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CHAPTER ONE Connecticut’s Cultural Context, 1875

The Nature of American society in its various historical and sectional stages has emerged from a consideration of the geographical, industrial, and cultural factors that have determined penal trends.

— Blake McKelvey, American Prisons, 1936

In 1969 I had an interview with a twenty-six-year-old man named Paul. He spoke fairly good English, although Spanish was his native tongue. He was articulate but not the con-artist type I would meet many times in the future. He was in for manslaughter. I didn’t ask what the occasion of his crime was. That wasn’t my style, but he revealed it anyway. He had been drinking one evening, he explained without much elaboration, with his girlfriend. They got into an argument about the music they were listening to, and it woke up his girlfriend’s daughter, a six-year-old. The youngster came out of her bedroom crying, and he told her to stop and go back to bed. He and his girlfriend resumed the argument, which made the daughter cry even more loudly. One thing led to another, and in his angry need to control the situation, he slapped his girlfriend; then, turning on the youngster, he picked her up and flung her across the room. Her body hit a bookcase, splitting her skull. She died before he or her mother could reach her.

One late afternoon two weeks before I met with Paul, I had returned home to find a shouting match in full swing in our living room. My wife, Wanda, and our nine-year-old Cindi were yelling full blast at each other and not for the first time. My solution was to take over. I told Wanda to shut up, and I picked up Cindi and took her upstairs. Yelling at her for making her mother cry, I used all my strength to throw her on her bed. She barely missed the headboard.

I have no idea what was said during the remainder of Paul’s and my time together. He was nearing his parole date, so I probably told him I’d be in touch on one of my next visits to arrange transportation. (That was one of the concrete tasks the CPA did for released inmates.) He wanted to know if he could be paroled to Puerto Rico, and I would have said I’d look into it. But I knew somewhere in my gut that I would never see an inmate down in a hole again while I stood on the solid ground. And I realized, maybe for the first time, that I could use a rope.

Until approximately 1950, American historians, with rare exceptions, did not examine criminal activity unless it affected national politics or was notorious enough to become a news item. Connecticut is fortunate. Two twentieth-century state historians took the time to describe the penal institutions and the court systems of the previous century. George L. Clark, writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, examined a variety of cultural, economic, and social facets in A History of Connecticut: Its People and Institutions. His chapter on the state’s prisons mentions the Connecticut Prison Association (then almost forty years old). Clark’s book is important for a second reason: it describes Connecticut’s penal institutions in the context of the “inventions, discoveries and industries of the nineteenth century” and discusses a variety of facets of the state’s culture, including other philanthropic groups, alcohol abuse, the Temperance Movement, the insurance industry, the fine arts, and the rise of the modern city.¹

Norris Galpin Osborn, a decade later, edited a five-volume History of Connecticut in Monographic Form. The last volume contains “The History of Connecticut Institutions,” by Edward Warren Capen, which includes several sections on the insane criminal, a category of information neglected by George Clark. Both Clark and Capen were reportorial in their comments. Neither attempted a critical examination of the jails, prisons, or courts.

My education in the various disciplines of criminal justice began when I read David Rothman’s investigation of the origins of American asylums for the deaf and prisons for convicted criminals. Rothman, I discovered, was a professor of social medicine in the 1960s at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In his first book, The Discovery of the Asylum, he speculates (with more than a hint of sarcasm) that national historians, with so much more positive topics to write about, had assumed that social reforms (like the asylum he discusses) were simply political programs and not worth the bother of serious historical attention.²

In Rothman’s second book, Conscience and Convenience, he was more direct, stating, “To a remarkable degree, American historians have ignored these programs for the criminal, the delinquent and the insane. There is not a single history of probation or parole or indeterminate sentences, not more than two or three accounts of prisons, mental hospitals or training schools in the twentieth century, and only a handful of studies of juvenile court or outpatient clinics.”³

Rothman’s general point, published in 1980, can now be viewed as part of the change in historical writing that began earlier. A number of excellent studies of American prisons had been written in the earlier parts of the century. They were, to be sure, specialist voices crying in the wilderness. Most historians who mentioned the nation’s response to crime did so by concentrating on the exceptional crime rather than taking the time to investigate ordinary crime. Usually, organized crime or celebrity crime was the focus. Less attention was paid to wider cultural forces that have influenced, on one hand, the formation of law enforcement, courts, and prisons; and, on the other hand, the creation of private-sector groups designed to help prisoners and advocate for prison reform. Yet those same forces were, in fact, helping to determine which kind of justice system would emerge out of America’s post–Civil War response to crime.

