Wayland was well known in and outside of Connecticut. Most important, he was politically connected, knew how to organize effectively, and could create consensus in the midst of controversy, three qualities indispensable to the success enjoyed by the CPA during his presidency. His legacy was not based on rhetoric, brilliance, or innovation, but on lending his objective legal mind to champion prison reform in the midst of a relatively hostile public and press for criminal-law reform within a reluctant legislature.

Working in tandem with John Taylor, Wayland’s academic and judicial status created a unique quality. Their combined voices added substance and credibility to the CPA’s chosen role and blunted any charge of sentimentalism and amateurism against the agency’s leadership. The agency probably could not have survived without both of them providing consistent guidance and stability through the first three decades. The two men gave to the agency the solid core that is indispensable to ultimate success for any organization.

IMPLEMENTING THE AGENCY’S OBJECTIVES

The objectives of the association set the work to be done in its largest context: the prevention of crime and the protection of society. The narrow focus on helping the individual offender upon discharge was always seen through the wide-angle lens of systemic reform of the prison and the criminal justice components.

Together with a few volunteers who composed the CPA’s Standing Committee on Visitation and Discharges, Taylor set up a monthly meeting with the warden, chaplain, and other officers of the prison. Each discharged individual was up for consideration to be assisted by the CPA. They discussed such items as the character of the prisoner, the amount of monetary aid available (not necessarily to be handed out), the type of work for which the individual was suited, and the destination to which he was most likely expected to return. The majority had no home to go to, nor any promise of a job.

In many of his reports Taylor’s comments illustrate how subjective the process of extending assistance can be in this all-too-human arena. He was sure that he knew how to read the men he met as they prepared to leave Wethersfield. Not having psychologists around to confer with or social workers to do background checks, he tended to help most fully those able to impress him with their willingness and industry, not simply through their record but through his own intuitive reading of their intentions.

Taylor had the benefit of the warden’s judgment, of course, and for a few years until the process became too unwieldy, he had the opinions of the members of the CPA visitation committee to help him. But the final decisions and the amount of assistance he offered were based primarily on his personal insight into the character of people presented to him and on his own deep well of intelligent compassion. It was a feature of the work that did not change much during his long tenure with the agency. Before his life ended John Taylor became a highly respected example of that experiential method throughout New England and the United States. Indeed, all of his colleagues doing similar work had to depend on their own judgment and ability to make the daily decisions about who to help and how.

In the background, but of considerable importance, were the people who made up the membership of the four committees that shepherded the CPA’s work. The division of duties was appropriate to the task, beginning with an executive committee, chaired by Wayland.¹⁶ The CPA was a statewide organization from the outset. Members were matched to particular counties: James Hughes for Hartford, Noah Porter for New Haven, Lafayette Foster for New London, Henry Towne for Fairfield, Origen Seymour for Litchfield, Charles Hill for Middlesex, William Jillson for Windham, and Alfred Goodrich for Tolland County. Wayland made committee assignments: a committee on finance was composed of John Corning, Henry Towne, and William Franklin; a committee on crime and laws included Thomas Gibbon, Henry Towne, and James Hughes. A committee on visitation and discharges lists George Woods, William Berry, John Browne, William Ayres, and John Belden.

Most striking about the list is the prominence of judges and attorneys, a pattern that held in all future organizational structures. It was not accidental. In 1875 the judicial component of the criminal justice system was well poised to recognize the need for prison reform. It was also the judges and senior attorneys of the day who had the political connections to help make systemic reformation happen. There are numerous hints and suggestions indicating that the CPA’s leadership had corresponded with the Pennsylvania Prison Society (which dated back to 1787), the Boston Prison Discipline Society (formed in 1825), and the Correctional Association of New York (formed in 1844). All these agencies and many more attended the annual meetings of the National Prison Association and had many opportunities to hear one another speak and to exchange views on methods and systems of criminal justice, as the nineteenth century gave way to the growing complexity of society in the twentieth century.

The reform movement faced an uphill struggle within the general public. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the prevailing attitudes toward crime and criminals among the public ranged from vengeful anger to apathy. Legislative reform required an equivalent or stronger passion combined with considerable legal knowledge and negotiating skills to counteract such opinions. Judges and attorneys committed to reform were essential to give the rehabilitative ideal credibility to supplement the moral and practical energy provided by clergy and prominent business owners active in the reform movement.

The Connecticut legislature, of course, had attorneys among its members. Reformation on many issues often started with insightful legislators. In prison reform, however, that rarely happened. Few attorney-legislators came from a background in criminal law, and those who did were usually former prosecutors whose electability to the legislature was partly based on a record of locking people up. They generally favored the retributive system, in which they usually recommended as severe a sentence as the law allowed and the jury could be persuaded to impose. Helping offenders get a new start was not usually among their interests or listed in their portfolio of talents as legislators.

The executive branch of government was an even less likely source of reform. Governors, and the administrators they appointed, were often people trained in law, but as elected officials they were subject to pressure from public opinion on a daily basis. Consequently, they tended to be reluctant to get involved or viewed helping criminals as a negative in the compilation of their resumes. Francis Wayland, formerly a lieutenant governor, was the exception that proved the rule. It is incontrovertible that without the leadership and expertise of judges and criminal-law attorneys at every stage of CPA’s evolution, the achievements of the agency and systemic improvements in criminal justice would not have been possible.

AN OPEN COMMITMENT TO HUMAN POTENTIAL

In 1879 John Taylor’s report reflected the thinking of a man who had decided, on one hand, that he was not going to be a pushover on prison reform; on the other hand, he had not lost his confidence that what he was doing was morally right and that it was, in the end, going to be effective. For the next three decades it was his repeated conviction that the men serving time and being discharged from the state prison were worthy of his time and energy. He never stopped believing that, with some exceptions, enough of them would respond to his caring for their basic needs: shelter, food, clothing, and a job.

There is no evidence that Taylor saw ethnicity as an issue or held any particular prejudices about the Irish, Germans, Swedes, or any other group of immigrants that tended to make up the bulk of the inmates at the prison. He seemed to trust that most would react positively to his kindness and a promise of continued support. If the men he worked with failed after their release, it wouldn’t be because they lacked someone in whom they could trust and to whom they could turn. In realistic but hopeful words at the end of his 1881 report, after five years on the job, he explained how he often did not introduce men to an employer as an ex-convict, which worked most of the time, allowing him to assert a view that he expressed in one form or another during his entire thirty-four and a half years of service that “no prisoner discharged from the State Prison … can truthfully say that he was obliged to commit crime, since his release.”¹⁷

The assumption that criminal behavior was a combination of pressures from without and weaknesses from within each individual was not common, but it was representative of a strong school of thought that was prominent in New England. CPA was implementing, consciously or not, the message that Horace Bushnell, Nathaniel Taylor, and other Protestant clergy and teachers of the day had been preaching for five decades. Their message held that a benevolent God had created all people with the capacity to choose their patterns of behavior and belief. Each person was also endowed with a capacity to grow and to change, either by religious conversion or by utilizing his or her God-given abilities and moral values. By 1865 these beliefs had become sufficiently active in the culture to make the rehabilitative prison reform movement a dominant force against a culture that in all probability would not have otherwise supported reform.

Taylor’s reports often alluded to an observation that may have surprised even him: most offenders are ordinary people, a mixture of good intentions and personal flaws. They may have been misled or have made bad judgments, but he convinced himself that many, if not most, of his charges were capable of resuming a law-abiding and self-sustaining life. Given the right kind of punishment, support, opportunities, and encouragement, he believed, most could be restored to society.