The question of motivation was one of the initial questions that initially led me to research the history of the Connecticut Prison Association. I was curious about what prompted a stellar set of judicial, business, and religious leaders in the early 1870s to form a new organization to help a group of people, labeled as criminals and convicts, who most of society detested. Just as important, I wondered what prompted them to seek to reform the policies and practices of criminal justice that most of society preferred to ignore. The CPA’s annual reports gave only hints of the internal motivations (e.g., religious beliefs or humanitarian inclinations were occasionally mentioned) that were prompting their actions over a period of thirteen decades.

Let’s briefly examine six of those cultural factors or forces at work in 1875 and highlight some of the major ingredients that, in combination, constituted the intellectual and moral setting that surrounded the CPA’s founders in 1875.

CRIME

Criminal, or at least antisocial, activity has long been a major problem at the center of humanity’s self-conscious existence in groups. In the sense of violating unwritten but conscious norms, the broad concept of crime may even have predated settled communities. Whether judged on religious or rational points of view, harmful behavior has never been acceptable in any organized society. Based on newspaper reports, a reaction to the scourge of criminal activity was among the more compelling factors motivating the CPA’s founders.

George Clark provides the first detailed description of Connecticut’s justice system from 1630 to 1900, a story of jails, prisons, witchcraft turmoil, schools for boy and girl delinquents, reformatories, and evolving laws to control crime. Since the Civil War, crime had been a growing problem in Connecticut. While there is no method by which the state crime rate can be determined in the late nineteenth century, crime was, at least occasionally, very much in the news. On January 29, 1873, for example, the Hartford Daily Courant carried a letter from Francis Gillette, former United States senator and father of the famous actor William Gillette. In it Gillette called attention to the cost of a new state jail, estimated at $150,000, and defended that expense by describing the current jail as antiquated and “totally inadequate to accommodate the increasing number of criminals. “Is it not an insufferable shame and reproach to our boasted civilization that a necessity should exist for enlarged jails and prisons?” he wrote.⁴

A new county jail was built in 1874 on Seyms Street in Hartford. Its maximum capacity was 204 offenders, including a wing of cells to confine 36 women. The population of the Connecticut State Prison in the town of Wethersfield, around 210, had not grown appreciably since it was built in 1827 to replace the former copper mine in Granby known as Newgate Prison. The numbers do not sound impressive to modern ears, but the fact that the two facilities had continued to house over an increasing number of inmates every year was sufficient to remind Hartford citizens that crime was a dark reality that threatened, in Victorian religion’s terms, the ruination of a moral society.

Crime takes many forms, and the definition of what constitutes a crime lies at the heart of the debate about whether convictions and punishments are appropriate, fair, and morally justified. In its simplest form, crime is what federal, state, city, or town law proclaims is illegal. Noted historian of criminal justice, Lawrence M. Friedman, reminds his readers, “crime … is a slippery, variable, protean concept; and criminal justice is equally variable, mutable, time dependent, culture dependent.”⁵

In colonial times, with written categories of crime in use that date back to English common law traditions, the prevailing response to crime had been the use of public shaming techniques and more drastic measures. Foremost among the shaming techniques was to have the offender, either standing or sitting, confined in a wooden device called the stocks, where the arms and legs protruded through holes and were locked in place. The punishment took place on the town green and could last for a few hours or a few days, with neighbors and others passing by constantly, free to deride or throw objects at the offender. A similar device, called a pillory, differed in that it confined the head and the wrists or arms, with the offender standing. Over a period of hours, or days, the punishment was not only a shaming technique but also a very painful one.