The problem offenders faced, Taylor theorized, was one of moral deformation and practical deficiencies. In maintaining this confidence as he went about his work, Taylor was part of a fundamentally countercultural movement that had started earlier in the century. In his 1870 address to the National Prison Congress, Zebulon Brockway asserted that crime had two sources, the individual and the society into which the individual was born and raised. “The causes of crime,” he said, “are primarily in the creature, secondarily in the circumstances that surround him.”¹⁸ By stressing the environmental impact on the offender, Brockway was adding impetus to the growing scientific interest in the causes of crime outside the offender, omitting the devil and other religious forces. By stressing the creaturely basis for crime, Brockway was indicating that he was still part of a long history of blaming the offender for making bad choices or falling prey to greed or one of the other seven deadly sins. Although the religious aspect has been replaced by psychology and sociology, the debate has never diminished as to which locus of criminogenic activity, the individual or the environment, is the most basic force at work.

The presence of professional or career criminals was not ignored, but the answer to horrific crime was lengthy imprisonment—or incapacitation. Such people were considered irretrievable, damaged permanently by their environments. They belonged in prison for as long as the law allowed. However, average offenders, according to Gibbon, were people who had been harmed by their background but had not been irreparably damaged. Such offenders only lacked strength, training, moral principles, and personal support. It was a perspective that was reflected on virtually every report of the annual Proceedings of the National Prison Association.

The remedy to human malfeasance in the agency’s early years was to offer a combination of moral reformation and practical assistance. Taylor was a progressive Calvinist, but he was still a Calvinist. He took seriously the power of temptation and did not expect everyone to respond positively. Yet he was equally pessimistic about the vaunted efficacy of pure punishment to cure people of their disposition to commit crime. He was acutely aware of the powerful attractions toward a negative life that surrounded newly released inmates and the personal demons that could undermine their best efforts. All considered, he rejected retribution as the sole purpose of incarceration and advocated for reformatory programs to assist offenders to change.

Taylor and the association members expected to have many more successes than failures, as long as two prerequisites for reformation were in place: an institution that could be trusted to instill discipline, cultivate good work habits, and encourage repentance; and a method of individualized assistance available from the day of release. In report after report throughout his long career, Taylor declared, “It is our promise to each man who needs it, to stand by him with material assistance until he can find honest employment, provided his conduct is what it should be.”¹⁹

The approach, and the CPA Board in general, presents a remarkable example of the progressive Protestantism of the time and the subtle but powerful impact of the Enlightenment. At the core of eighteenth-century Enlightenment was conviction that a rational approach to life could be both effective and beneficial in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and justice without constant recourse to the revealed truths of religion. At the heart of progressive Protestantism in the nineteenth century was the conviction that there existed a God-given potential for steady improvement within human nature without constant dependence on conversion. The promise of the new sciences (especially the powerful ideas of evolutionary biology and psychology), combined with progressive theology being preached throughout New England, was the foundation on which they built their assistance.

Those assumptions would be tested severely and challenged increasingly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Despite the latent and sometimes vocal skepticism of much of the surrounding culture, they would dominate not only the CPA’s approach but also that of the state’s criminal justice system well into the next century.

WEATHERING THE EARLY STORMS: LOCAL AND NATIONAL

The first year for which we have a relatively full account of the work done, 1878, Taylor gave his report to the board: 123 prisoners had been discharged from Wethersfield State Prison between January 1 and December 31. Only those released during the last nine months of the year could be counted because, according to Taylor’s report, the new policy was not effective until April. From that date, 85 men had been released and, of that number, 81 received assistance. For the next thirty-one years, Taylor would continue to give a careful and detailed account of the flow of inmates to the free world and the various ways he had rendered help to them. Although the percentage of offenders given assistance slowly dipped as the prison population gradually increased, it was maintained at well over 90 percent of those discharged until the end of his life.

It is extremely easy and common for later generations to underestimate the degree of difficulty encountered by those initiating, programmatically, any new social policy. No doubt, John Taylor had much going for him. There was that strong idealistic current of public opinion that had helped to bring the agency into being. Its effects ranged from outright support to grudging tolerance of the work he was doing. At the same time, beneath this thin, modern layer of progressive thought lay a much-thicker layer of traditional views about criminal justice. While there were, for the moment, few public detractors or critics of his efforts, they were never entirely absent or silent. Criticism at the state level was paralleled by mounting questions being faced on the national level.

In addition, the American economy faltered twice before the end of the century. The first was a downturn for six years after a panic in 1873, when the largest bank in the country failed. The second was a series of recessions from 1879 to 1896, initiated by the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange, affecting Europe and the United States. Jobs were hard to find on every level, and Taylor’s work was difficult in the extreme. Yet Taylor regularly shared letters from discharged inmates. (We can assume that he reported those depicting the most success.) With that caveat, three samples from 1880 to 1900 illustrate the responses that strengthened his realistic willingness to help the men who accepted his friendship:

I am earning two dollars per day and have steady work. I made fifty full days in the last two months. I have faithfully kept the promise I made to you not to drink anything that can intoxicate, and I intend to keep it during life. I was married in September … and have a good wife…. Thanking you for the kind interest you have in my welfare.

In compliance with your request, I write to say that I arrived here on Monday evening and started to work the following morning. I have been very kindly received and have not met with anything unpleasant on account of my past history…. I am not able to make full wages yet … but I earn sufficient for my present wants.

It is with great pleasure I write to you for my husband, who was an inmate at the prison…. I hope you will excuse him for the long delay in writing. He has had work about every day since he came home…. He sends his kind regards to you and hopes to hear from you.²⁰

After 1903 Taylor’s optimism decreased and his discouragement grew. An increased workload, the continued return to crime by so many offenders, and resistance to prison reform by prosecutors and judges combined to weigh him down.

THE NATIONAL PRISON ASSOCIATION

The national prison reform movement that had begun boldly in 1870 was faltering. The forty-one rehabilitative principles adopted at that meeting had been a clarion call for change, but the changes were like planted seeds that lacked consistent irrigation and cultivation to grow. Additional congresses of the National Prison Association were held in 1872 in Baltimore, 1874 in Saint Louis, and 1876 in New York. Attendance, however, had declined, and the emotional intensity had lessened at each gathering. The association rehashed the same issues year after year with few visible outcomes. As powerful and intelligent as the leadership had been over the first twenty-five years, the NPA had failed to organize itself across the country to translate the practical, progressive principles it had enumerated in 1870 into federal legislation and local change.²¹

The possibility of disbanding the National Prison Association had become real by the middle of the 1870s. The perennial charge, from more conservative groups, of being soft on criminals could not be ignored. In the 1874 NPA meeting the president of Washington University in Saint Louis gave an opening address clearly seeking to counter that perception: “We desire to fall into no weak sentimentalism. We would not shrink from making men suffer. We ask no cossetting and foolish indulgence for those who need to learn that as a man sows so shall he reap…. But we insist upon it that the criminal … shall be treated as a human being, having the same natural rights as the rest of us, not necessarily worse than many of ourselves, capable of being redeemed from guilt and degradation, and therefore to be taught while he is punished, by the arguments of hope more than fear, to be trained, even in prison, to the rational use of liberty, and so to be prepared for his restoration … to a noble and better life.”²²

Unfortunately, weak sentimentalism and foolish indulgence was too often the way the public perceived the push for a rehabilitative system. Then, in 1879, the major flaw of the national organization was revealed. Too much of its strength lay in its top leadership and especially in it principal founder and charismatic president, Dr. Enoch C. Wines. His death in 1879 was unexpected and traumatic, judging from the multitude of testimonies issued by his colleagues. It is obvious from their comments that, almost single-handedly, he had initiated and laid the organizational foundation for the worldwide movement for prison reform that catapulted into the news after 1870. As the secretary and agent of the New York Prison Association before becoming the first secretary of the National Prison Association, Wines was the most eminent and easily the most eloquent prison reformer in the United States. Supporting the idea that history in many instances is biography, it took four years to regroup from his death. By 1883, however, the NPA had recovered its passion and resumed its biennial congresses with even greater motivation and impetus.

In Connecticut, by the fall of 1877, the CPA was on stable ground. The economy was improving and fiscal support for the agency had grown. The several committees appointed by the agency were hard at work, and, most important, E. B. Hewes, warden at the state prison, publicly praised their accomplishments. Nonetheless, John Taylor felt it necessary to write a letter to the Hartford Daily Courant to specifically counter the rumors that the CPA was “coddling criminals” and “weakening prison discipline.”²³

Taylor assured the Courant readers that he and the CPA’s directors were working closely with the warden of the state prison and that the agency had no intentions or desire to interfere with the discipline or management of the prison. Their sole aim (and his as their agent) was restricted to aiding discharged convicts in their own efforts to reestablish themselves in honest and productive lives. No more, no less. Indeed, he stressed, the CPA did not even choose the offenders they worked with: “only such as are recommended by prison officials are examined by the committee.” The warden and the chaplain had “freely promised to cooperate in the work.” Moreover, in a statement that seems designed to underscore the claim that the CPA was not overstepping its bounds, Taylor wrote, “The Connecticut Prison Association has no connection with the Board of State Charities,” a new organization charged with examining the conditions of life within the prisons and jails.²⁴

As the CPA’s stability increased, its leaders gradually became more interested in what was happening inside the Wethersfield State Prison. But in this early stage it was understandably careful to protect its flanks. Ultimately, as a state-sponsored group, the CPA could not take on the mantle of being a “watchdog” agency. All the changes it affected in the years ahead, or tried to affect, would be from inside the system. The principles proclaimed in 1870 carried not only the National Prison Association but also state and regional reform agencies for the next one hundred years. The CPA engaged much of its energy and skill in promoting all three.

SETTLING IN FOR THE LONG HAUL

During the late 1870s John Taylor and Francis Wayland hit their stride in the operation of the Connecticut Prison Association. The agency’s financial crisis was resolved in part by a concerted effort to recruit more supporters, but at $2.00 per membership the increased income was probably less important than the added political leverage it gave the organization. The Hartford Daily Courant reported the CPA had hired Rev. Howard Mead for a six-month period in the summer of 1875 for a stipend of $1,000.00. Mead’s charge was to organize local chapters of the agency throughout the state.²⁵

John Taylor would apply part of his time to add to the focus on recruitment of new CPA members, but the struggle to survive continued, indicating that the outreach had not been successful enough. Three years later the balance on hand at the beginning of the year was a grand total of $24.83! Along with a $300.00 grant from the local philanthropy organization the Watkinson Foundation and $559.95 brought in by membership dues, the CPA was able to give Taylor the balance of his salary in 1880 and meet all but $152.00 of its expenses for 1879. It dispersed $1,115.75 to 95 (out of 135) discharged inmates. In 1881 the state provided $1,800.00 and in the following year, $2,000.00. The CPA’s financial stability in 1882 was rescued by an additional stipend granted by the Connecticut legislature of $900.00 (Judge Origen Seymour is later given credit). Seventy-four contributors provided another $778.50. Together the two sources enabled the CPA to pay all bills except a $30.80 balance due to John Taylor. The next year the state allotment rose to $1,200.00.²⁶

The state would gradually increase its stipend, though not every year. The numbers of discharged inmates, however, increased more rapidly. The state stipend was a two-edged sword. It was the critical support needed to survive the tail end of the great recession that plagued the first half of the 1890s. It also tended to lessen the pressure to expand the agency’s membership. In the annual reports from 1879 to 1882, Francis Wayland was content to simply acknowledge key people who had passed away or to express gratitude for the work being done by the agency. In 1883 he felt secure enough to speak out about international prison reform and the benefits of well-ordered prisons.

Wayland’s intellectual strength was his vision of prison reform and a sentencing system that would facilitate rehabilitation. His weakness was that he paid little attention to mounting a convincing interpretation of the CPA’s goals to the general public. He saw the larger goal clearly. He did not worry about building an effective foundation of public opinion to support it. Specifically, Wayland began to teach the penology of reformation as the replacement for the long-standing penology of retribution. Modern penology, he professed, should focus on both incarceration and release equally, or it will be impotent. In 1883, seven years after assuming the presidency, he articulated for the first time his understanding of prison reform. It is, he said, one of the prime endeavors of a civilized society. “Imprisonment for crime should be not only a deterrent, but reformatory; it should not only restrain physically, but renovate morally…. But the permanence of the work of reform … depends almost entirely upon the influences which surround the prisoner on his return to society.”²⁷ That demand is reasonable, he argued, on the basis of enlightened Christianity, common sense, and sound political economy.

For the next three years (1884–87), both Wayland and Taylor lifted Connecticut’s approach to greater visibility outside of the state. Wayland was now on the Executive Board of the National Prison Association, and Taylor served on the NPA’s Standing Committee for Discharged Offenders. In addition to their annual reports to the CPA, they each spoke at the annual NPA congresses. Wayland was especially vocal nationally, with extended arguments for the reformatory point of view. John Taylor’s comments and reports were generally less complex and more practical, as he explained his “paternalistic” system of assistance, clearly intending that qualifier to be heard as the positive, compassionate way a father would help a son who was just learning how to fend for himself in a world that did not easily accept him back.

Both Wayland and Taylor consistently explicated the value of four reforms they were championing: the initiation of indeterminate sentences, the value of constructive labor, the need of a probation system, and the foundational importance of helping the individual offender. These four topics tell us much about the major debates of the time in which they were offered and quantify the achievements of the CPA in its first thirty-five years.

These four reforms also remind us that, from the beginning, the CPA was as interested in systemic reformation as it was in personal rehabilitation. Becoming the prisoners’ friend in 1875 not only involved extending a helping hand to offer them another chance; it also meant advocating for appropriate changes in the prison conditions that surrounded offenders during their confinement and examining society’s role in producing crime. The offenders’ own responsibility for their misdeeds was accepted as a given. But the criminal justice system was not thereby off the hook. Individuals and the system were of one piece. The CPA attempted to deal with it all.

THE INDETERMINATE-SENTENCE DEBATE

The most important change many reformers promoted was the need to replace the simple fixed-sentence structure—which went back to colonial days—with a system of “indeterminate sentences.” For well over one hundred years criminal sentences in the United States had stipulated a definite minimum and a definite maximum time. Francis Wayland’s rational Christianity (shared by most reformers of the time) offered a nicely combined analysis of the situation: the problem lay in rigid judicial timelines delivered by judges with unjudicial temperaments.

The same year that Wayland talked to the CPA annual meeting, he took his message to the national stage. Drawing on a medical analogy to supplement his criticism of the judicial process, he told an audience at the 1883 National Prison Association what most of them already believed: crime must be understood as a moral, treatable disease. “The object of punishment I believe to be two-fold, to protect society by confining and reforming the prisoner.” The path to reformation lay in sentences that had neither a minimum nor a maximum limit. Only those who oversee custody day by day were in a position to ascertain, after their experience with personal treatment, what the limits should be for any particular prisoner.²⁸

Wayland literally meant what he said. A judge himself, he was convinced that judges lacked the necessary insight, experience, and close observance of the offender to allow them to determine what length of sentence an offender should receive. He believed, also, that the reformed prisoner should be released when and only when he had proven to the prison officials (the only people with the knowledge and wisdom to determine the authenticity of that proof) that he was a reformed man, that he was morally cured. The criminal who was not able to demonstrate change would stay locked away, for the rest of his life if necessary. Wayland’s solution was to have sentences without limits at either end.

Wayland was not alone in these conclusions. At this juncture of science and morality, the notion of rehabilitation was reaching its peak. Wayland’s opinions were shared by a multitude of wardens, academicians, and lay practitioners. The weakness in the fixed-sentence system was that it dealt only with the crime. (The rationale is similar to the “three strikes and you’re out” policy of the 1990s in several states, which imposed a life term after three separate felony convictions.) By contrast, the strength of the indeterminate system was that it went to the source of the crime. It was designed to focus on the criminal’s background, that is, the accumulated attitudes, spiritual defects, and other deficiencies that led to criminal activity. There would be other reforms proposed and instituted in the coming years, but the individualized approach of indeterminate sentencing became the backbone of the prison reform movement for the next one hundred years in America.