The application of the death penalty between 1650 and 1850 was considerably harsher and for more crimes in the New Haven Colony than in the Connecticut Colony centered on Hartford. A contemporary Connecticut scholar, Dr. Lawrence Goodheart, discovered that where New Haven’s code listed twenty-three capital crimes, Hartford courts listed eighteen, and they were regarded with less biblical literalism and greater leniency than had been the case in England.⁶

The New England colonies varied in the intensity of their desire to minimize crime in its towns and villages. Rather, in writing their own seventeenth-century codes of law to adapt to new conditions in the Americas, Puritans were quite flexible. “The Puritan mind filtered out of the Bible what was usable and appropriate for their wishes and their days.”⁷ Our interest is in how that filter worked in Connecticut.

Late responses to crime in Connecticut, as it has been in virtually every era, were a combination of two historical options, retribution and rehabilitation. Each imparted a particular appearance or facade to the actual justice administered by the courts and correctional facilities. Each appeared frequently in the nineteenth-century debates about the primary purpose of both individual punishment and the entire criminal justice system. Retributive sentences that removed the offender from society for a set period were developed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and eventually replaced the stocks and pillories. But by 1830 a revolutionary type of prison was constructed in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, which called into question the assumption that confinement was simply for punishment. The Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania preferred isolation as the basis of reform. The Auburn State Prison in New York chose to use a congregate system to engender good work habits among inmates. The Wethersfield State Prison in Connecticut sought a middle ground to foster attitudinal changes in offenders.

The retributive approach thus gave way to the belief, both religious and pragmatic, that rehabilitative measures, if used properly, would accomplish more changes and be profitable as well. In the new prisons various methods were employed to achieve the desired changes, such as Bible study, hard labor, the imposition of silence and isolation, preaching, education, counseling, and friendship. The range of means used to rehabilitate often depended on the degree of retribution that was covertly, or openly, insinuated into the rehabilitative regimens. Religion had much to do with that choice.

RELIGION

The importance of religion as a factor in the development of public attitudes toward offenders and criminal activities cannot be overstated. Religion is at the root of almost all personal and social mores, moral rules, civil law, and practical attempts to control human behavior. Even when not directly responsible, religion invariably molds the attitudes and actions applied within societal life.

The most pervasive religious force (and for a long time the dominant one) in early New England was the Puritan version of Christianity. Puritan Protestantism was only one religious tradition in New England and Connecticut, but its literalistic biblical view of law and sin, punishment and redemption, governed (sometimes unconsciously) the choice of means used to eradicate sinful behavior and guarantee salvation of the offender. Read in terms of their mission, the intention of the Puritans was to save the sinner even if the methods had to be harsh, even brutal, at times. Historian Jill Lepore reminds us that this often became a justification for a vicious application of mercy, seen most vividly in the Puritan denial of the humanity of Native Americans and a denigration of them in the American story. She writes, “The ways of the Puritans are not our ways. Their faith is not our faith. And their wars are not our wars.”⁸ Puritan Christianity impact on colonial and American culture was immense, but it was often rooted in values and attitudes that denied the status of human being to those deemed evil or worthless.

John Winthrop, a lawyer and organizer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached a classic sermon aboard the Arabella during the voyage across the Atlantic. His message formed the foundation of the Puritans’ subsequent behavior: “They were to be knit together as a single body in which the private interests would be subordinated to public concern.”⁹ Only by being obedient to God’s commands could they build the “city on a hill” that was Winthrop’s ultimate spiritual goal. Puritan scholar Perry Miller, emphasizing the positive, summarizes the Puritan ethos: “The doctrines of original sin, the depravity of man, and of irresistible grace were not embraced for their logic, but out of a hunger of the human spirit and an anxiety of the soul.”¹⁰