In Connecticut Wayland (and, to a degree, John Taylor) moved the CPA to the center of the reform movement. Wayland’s approach, however, was never that of a purist. It was a blend of the classic retributive type of justice and the new rehabilitative justice. He believed in the individual assessment of every prisoner. Toward those categorized as “incorrigible,” his attitude was as harshly punitive as his concern for “reformable” offenders was compassionate. Once offenders were deemed incorrigible (by the warden and other prison staff), Wayland’s preference was the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In an 1887 speech to the National Prison Association, he declared that “the presence in the community (of those labeled incorrigible) was as painful as it was palpable…. The members of this class or guild are openly at war with all that society holds dear and is bound to protect and are a perpetual and dangerous menace to the law-abiding citizen.”²⁹

In that same year Wayland drafted an “incorrigible law” for the Connecticut legislature with the support of the CPA Board of Directors. Under its provisions, if an offender was convicted for the third time for a crime requiring at least two years in prison, he was deemed incorrigible. The proposed penalty was the addition of twenty-five years after the expiration of the third sentence. It was passed with few objections, and when questions were asked, he replied that his answer would be confinement until death or until the offender showed conclusive proof of complete reformation. “The disease is deadly; the treatment must be heroic.”³⁰

The use of indeterminate sentences had already begun and was well under way outside Connecticut, in Colorado, Indiana, and Illinois during the 1890s. In Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire indeterminate sentences were in use by 1900. Most of the states professing a rehabilitation approach retained some of their determinate or fixed-sentence structure and resisted, in one way or another, the idea of completely abandoning that system. The indeterminate sentence, regardless of how it was defined, was applied in a variety of ways by judges reluctant to give up their discretion.

Connecticut passed its first indeterminate-sentence statute in 1901, fifteen years after Wayland, Taylor, and others had initially proposed it. It was a partial application of the idea with many qualifiers, an indication of the latent resistance to the prison reform movement. John Taylor’s reports for the next few years invariably included several paragraphs pleading for a fuller implementation of the law. One aspect he especially regretted was the omission by judges of any stipulation of parole supervision. “Unfortunately,” he wrote in 1903, “many prisoners come into the prison with sentences so arranged that the possibility of applying the essential principle of the indeterminate sentence (the parole) is practically or literally eliminated.”³¹

The difficulties continued. Despite the support of the warden of the Wethersfield State Prison, Albert Garvin, who had assumed the position in 1899 and was highly regarded, the legislature refused to act. It is a matter of daily regret,” Taylor wrote a few years later, going more to the heart of the matter, “that the indeterminate principle in the law … has not had a fair opportunity to demonstrate its power for good…. Court officials persist in clinging to the long ago discredited method of practically fixed sentences.”³²

The debate revolved around one question: should the punishment fit the criminal or the crime? The indeterminate-sentence statute was the culmination of the modern reformatory quest for individualized justice. Its full implementation across the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century marked a watershed in the battle with the ancient desire to punish the crime. Wayland occasionally used the analogy of a dangerous snake to make his point. “Now to sentence rattlesnakes or copperheads to three months imprisonment every time they should bite a man, and then turn him loose to bite again, would be almost exactly what our criminal law has been doing in all cases for which capital punishment was not decreed. The reform we propose today is either to remove the poison-fang or keep the snake caged for life.”³³

Consequently, the reformers in Connecticut achieved only a partial victory. The fixed-sentence laws were never fully replaced by indeterminate sentences. When the latter was passed, it was applied unevenly by judges and implemented in a limited way by prison staff. During the next eighty years of amendments, the indeterminate sentence never reached the level of purity sought by the CPA and other reformers. Both the Connecticut legislature and the state’s judges fought the idea that only prison officials possessed the wisdom to determine when an offender should be released. Connecticut never did enact the ideal sentencing law championed by CPA, continuing with a mix of fixed and indeterminate provisions until 1981, when a law returning to a predominantly determinate structure was passed by the state legislature.

As a result, indeterminate sentences were characterized by enormous variation, from the beginning. Deciding when an offender was reformed proved to be as subjective a process by wardens as it had ever been by judges. There were successes, as the annual reports of the CPA constantly stressed. Each report to the CPA Board contained letters from discharged convicts who not only thanked the agency and John Taylor for the help received but showed real evidence of staying crime free. But the fact remained that criteria were rarely, if ever, devised in any concrete rationale to decide which offenders were amenable to reform, what kind of treatments or disciplines were to be used, or how to rate the progress or the actual cure of the moral evil or weakness within the offender once they were released to the free world.

Wardens at the Wethersfield State Prison and their staff had no objective measurements to guide them. More often than not, they resorted to intuitive judgments about when to release a prisoner. The one concrete promise by prison reformers, especially in the initial stages, that reformation methods would save taxpayer money by reducing the number of repeat offenders, became a goal ever out of reach. Crime continued to increase. There were many reasons, but the burden of proof was on the reformers. Justifying the continuance of the indeterminate system proved to be increasingly difficult as the decades went by.

Taylor admitted in later years that the number of repeat offenders continued to be significant. The term recidivism as one detail of an offender’s evaluation had come into use about 1880. Until the advent of sociology and the creation of more objective research methods, recidivism referred only to a return to prison. Did it also mean a repetition of the same crime or any crime? Did it mean repetition within a certain time limit? Was the commitment of a misdemeanor the same as a repetition of a felony? Over the years recidivism accumulated many definitions.

The reality of men and women returning to prison was undeniable. To Taylor and Wayland (along with most reformers) the reason was plain and uncomplicated. By their observations the indeterminate system was not receiving a fair chance to be as successful as it might be. Too many offenders were being released prematurely before they could be guided to prepare for the demands of free society. Without proper training, how could they be expected to function as good citizens? In one report to the CPA Board, Taylor called the misuse of the indeterminate law a “snare and delusion,” which ought to be repealed if it wasn’t going to be applied as the law demanded.³⁴

The indeterminate sentence, among other reformatory tools, certainly fell far short of its advocate’s hopes. But it accomplished at least two changes. It focused public attention on the need for laws that addressed the criminal as well as the crime. It also made abundantly clear that punishment by itself could never be a long-term solution to the control and reduction of crime. Without doubt, criticisms of the indeterminate system were legitimate. Over time, the arguments used to defend it sounded like excuses rather than a rationale for further reform.

In the meantime, inside the prisons, another unintended and unexpected problem was slowly developing. Treatment modalities within the prison expanded during the Wayland-Taylor era, moving beyond improved prison conditions, moral training, education, and rigorous labor. Inevitably, prison controls over their application relaxed. Often the end tended to justify the means. It was problematic that inmates were being released prematurely. It was even more problematic that the treatments being used were being abused.

AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE: REHABILITATION SUBVERTED INTO PUNISHMENT

One of the unintended consequences of the developing criminal justice systems across the United States in the first 50 years of the twentieth century was that treatment easily morphed into punishment, and punishment was often disguised as treatment. So great was that result that legal scholars such as Leonard Orland, writing in the 1970s at the height of the critiques of scientific prison experimentation, described most treatment modalities for the past 150 years as merely the “rhetoric of rehabilitation.”³⁵

Coming from a scholar known to be a progressive witness for a more rational system of criminal justice, it was a powerful indictment of the failure of the rehabilitative ideal. Orland also placed retribution, incapacitation, and deterrence as failed approaches. His assessment was not an advocacy of nihilism. Rather he represented the conviction that the prison did not lend itself to true rehabilitation, which was needed. His goal was to raise up the need for responses to crime that were “reasoned, informed and lawful, and to remind the public that with the advent of more complex psychological tools and sophisticated ways of manipulating the mind and body of convicted offenders, the system from court through parole could become more dangerous than the crime being fought.” Orland cynically described the regressive progression from the Quaker “penitentiary,” where isolation, silence, and corporal punishments were combined, to the “reformatory,” where reeducation, adopted as the new path to reform, easily became equally cruel. Guards literally taught recalcitrant inmates a lesson and claimed the abuse was meant to reform them. Based on his experience while a professor of law at the University of Connecticut and as a parole board member, Orland’s prescriptions for the prison system included a wide range of features. Among them the following stand out: the abolition of the indeterminate-sentence process; the abandonment of the pretension that a prison sentence can be rehabilitative; the acknowledgement that, conversely, rehabilitation was usually coerced; shorter sentences and the elimination of plea bargaining and parole release. Much of what he proposed was put into practice in the 1970s and 1980s in Connecticut. Orland concluded, “the result of this shift from retribution to repentance to rehabilitation has been to legitimize punishment in the name of treatment.”³⁶

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the reformatory approach eventually became as punitive as the whipping post or the thumbscrew had been. Participation in that approach became less and less voluntary. Strikingly, the fact that treatments were being misused and misapplied was not being questioned. On the contrary, the conclusion was reinforced that the indeterminate-sentence process and the rehabilitative ideal were ill-conceived and ineffective and a waste of time and money.