The goal for the Puritans was distant but, in the context of their faith, realizable: to construct a harmonious community ruled by the love of God and enforced by divine commandments when necessary. It eventually became evident that Winthrop’s admonition to live lives of “Justice and Mercy” did not apply to their relationships with Native Americans, who were described as no better than “speaking apes” by the seventeenth-century English scholar, Samuel Purchas. That tendency toward saving souls even if the bodies they inhabited had to be destroyed continued to plague criminal justice in all subsequent decades.¹¹

The Puritan settlers’ intention to create a theocratic community has had no equal in America. Though the intensity of commitment to that agenda diminished during the following centuries, many of its assumptions were sufficiently embedded in the social consciousness to remain active. Those assumptions have guided the actions of subsequent generations down to the present, even when those assumptions were no longer operative. Puritan Christianity has been considered by most historians of the era to be the most basic, the most important feature of the New England colonies and, to a significant degree, one of the most significant sources of American culture. Historian Mark Noll succinctly summarizes its impact: “They were the one group of colonists who aspired to establish an entire society on the basis of their theology and the only ones to have partially succeeded.”¹²

The iconic testament to the Puritan form of faith is found in the sermons delivered by John Winthrop. During his three-month long trip across the Atlantic, Winthrop served as his fellow voyagers spiritual as well as governmental leader. He preached regularly during the journey to instruct and inspire his companions. Winthrop’s best-known sermon is titled “A Model of Christian Charity.” Seeking an image to make his point clear, Winthrop draws on Saint Matthew’s version of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, urging the colonists not toward pride but toward humility. God was depending on their risky mission to succeed. It was a “holy experiment…. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”¹³

The phrasing is significant in that it postulates a divine destiny for their voyage as well as a sense of divine judgment if they failed. The Puritans at their worst were certainly characterized by an elitism that bordered on self-righteous arrogance, arising from their sense of being chosen by God. It is commendable, if not always admirable, when it is remembered that they risked everything they had for the sole purpose of establishing a biblically based church and government that would stand as an example to the world. Their goal was not economic prosperity (though it was assumed that God would take care of the faithful), nor was it just personal freedom from oppression (though they would achieve that also if they were faithful). Puritans desired with religious desperation to be such a witness to God’s glory that it would convert the Anglican Church in England, to which they still gave their allegiance, and the oppressive English government, from which they had fled, and inspire all nations for all time to come.

The idea of living under a covenant with God and subject to the scrutiny of the world gave rise to a moral theocracy within the Massachusetts colony. Their desire was to build a religious framework so strong that it would hold society together regardless of the weakness of some. “Despite the awful sinfulness of many,” the founders of Massachusetts Bay “erected civil and ecclesiastical institutions to ensure that their society would be godly even if the majority of people in it were not.”¹⁴

The metaphoric ideal of a resplendent city on a hill, dedicated to God’s glory, was a powerful source of physical and spiritual strength to a people whose survival was never guaranteed or easy. The remarks of John Winthrop faded gradually, but the concept sank deep into American consciousness. The Puritan sense of mission to become a model for the world became one of America’s characteristic ideals, lifted even higher in the nineteenth century, by the idea that God had given the United States a “manifest destiny” to spread American culture first across the eastern mountains and finally across the continent, by force if necessary.

The Puritan life, carried out as a divinely guided mission, was perhaps the reason why none of the Puritan colonies in New England embraced the transportation of offenders from England, Ireland, or Scotland as a source of labor or skills. More than twenty thousand (and perhaps two or three times that number) criminals were transported to the Americas between 1700 and 1775, most of them to Maryland and Virginia. It need not be concluded that the rationale was based on any great compassion for offenders who were available for transport. Connecticut, like the other New England colonies, simply had no need of that particular resource. Their biblical morality would be more open to the African slave trade.

Puritan Protestantism’s influence on New England society extended down the Atlantic and westward to the degree that one historian thought it not excessive to label it the “Righteous Empire.”¹⁵ As colonies evolved into states, the general Protestant culture held the upper hand politically, socially, and morally, especially in rural areas, but also to a remarkable degree in the urban regions. The Puritan clergy and laity expounding and living out this vision became the first leaders of government and society. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the civic officials, judges, schoolteachers, and business owners, as well as the resident pastors and theologians, were drawn from the Puritan churches. Well into the eighteenth century, the state governments in Connecticut, and most of New England, did not officially recognize a new town until a theologically acceptable pastor had been installed. Once in place, power does not yield its sway easily. Two centuries passed before the disenfranchisement of the Congregational Church was voted into Connecticut’s constitution in 1818. Connecticut was one of the last of the original colonies to take that step away from a virtual theocracy to allow a more democratic system to emerge. It remains one of the great ironies of the first American immigrants that, having fled persecution and oppression in Europe, they tended to be just as exclusive and oppressive as the governments and churches they had condemned, until the early nineteenth century when they were forced by the legislature to share power and control.

American Puritanism differed in one key regard from dissenters left behind in England. They were far more adaptable over the next two centuries. The rigid systematic theology of John Calvin, which had inspired and guided them, was softened slowly under the exigencies of frontier living as the wildernesses of New England were tamed, the Native Americans subdued, and thousands of new immigrants brought other faiths to Connecticut and every other colony. The foundations of Puritanism evolved to absorb ideas from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Divine sovereignty, predestination, human sinfulness, and total dependence on God’s grace to survive and thrive were remodeled to integrate new ideas about humanity’s willpower and capacity to change. Instead of moral inability, theologians talked of the human power to do otherwise than had previously been though possible. The importance of that shift for criminal justice was immense.

Among the numerous theologians and pastors who transformed the original theocratic concepts of the first Puritans, several were particularly important in creating the Connecticut religious context in 1875: Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Taylor, and Horace Bushnell. All four raised moderating voices within Connecticut that set them apart from the orthodox leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their preaching and writing made the transition from a European theology to a distinctive American theology possible, particularly in Connecticut. What is not well understood (or even well known) is that the Protestant Puritan theology of the state’s religious leaders in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was a major factor in the shaping of Connecticut’s particular approach to criminal justice in their own eras and up to the twentieth century. It was certainly not the only religious influence, but it penetrated more deeply into the cultural context than any other.

Few remember that there were two colonies along the Connecticut River for a time. Hooker’s colony, which covered the eastern half of the region from Old Saybrook on the coast to Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield on the upper Connecticut River, had a rival settlement of Puritans in the western portion of the area, centered in New Haven at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Rev. John Davenport had established the New Haven Colony in 1638. Assisting him in the formation and administration of the colony was Theophilus Eaton, a boyhood friend and a wealthy businessman who saw great commercial opportunity in the venture overseas. Eaton also shared Davenport’s commitment to establish a community in New England that would place both the church and the society around it exclusively under biblical laws. Under Davenport’s extreme orthodoxy, New Haven became a theocracy, more thorough than Massachusetts. Davenport and Eaton together applied an unbending moral discipline that became intolerable to most of the citizenry, as a contemporary study of legal decisions in the New Haven Colony demonstrates.¹⁶ Eventually, Davenport left Connecticut for New Jersey, which he hoped would be a more hospitable climate. In addition, and perhaps most important in a practical sense, New Haven’s choice of political alliances led to a loss of support in England in the 1650s, virtually eliminating its colonial status.

By contrast, Hooker’s approach in Hartford was more moderate. He and his congregation had departed Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put some geographic distance between themselves and another rigid Puritan, Rev. John Cotton, the quintessential conservative Congregationalist in New England. Once in Hartford, Hooker often revealed a broader perspective and greater flexibility in his approach to both ecclesiastical and governmental issues. Most readers will be familiar with his conviction that the authority of the government depended on the free consent of the people. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, usually ascribed to Roger Ludlow and endorsed by the neighboring villages of Windsor and Wethersfield, was set in motion by a sermon of Hooker’s on May 31, 1638. The Fundamental Orders became the basis for Connecticut’s constitution, the first in America and the basis for the U.S. Constitution a century and a half later.