THE PRISON LABOR DEBATE

There was a second systemic issue in the Wayland-Taylor era. It was the widespread and controversial use of prisoners as a labor force to benefit the state. Connecticut had a long history of including labor as part of the prisoner’s life, starting with the original warden of the Wethersfield State Prison, Moses Pilsbury, in 1827. Its purpose at the outset was two-fold: first and foremost, labor was a way for prisoners to pay back the cost of incarceration. Second, labor was part of the prison discipline, the best and only way (in the opinion of most prison correctional staff) to inculcate good work habits in prisoners who never had developed them and actively resisted them.

The fact that the monetary rationale for prison labor was uppermost among legislators and in the general public was evidence of the subtle manner in which retribution regained its vitality after 1900. Hard-liners were always visible among the prison staff and certainly among conservative politicians of both parties. They were not alone. Even some progressive reformers pressed for hard labor to be imposed, acquiescing in the assumption that a significant percentage of offenders must lack either willpower or good work habits. Hard labor, with the emphasis on hard, was the necessary hammer to instill new patterns. The antebellum rhetoric of reform of Wayland, Taylor, and a host of others persisted as an undercurrent, but its capacity to persuade gradually diminished. The exchange of retribution for rehabilitation was a pattern that would be repeated in the decades ahead.

Prison labor took place inside the walls of the Wethersfield State Prison, just as it had in the workshops of the Old Newgate Prison. The prisoners at Wethersfield, following the Auburn plan, worked in silence in congregate workshops inside the walls. That deprivation gradually eased, and by turn of the century some talking was allowed if it pertained to the work. Wayland and Taylor were strong supporters of Connecticut’s approach to prison labor. At the 1883 meeting of the National Prison Association, Wayland praised the profitability of Wethersfield State Prison, but, not surprisingly, he insisted that fiscal gain was less important than the value it added to the offenders. “There is better order and less punishment than in any other prison…. The sanitary condition is as good…. As to the reformatory effect he is taught regular hours of labor … the importance of obedience to orders … (and) prevented from the use of intoxicating liquors.”³⁷

Wayland derided those who would try to abolish productive labor in Connecticut’s state prison. In 1888, he proposed a resolution to the National Prison Association in Boston, which was immediately adopted, to the effect that the association support prison labor “as an indispensable factor in the work of prison reform.” Changes that permitted idleness inflicted “irreparable injury upon the prisoner, the working man and the state.”³⁸

Among the nation’s prisons, four different methods were utilized, commonly called the state account, the piece-price, the lease, and the contract systems. They were not rigidly separate categories, and often one or more overlapped in any given state. There were lengthy debates in the annual congresses of the National Prison Association on which was the easiest to implement, the most productive to use, and the most profitable to the state. A simple description of each illustrates Connecticut’s choice.

In the state account, the “factory” work was performed inside the prison, with the machinery owned by the state and the goods produced for sale outside. Many states preferred this system because the state governed the custody, the care, the discipline, and the labor of the prisoner. It was also a challenge and often a financial stretch to find space to put the machinery, to maintain it, and to adapt to changing needs in whatever product line was being produced.

A second popular system often used, though not often in Connecticut, was called the “piece-price” approach. In it, each prisoner earned a certain amount of pay for each article or object made. The location of the manufacturing could be inside the prison or out in the community. Depending on that choice, the government or the manufacturer supplied the material and machinery. How much of the earnings was put in the inmate’s account and how much was retained by the prison differed according to the contract signed with the manufacturer and the policies of the prison. The challenge of this approach was the logistics of keeping track of the items produced and maintaining quality control with the various manufacturers involved.

A third type of prison labor was called a “lease” system, in which the state leased prisoners to an outside party, often on an annual basis. Once leased out, the prison usually had little or no say in what work was done or how it was managed and often did not desire that authority. Responsibility for the clothing, food, medical care, transportation, and guards needed in the work was handed over to the factory, the farmer, or the mine official.

The lease system originated in the South and was used most extensively there. It was also the most easily abused of the four choices. Here the inmate was leased to a mine owner, a manufacturer, a farmer, or the public works department of a town or county. Rarely did any of the money go the offender, who more often than not did not survive the brutality to live through the end of the contract. The morality (or lack of it) of the lessor alone determined the level of care or violence practiced. An almost inexhaustible supply of prisoners were guaranteed by the state in combination with local laws, which were expanded to facilitate arrests and convictions. In many towns and counties of the South, an offender could be arrested, according to laws passed for that purpose, for any one of dozens of violations. Leniency on the sentence would be promised if the offender agreed to work off the cost of the penalty. More violations would extend the sentence until there was no hope of ever paying the debt, except by death.³⁹ The majority of lessors were free to conclude that there was little need to worry about how long a prisoner stayed alive. The lease system was the setting in which the notorious chain gangs emerged, usually to work on roads or in agricultural settings.

The effect of the lease system in the southern states fell most heavily on poor whites and newly freed African Americans seeking homes and jobs. It seems these populations were more frequently arrested for trespassing, vagrancy, drunkenness, or lack of identification. The offenders were leased to factories or plantations to work off their sentence. Once there, conditions became brutal, and resistance meant added time and beatings until the offender, more often than not, found himself indentured for life or until he died from abuse. Slavery had discovered a new, and much more protected, venue.⁴⁰

Connecticut used the fourth system, called the “contract system,” and employed it without cessation from 1827 to the mid-twentieth century. In its earliest form, the goods were manufactured inside the prison, with materials, machinery, and work instruction provided by the contractor. The prison retained responsibility and authority for the disciplinary side of the prisoner’s life. Some of the work was done inside the prison, directed by skilled factory employees.

The contract system called for a per diem charge to the contractor for each inmate employed. In its later forms some prisoners were sent out to work in factories in the community, accompanied by guards. The financial profit was positive some years, and the state lost money other years, but the system was maintained in spite of resistance from free labor supporters. The system did not work perfectly, but in a small state like Connecticut, the contract system was quite feasible and often profitable.

Although he was open to all but the lease system, Francis Wayland praised the Wethersfield State Prison as a model of contract labor. He boasted in 1883 that when “ ‘agitators’ against the contract system were fully notified at the beginning of the contract process, invited to be present to state their objections … not a human being presented himself, not one.”⁴¹

Wayland was most eloquent about the value of constructive work for prisoners, as he had witnessed it in Connecticut. Before the 1888 meeting in Boston of the National Prison Association, he argued that the bill being presented to the NPA was extremely important because prison labor affects every part of prison reform and the total well-being of every prisoner.⁴² Wayland was correct. Prison labor is a complex subject worthy of being studied on its own merits. Here the point that demands attention is not simply that the CPA leaders chose one system or another, but that they, along with most prison reformers, never questioned the involuntary use of prisoners’ labor, either in terms of its benefit to the state or in its correlations to slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was only ten years old in 1875, when the CPA was organized. Francis Wayland was two years into his position as the dean of the Yale Law School. He undoubtedly was familiar with the stipulation that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It appears strange, at first consideration, that there is no sign in any of the CPA records that its staff or boards members discerned any connection between prison labor and slavery, not even for black offenders, and they appeared not to have had any question at all about the legitimacy of prison labor or its value to the reformation process.