Unique among colonial leaders in New England, Hooker’s preaching, based on biblical patterns, sought to place the responsibility for choosing the colony’s leaders in the freemen among the population rather than relying only on the learned abilities of the clergy or on royal wisdom. It represented another major shift in Connecticut’s approach to the various issues that faced the new colony. Though not exceptional in its format, the subsequent eleven fundamental orders made no mention of the Crown’s authority; had no religious test for the privilege to vote; put the election of the governor, deputies, and magistrates in the hands of the colony’s freemen; and granted the general court full authority. Connecticut, as a result, became an exceptionally free, moderate, and middle-of-the road state, not only in its religious culture but also in its political organization. As Connecticut evolved and ultimately became one of the United States of America in 1776, it also became accustomed to respond to crime in ways that, although still basically retributive, were more moderate in tone and gradually more rational than religious, distinguishing it not only from New Haven but also from the rigid Puritan base established in Massachusetts Bay.

Hooker also believed and taught that even the most errant and stubborn human being was not beyond the reach of God’s love in this world. Along with his associate, Rev. Samuel Stone, for example, Hooker decided to allow admittance to the church membership as soon as an applicant had achieved some hope of their salvation rather than forcing them to wait until definitive experiential proof of faith was available, because “God receives into covenant partnership the weak as well as the strong.”¹⁷ That small measure of leniency, tame by modern standards of flexibility, was contrary to the long-standing Puritan tradition. Hooker believed spiritual change was incremental and often hidden from view. His assumption that no one was beyond God’s reach became a foundational part of Connecticut culture, with vast implications for its approach to justice.

The adaptation of a rigid religious discipline to the varied conditions of the Americas serves as an early example of the application of the rehabilitation ideal that came to be an essential part of U.S. culture. Adopted widely by the prison reform movement of the nineteenth century and eventually embraced by the founders of the CPA, this ideal is acknowledged whenever the United States is described as a “second chance” nation, a metaphor that runs throughout American history. Over the course of the next century, Hooker’s more compassionate approach prevailed, producing what came to be called the “Congregational Way,” characterized by an “extensive and universal charity.”¹⁸

A second essential link in the evolution of progressive religious influences on the New England culture was the work of the reverend Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Though his pastorates were in Massachusetts, his preaching had an immense impact on Connecticut pastors through his role in the First Great Awakening (1730–50).¹⁹ He is remembered today, unfortunately, for his few fire-and-brimstone sermons (e.g., “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”). Edwards was, in fact, orthodox in most of his theological positions and preached a strong biblical message about the reality of God’s requirements and the threat of losing the gift of salvation. But he was far more influential during his pastorates through his steady proclamations about living lives of unselfish charity and the duty of all Christians to be good Samaritans as they worked out their eternal salvation in daily life.

The center of Jonathan Edwards’s preaching and writing during the First Great Awakening in the 1730s was characterized by a “sense of the heart,” amplified by rationally faithful analysis of the scriptures and of the situation facing each individual Christian. What an individual believed was important to Edwards, but much more significant was how an individual experienced God and acted toward others. The concept of a covenantal relationship with other Christians and the community at large was critical for Edwards, linked to the biblical stories of the ancient covenants made by God with humanity. In addition to the quest for a heavenly reward, his audiences wherever he spoke were told that their personal decision to be part of the church was a key not only to their eternal destiny but even more so for the community they shared on earth. Heartfelt love of one’s neighbor rather than theological self-righteousness was, for Edwards, the truly spiritual effect of conversion and the confirmation of its reality. He believed that the most virtuous act one could perform was to help a stranger without expecting anything in return. Even more than the doing of evil deeds, it was the failure to let God’s grace work itself out creatively in ways that build up community that put the Christian in the path of God’s wrath.²⁰

Jonathan Edwards’s powerful intellect and writings strengthened the trend in Protestantism toward conversion as a willful response to God’s love, not just a passive acceptance of divine love. Other eminent nineteenth-century preachers carried on the trend. Many, if not most of them, had been trained at Yale Divinity School, where faculty members like Nathaniel Taylor built the Edwardian strain of theology into a reformed Calvinist curriculum.

Nathaniel Taylor became one of New England’s leading Protestant thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century, teaching and writing a system of Christian thought known as New Haven Theology (also known as New England Theology). Appointed to the Yale faculty in 1822, he taught there for the rest of his life. During his tenure New England was caught up in the Second Great Awakening, a widespread religious revival in America, generally east of the Mississippi and contained within the years between 1790 and 1830. The Second Great Awakening occurred primarily in Protestant churches. The denominations engaged in the revivals were principally Baptist and evangelical Methodist congregations and pastors, but the movement was embraced by a number of Congregational churches as well, including some prominent congregations in New England. Although the transformative power of the movement dissipated after 1830, the passion for conversion in the United States lingered until the Civil War.

Of interest to our narrative is the fact that the center of Nathaniel Taylor’s approach was a theological perspective contrary to the Second Great Awakening, utilizing the insights of the Enlightenment and open to the new sciences being developed. The New Haven Theology, which Taylor taught at Yale Divinity School for several decades, featured an increased optimism about the human capacity to choose the direction of personal and societal life, including religious beliefs. Such a modification of Calvin’s idea of the total depravity of humans stirred theological controversy, but it was in harmony with the diversified culture developing in the new nation. Taylor also promoted another novel concept for the time, the obligation of the church to be involved in society’s problems through participation in voluntary associations as well as through personal charitable acts. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his tour of the United States in 1833–34, proclaimed voluntary societies to be one of the principle features of American democracy, seen in connection with hospitals, schools, and even prisons. “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”²¹

Rev. Horace Bushnell is the final religious voice that we will cite in the era leading up to 1875. In Taylor and Bushnell (1802–76), the tolerant spirit of Thomas Hooker was continued and expanded through the new knowledge being derived from modern sciences like biology and astronomy. The result was a very different form of Christianity. The basic teachings of John Calvin had stressed the total sinfulness of humanity and its total dependence on God’s creativity and saving grace for redemption as well as every phase of daily life. Bushnell’s body of work supplemented the stance of Nathaniel Taylor as a staunch defender of free will over predestination in his explication of human nature. Both also chose benevolence over wrath as the chief metaphors to describe the character of God portrayed in the Bible. Taylor’s theology classes at Yale New Haven produced over three generations of seminary students who filled pulpits in Connecticut and other New England colonies in the nineteenth century. They conveyed a more liberal and progressive approach to both church and social issues.

Central to the message of the New Haven Theology was the desire to go beyond the restoration of the individual sinner. In a radical shift this new theology proclaimed that the true ministry of the church was the transformation of society by charitable deeds. The shift from personal salvation to the renewal of the world placed a part of the responsibility for salvation from sin firmly on the individual. This point of view, rooted in the work of Jonathan Edwards and the philosophical treatises of John Locke, adopted the idea that humanity exercised freedom of the will from the beginning of creation. The proponents of the new biblical perspective gradually abandoned the concept of original sin. Sin itself was increasingly considered to be a human choice, rather than the work of the devil or any other bad spirits. The work of the church was to respond to the needs of one’s neighbor, not excluding those in prison. Given that Jonathan Edwards preached for years in North Hampton, Massachusetts; Nathaniel Taylor taught at Yale; and Horace Bushnell was a stalwart presence at a Hartford Congregational Church, Connecticut was a prime recipient of the changing theology and changing culture. The state’s criminal justice components in the nineteenth century changed along with the rest of society, and the basic change was a fundamental tendency toward rehabilitation of offenders in the midst of the perennial pressure to focus on pure punishment. Together with Taylor, Horace Bushnell helped to shape a new Calvinism by the end of the century. Centered around practical, pragmatic Christianity, it eventually displaced the old, more rigid and more salvation-centered Calvinist approach.