Wayland, Taylor, and the state prison warden, Albert Garvin, were confident that the laws were being enforced fairly and equitably in Connecticut. Since that was the case, none of them saw a single moral issue involved. Perhaps because it was authorized in the U.S. Constitution, they raised no legal or economic arguments about the use of prison labor. In this area of prison reform, Connecticut’s leaders were as blind as the rest of the nation. The leadership of CPA viewed the concept of the prison as a necessary social institution. Even if prison labor was considered by some to be a new form of slavery, the implicit answer was that its use was justified by the highest court in the land as well as by the harmful nature of many crimes.

ESTABLISHING CONNECTICUT’S FIRST PAROLE AND PROBATION SYSTEMS

A third systemic intervention by the CPA in the Wayland-Taylor era was the advocacy for and the successful formation of a statewide probation or parole system. The indeterminate-sentence debate in the late nineteenth century spawned the idea that the first few months after the release of offenders should be used as a time of testing whether the virtues of reform had truly been inculcated in the person’s behavior. The release of the prisoner was up to the warden, who determined when the offender was sufficiently “cured” or reformed to merit release. Rarely inclined to be a pioneer, Connecticut followed the lead of other states that had already begun to establish parole systems to supervise the discharged offender, and some had begun using the term probation. The motivation was the high rate of failure to stay away from crime after returning to the community, usually the neighborhood where they had lived at the time of arrest.

The original historic precedent was the work of two reformers, the English captain Alexander Maconochie, an innovative administrator of penal colonies in Tasmania and Australia in the 1830s; and an Irish prison reformer named Sir Walter Crofton, who earned his reputation as a correctional expert a few years later. Both men devised methods of incarceration based not simply on time served but on graduated periods of labor and education. Prisoners earned or lost “marks,” which enabled them to move up to a more privileged grade or led to a demotion if they misbehaved. Maconochie, in particular, created a “ticket of leave” system as the culmination of a process of gradual improvement.

A parole-release process became linked to the indeterminate sentence at the meeting of the National Prison Association in the late 1880s. In 1887 Zebulon Brockway, one of the seminal minds of the prison reform movement, was nearing the height of his influence as the warden of the internationally renowned Elmira Reformatory. Brockway endorsed the fully indeterminate system for “accidental criminals,” with an unrestricted authority to release them early on parole, an idea that had come to America from England, where it was called a “ticket of leave.”

In 1866 Charles II had passed a statute permitting unwanted (for political or personal reasons) offenders to be transported, on the whim of the king or one of the king’s retinue, to one of England’s colonies. The idea was reaffirmed in a general way by George II in 1718 and again, more frequently, by George III after the American Revolution, specifically for the transportation of English convicts to Australia. Alexander Maconochie, one of the most able superintendents of England’s Australian prison facilities, had extended the concept of parole, or ticket of leave, to allow trusted prisoners to take over land grants to develop the wilderness around the Tasmanian penal colony. The success of this decision was historically significant in opening up Australia for the general forced emigration of a diverse population from various parts of the British Empire.⁴³

John Taylor’s first reference to the need for an expanded parole-release mechanism came in his 1898 report to the CPA. He listed four men as paroled by the state board of pardons and commented, “This system of parole, or probationary trial, is the only logical way of discharging any prisoner who is ever to be released.” Taylor strongly urged that it become the rule instead of the exceptional method of release.⁴⁴

Just prior to the turn of the century, the terms parole and probation were interchangeable. By 1900 the two concepts had been clarified, with parole following incarceration and probation applying to supervision in the community in lieu of imprisonment. In 1903 the state passed the first Adult Probation Law, Public Act 126. The law provided for the appointment of thirty-one probation officers, all volunteers and two of them to be women. Taylor admitted that none would have experience, since this was a brand new system. He cautioned his board of directors that progress in the implementation of the law would be slow but expressed his certainty that the work would be as efficiently performed in Connecticut, as it was currently being done in neighboring states.

Section 8 of the Probation Act assigned the general supervision of all probation officers to the CPA. It was a huge expansion of Taylor’s work. The law required the judges of all district, police, city, borough, and town courts to appoint one or more probation officers. It permitted the judges of every superior court and every criminal court of common pleas to do so as well. Taylor faced the daunting task of setting up a new system, with report forms for the people under supervision, record books for the office, descriptions for each probationer, and methods to keep track of completed forms. The parole staff would total forty by the middle of 1904. Each one was expected to file a quarterly report. Taylor was to file a report to the governor at the conclusion of each year, covering the operating process he had devised, the results of supervision for each probation officer and the probationers, and recommendations for improvements.

The willingness of John Taylor and the CPA Board of Directors to take on this enormous new workload is both understandable and incredulous. The public relations benefits to the agency were immense. The passage of the indeterminate-sentence law two years before had lifted the CPA above anonymity. It was now a force to be reckoned with legislatively and politically. After a quarter of a century of intensive but relatively low-key work with discharged offenders on the local scene and two decades of involvement with the National Prison Association, the agency had become a highly visible and respected entity in Connecticut and beyond. It was the accepted right arm of the Wethersfield State Prison and a distinct voice of advocacy within the national debates about penology. This new law in 1903 established the CPA as a de facto part of Connecticut’s criminal justice evolution. They had worked hard to achieve this reform and it without doubt one of the most enduring legacies of the agency’s history.

At the same time, the ready acceptance of this expansion of their organization into probation supervision is characteristic of situations where new ground is being broken. There was an understandable innocence on the part of the CPA about the amount of organizational detail and complexity involved in parole supervision. No one in the state had any past experience by which to measure the extent of the work involved. Another significant difficulty was the state’s willingness to use and to financially exploit the willingness of a nongovernmental agency to pioneer the provision of new services.

Taylor’s responsibilities for the parole system was on top of all the ordinary prison visitations he had to make for offenders being released without parole at the completion of their sentences. In his reports for 1902 and 1903, he states that a total of 335 prisoners had been discharged, of which he had assisted 309, plus 19 from years prior to 1902, 31 discharged from jails, and 3 from other state prisons, 362 in all. That meant providing clothing and tools and finding places for them to live until employed.

There were other, personal, complications within the organization. Francis Wayland was aging. He had been suffering from diabetes, bronchitis, and poor circulation of blood in his legs for the previous five years. He had dropped out of the National Prison Association in the late 1890s and cut back his involvement in the CPA, though remaining as president of the board of directors. He died of natural causes on January 10, 1904. Taylor was also getting older. He had suffered a stroke in 1901, later referred to as a “paralytic shock.” He used a cane much of the time for the rest of his life.

Both Wayland and Taylor had devoted most of their waking moments to furthering the cause of prison reform on practical, legislative, and theoretical levels. One can only wonder in retrospect at the apparent ease with which they accepted this new challenge of creating and supervising a new system of probation for Connecticut’s prisoners. Their commitment to the welfare of their state and to the restoration of offenders was typical of nineteenth-century reformers. A sense of moral obligation, based on their religious concern to care for the outcast, combined with a noblesse oblige mentality derived from the Victorian era, seems to have been bred in the bones of the CPA leaders. Their unselfish work to improve the community was replicated in later years by scores of similar agencies in criminal justice and many other social causes. It underscores a major theme of this narrative: the immense but largely hidden and often forgotten contribution of voluntary agencies to America’s social and humanitarian development.

Monetary wealth does not seem to have been part of their motivation. John Taylor was receiving a modest $2,100 in yearly salary in 1904, and there is no indication that he received any significant increases in the next five years before his death. Wayland himself bragged in 1883 that John Taylor was the “cheapest investment for the benefit of criminals and for the state that I am aware of.” He goes on to say that Taylor’s salary then was $1,500 annually, a good salary by that day’s standards, but a bargain considering the type of pioneer work Taylor was performing every day without many guidelines or models to follow.⁴⁵

Connecticut’s probation system expanded annually after 1903. Taylor’s report to Gov. Rollin Woodruff in 1908 indicated that forty-nine officers were at work in forty-five towns, with six positions unfilled. He lists the amount of fines and costs collected from probationers, the amount of wages collected and expended for families of probationers, the amount of salaries received by the officers, and their expenses as submitted. He also provides, for the first time, a “Table of Offenses” for the year 1907–8.⁴⁶

Seventy-eight crimes are listed, including intoxication, which had the highest numbers by far, assaults, burglaries, forgeries, gambling, rape (only one case), truancy, vagrancy, and domestic crimes such as desertion and child neglect. The list also includes crimes such as spitting or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, committing nuisances, evading a railroad fare, and keeping an unlicensed dog. The changes in the types of crimes being processed by the courts is a fascinating study in itself, but not one that can be traced in detail in this history. It is the first information we have of the crime problems faced in Connecticut at the beginning of the twentieth century.

PRISONER IDENTIFICATION

Several other issues dealt with by the CPA during their first thirty-five years of operation are worth noting. One was prisoner identification. There existed no way for one jail or prison, even in the same state, to know whether the men and women being held there had committed other crimes elsewhere or were using their own names when convicted. Communication between states and even cities was almost completely lacking. In 1887 the National Wardens’ Association had organized themselves within the National Prison Association around the need for a way to identify criminals who had already been in the various prison systems across the country. Their object of concern was a new method that had surfaced in Europe that same year, the Bertillon System of Criminal Identification.

Alphonse Bertillon was a French law enforcement officer who, in 1884, worked out an identification system called anthropometry. It was based on a combination of measurements of various body parts, individual markings such as birthmarks and tattoos, and personality characteristics. Bertillon is also credited with promoting crime scene photography before it was disturbed and the invention of a compound to preserve footprints. On the whole, however, it was Bertillon’s anthropometric system that caught the attention of wardens and other prison reformers in America. It was a topic of debate for the balance of the nineteenth century. Included among its supporters was Francis Wayland and John Taylor from the CPA; John Garvin, warden of Wethersfield State Prison; and Charles Dudley Warner, owner of the Hartford Daily Courant, among many others.

For a good portion of the prison reformers of the day, the Bertillon method had an unintended but chilling effect on society. It seemed to confirm the widespread and often voiced assumption that criminals constituted a separate group of society. By the 1880s the barely understood concepts of evolution were being freely used to enliven parlor conversations about why some people competed successfully within society and some failed.

Criminals, being among the most prominent failures, were logical contenders for a special compartment of society’s misfits. If they could be categorized and documented physically, it would further justify isolating them in jails and prisons. Joseph Nicholson, who was one of the NPA leaders (the superintendent of the Detroit House of Correction and president of the National Wardens’ Association in 1888), sought to put a positive interpretation on that ideology. In a comment to his fellow wardens, he said that anthropometry “will make identification as belonging to the crime-class secure and unfailing, which will have a deterrent effect, free from brutalizing practices.”⁴⁷

Not much more than a decade had passed, however, before the actual practice of measuring the physiognomy of criminals was deemed badly flawed. The instruments used were not uniform, nor the measurements precise. The same measurements taken by different officers differed significantly, and the physical shape of the body of every person changed over time. Nevertheless, the concept of identifying offenders in some way that could be standardized and supplemented by photography had been established as an important criminal justice goal. It laid the foundation for the ready acceptance of a much more reliable method of identification: fingerprinting. The patterns of the ridges, loops and spirals at the end of each finger had been used since prehistoric times to identify the signers of documents, but no one had discovered how unique a set of fingerprints was when compared with those of any other person.

In the late nineteenth century the definitive quality of fingerprints over time was demonstrated. In 1897 Sir Edward Richard Henry solidified all the previous evidence into a feasible and easily used system for police work in identifying key suspects. By 1904 the New York State prison system, the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, and the Saint Louis Police Department had adopted the Henry system, and a year later a National Bureau of Criminal Identification was established as a fingerprint repository.

HEREDITY AS A SOURCE OF CRIME

Another minor theme, with major implications, of the era also grew out of the surge of scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century. It was the debate over the role of heredity as a source of crime. In addition to the biological theories of Charles Darwin, various schools of psychology were already well established by the end of the nineteenth century. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, William James, and a host of other formative leaders were exploring the significance of consciousness, debating the existence of the soul and freedom of the will, and beginning the modern examination of the brain.

Drawing on that academic matrix of studies in psychology, the subject of heredity was a major point of discussion among penologists. Cesare Lombroso’s work in Italy to fix criminality as an alternative aspect of human nature was very well known in America, and his theories were discussed frequently in the Proceedings of the National Prison Association. The concept of biological determinism was pushed hard by Lombroso, based on the idea that criminals’ destiny was determined by their failure to evolve as most of humanity had done.

Evolution, it was widely believed, produced humans with consciousness and a free will to make choices, which were then passed on through heredity to their progeny. Farmers and botanists already knew that crossbreeding of animals and plants could enhance or remove certain characteristics. In the late 1850s an Augustinian friar named Gregor Mendel had focused his research on clarifying the basic concepts of heredity to explain how those changes actually took place in a sheep, a rose, or a vegetable. Experimenting with peas, he developed a number of rules that by the early 1860s became known as the laws of Mendelian heredity.

It was only a matter of time before other scientists explored the role heredity played in human development and only a step from there to the study of the possibility of inherited criminality. The idea that some took to crime not by choice but because they were born to be antisocial and prone to criminality was exceeding attractive, especially to those who supported a punitive approach to crime. Those with inherited character flaws would not easily be changeable, if at all. Those able to make better choices constituted the majority in society. They might become accidental criminals but were open to reformation because their inherited character foundation was sound.

Charles Dudley Warner, speaking at the 1886 meeting of the NPA, voiced the cautious approach of the Connecticut delegation to the new sciences in this regard: “Is the science of heredity sufficiently understood for us to base legislation upon it? … I believe in heredity … but I do not think we know enough … to make it the basis of legislation…. I look to measures more in harmony with our Christian civilization.⁴⁸ He apparently spoke for the CPA leadership. No tendency to advocate for solutions to crime based on heredity, or to interpret crime in terms of heredity, ever appeared in the agency’s annual reports.

MIGRATION AND CRIME

A second less visible but important debate was precipitated by the increasing mobility of the American population. At issue was how to control and how to assess the dangers in the multitudes of people now moving about in the nation between towns, counties, and states. Black Americans and European and Asian immigrants were easy targets for police, especially after being once incarcerated for any perceived or real infraction as they moved about. Whether the determining factor was race, ethnic origin, or religious beliefs, they suffered immeasurably as expendable, replaceable laborers. In addition, as the twentieth century opened, there developed in U.S. industrialism an almost totalitarian passion to eliminate any social obstruction to the progress of business. There was plenty of obstruction to be found in the loiterers, the saloon crowds, and the many seeking honest work in a new location.

From 1870 on, thousands of war veterans, free blacks, and immigrants flooded the streets of Connecticut’s towns and cities. All, including the immigrants from overseas, were often subject to squalid living quarters and near-slavery conditions in the jobs they were able to obtain. Wages were withheld from workers who had little or no leverage to force employers to honor their commitment. Groceries and other basic supplies were available only from company stores and usually at higher than average prices. Living quarters were frequently unfit for human occupation, and for the privilege of having a leaking roof over their heads, they were charged exorbitant rents that left them with little money to look for other options, if there were any. Language difficulties made life precarious for immigrants and even blacks, who often had never had education beyond the first grade. These reasons alone made this mobile population easy prey and fostered the novel concept of associations of organized labor in the form of unions.

By 1900 Connecticut had over two hundred labor organizations, which slowly began to offer some protections. Immigrants gradually managed to find a way to survive, and some found the means to thrive. But a huge number carried baggage far too heavy to blend in. Vagrants filled the city streets of the larger cities and spread into smaller towns. There were so many that a new word emerged, trampdom, referring to the mix of hoboes, adventurers, panhandlers, thieves, and young adults seeking work. They took to riding the rails by the thousands, without tickets of course.

The presence of tramps, vagrants, and hoboes became a major challenge, especially on the outskirts of urban areas. Multiplying rapidly, they were soon labeled as a significant threat to the working class. They were more than a nuisance. The frequent accusation was that the tramps were impeding the civilized use of the train system, which was opening up the whole center of the country. Moreover, they were incipient criminals as well as being dirty and smelly. Along with all the other public nuisances, they were considered to be a dangerous infection of the body economic. Once caught, without alternatives, they were relegated to the jails and prisons. Once imprisoned, the chances of making an honest living became less and, eventually, too hard to achieve for most. Once they were released, if jobs were available, their children had even less opportunity to get the education and self-development that the rest of the nation took for granted. The “revolving door” cycle had its start in the 1880s. It could and did go on for generations.

VOTING RIGHTS FOR EX-OFFENDERS

Finally, one other minor debate, in which the CPA played a part, was about restoring the voting rights of offenders once released. By law, forfeiture of those rights was an automatic result of conviction and imprisonment. As early as 1900 John Taylor spoke directly to the issue. An ex-inmate had written to him, asking about the possibility of having this basic right of citizenship restored to him. Taylor shared the letter in his annual report. The published invitation to petition for a restoration of full citizenship required the advertisement of the crime and was unnecessarily shameful for the inmate and the inmate’s family. “I would suggest a Constitutional amendment providing that the power be lodged in the hands of the Superior Court Judges, where it would be safely exercised, and with little publicity.”⁴⁹

The idea of an amendment to the Connecticut State constitution was never pursued, but the agency continued to press for a better method to restore civil rights to offenders. Over the years public opinion has fallen on the side of affirming that such rights should be permanently lost for convicted felons. The CPA fought consistently for the other side, believing that the restoration of rights of citizenship was one of the key ways to foster a sense of hope and provide an incentive for staying free of crime after release.

THE RESULTS OF CPA’S FIRST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS

The era of the Gilded Age in Connecticut, from 1875 to 1910, was characterized by repercussions from the severe national periods of economic boom and bust, the rapid growth of urban centers and the decrease in farming, and an enormous increase in immigration from the South and from overseas. In the words of Bruce Fraser, by the beginning of the twentieth century Connecticut was “highly urban, densely populated, heavily industrial and ethnically diverse.”⁵⁰

This time was also marked by the continued dilution of another major cultural component, Protestant domination. The revision of Connecticut’s constitution in 1818 had eliminated the last of the Congregational preferences that had been in place for two centuries. Despite that change, the Protestant culture still maintained a strong influence in its political and economic control of business, banking, trade, and morals throughout the nineteenth century. In the criminal justice system the period witnessed the passage of historic legislation in sentencing and supervision of discharged offenders. It was a victory, however partial and provisionary, for the reformatory approach to prison discipline that would last for over seventy-five years.

The story of the battle for prison reform waged by John Taylor, Francis Wayland, and the CPA Board is the foundation of the Connecticut story. The reformatory ideal they sought to realize was hardly the result of a group of naive Pollyannas who looked only on the bright side of everything. On the contrary, they were practical realists as they sought to implement that ideal. Francis Wayland was a hardheaded, practical, and astute lawyer, judge, and politician. He considered whipping unnecessary, but he was hesitant to ban its use. He was a temporary politician and a long-term law professor who had little empathy for what he called career or “incorrigible” criminals. Strict retribution for those offenders who would not or could not change their ways made eminent sense to his Calvinist morality.

On the other hand, Wayland never lost his commitment to law and order in the community. He took the impact of crime seriously. He believed fully that a reformatory approach was infinitely better for most offenders and for the community than a retributive system, but he never disavowed the need for punishment. He thought systemically as well as about the care of the individual. His support of the indeterminate-sentence system never wavered, and he fought fiercely for the first probation law in Connecticut. With other members of the CPA, he contributed his leadership constantly to a number of improvements in prison conditions, including the abolition of shaved heads, striped uniforms, the ball and chain, the lockstep, and meals given in cells. Illness slowed him down from 1895 until his death in 1904. Rev. Henry Thompson assumed the presidency of the agency immediately afterward, holding the agency steady until William Bailey was installed in 1909.⁵¹

John Taylor’s contribution, on the other hand, laid not so much in his intellect as in the force of his personality and in his people skills, sharpened during his Civil War experiences. He had considerable natural organizing skills and a sturdy, indefatigable physical constitution. He appears to have been one who related easily to all the prisoners he dealt with, young or old, in a forthright and effective way. Entering the army as a youth, he had mustered out a mature man ready to deal with hardcase inmates. As a married man, Taylor was able to present himself as a father figure to the many younger prisoners whose care was in his hands.

Taylor held to the deeply engrained cultural value of giving all people, including ex-offenders, the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong. Informed consent was not part of his approach. Consequently, he did not reveal a prisoner’s background to a prospective employer very often, and he defended that approach under criticism at the national level. Taylor wanted his discharged offenders to have all the opportunities possible for restarting their lives. Although he was aware of the number of those returning to prison (his estimate of recidivism stabilized at 50 percent, approximating the average that has persisted into modern times), he was never a pessimist about his work. If he was ever discouraged, he never let it show. Along with all the other assistance he offered, Taylor fought consistently for the restoration of forfeited rights for discharged offenders who had stayed crime-free for one year. The multitude of thank-you letters he received sustained him to the end.

SUICIDE IN THE STATE CAPITOL

On the morning of October 4, 1909, John Taylor came to work after visiting his doctor for a physical examination. Perhaps concerned about his physical limitations and a future that promised little relief, he sat at his desk for a few hours; made a few phone calls, one to his wife; and did some paperwork. At noon, in the thirty-fourth year of his work with the CPA, he took a revolver from a drawer in his desk and, without a warning, ended his life with a bullet to his brain.

According to his obituary, few (including his wife) had detected any unusual depression or discouragement in the days and weeks prior to his suicide. Perhaps he felt that his weakened condition might lead the CPA directors to replace him. Perhaps he feared being further debilitated by another stroke. It’s very likely that the strain of over three decades of working with highly troubled and unpredictable clients, a population with a high percentage of failures, had finally begun to weigh on his mind. Whatever the reasons, he left no explanation by which others might rationalize his action and make it more palatable. He left behind only his dedicated work and his belief that his efforts as a friend of the inmates he served were not in vain.

Unfortunately, the devastating impact of suicide on those close to the deceased was as underestimated then as it has been until very recent times. The fact that we have no direct descriptions of the emotional reactions to his passing is neither mysterious nor unexpected. Only in the past forty years has suicide become an acceptable topic of academic research and public education. On the basis of the increased understanding of human psychology gained by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is probable that suicide a century earlier was even more demoralizing, discouraging, and frightening than it is today.

It was a tribute to Taylor’s reputation as a veteran and as a criminal justice specialist that the taboo about suicide was put aside in Connecticut. John Taylor was given a hero’s send-off at a well-attended funeral. His Civil War compatriots as well as his CPA and criminal justice friends were present, and he received full military honors at his graveside service. It is disappointing but not surprising that the same national American Prison Association ignored the suicidal aspect of his death. Despite the widely known thirty-two years of exemplary service rendered by Taylor to Connecticut through the CPA, and to the nation through his four years in the military, his passing went unnoticed at the national level. Francis Wayland, on the other hand, had been eulogized among those listed as the “veterans of the prison cause” along with Charles Dudley Warner in a reflection on the early reform leaders by Frederick H. Wines of Illinois at the 1906 American Prison Association Congress in Indianapolis, Indiana.⁵²