The importance of these competing theological worldviews should not be underestimated. The prevailing understanding of human nature is crucial in determining the approach any given society takes to criminal justice. It makes all the difference whether offenders are considered a salvageable part of humanity, worth the effort to rehabilitate and return to free society as productive citizens, or are perceived as lost souls locked into sin or, worse, as subhuman, born of “bad seed” whose particular race, nationality, behavior, or other characteristics place them in a category of disposables.

The positive understanding of human nature provided by Edwards, Taylor, Bushnell, and other Protestant teachers and preachers was not a minor eddy in the Protestant current flowing through nineteenth-century America. It was one of the most powerful aspects of the culture. The change in attitude toward evil and sin permitted a much more empathetic and hopeful view. Prisoners were now persons worthy of visitation by people willing to assist them in their pursuit of personal salvation rather than preach to them about eternal salvation. Three features of Puritanism are pertinent to our portrait of the cultural soil in which significant aspects of the choice between a justice of retribution and a justice of rehabilitation could flourish.

A RETRIBUTIVE AND REHABILITATIVE MIX OF MORALITY

One of the earliest estimates of the Puritan impact on American values and social systems came from an outsider, Alexis de Tocqueville. His impression of the various prisons he had visited, including Connecticut’s Wethersfield State Prison, is centered on the ambiguous commitment to retribution and rehabilitation that he witnessed. His conclusion underscored the deep connection between criminal justice and religion: “When I reflect upon the consequences of this primary circumstance, methinks I see the destiny of America embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man.”²² Part of that mission and destiny was a response to crime and wrongdoing that modeled the divine retribution to sin outlined in the Bible and the divine concern for the salvation and restoration of every soul. Puritanism and the subsequent American criminal justice system have struggled to balance the two faces of justice ever since.

A COMMITMENT TO THE RULE OF LAW

Based on scripture, the law superseded any one individual’s wisdom or power. No human tyrant could ever replace God’s laws. The law, however, depending on its perceived purpose, can also become tyrannical. The Puritan gift could be used. On the one hand, the application of the punitive aspect of the law, to enhance public safety by retaliation against the offender, became one of the most compelling factors in establishing a retributive system in America. Rehabilitative reform, on the other hand, invariably involved attempts to the make the punishment redemptive.

A CONCERN FOR PROPORTIONALITY IN PUNISHMENT

Puritans were judicious in their analysis of wrongdoing and lawbreaking, insisting on the basis of the scriptural lex talionis that the punishment fit the crime. Although some Puritans advocated that punishment be visible not only temporarily but forever after (as in branding with an appropriate letter or cropping the nose or ear), a more compassionate strain of Puritanism gradually became dominant. From Thomas Hooker to Nathaniel Taylor, an evolving Puritanism promoted, even as it was absorbed into the culture and was therefore less obvious, a more rational sense of proportionality in criminal sentencing. The evolving approach featured a growing confidence in the capacity of people to change and for offenders to change for the better.

PRISON REFORM

The roots of intentional prison reform can be found in the last half of the eighteenth century in England. John Howard led the way. A country gentleman, Howard was appointed the high sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. Upon inspecting the jail of his shire or county, he became appalled with the nasty conditions and set about rectifying them, an unprecedented action at the time. His own moral conscience was touched when he discovered that most of his jailed wards were either too poor to pay their taxes or had violated some minor royal edict. Two years later he toured hundreds of jails and prisons at his own expense, noting with great detail the deficiencies and inhumanities of each one.

In 1777 Howard sent a detailed treatise, State of the Prisons, to Parliament. His vivid descriptions of the toxic and dangerous conditions in the prisons and jails galvanized Parliament to unusually prompt action. The Penitentiary Act of 1779, among other improvements, mandated single-occupancy cells in all English prisons and the use of the title penitentiary houses to identify all such institutions from that point on. It was a propitious beginning, but the actual conditions within the jails and prisons were slow to change for the better, despite the law.²³

Between 1800 and the Civil War, stimulated by John Howard’s legacy and the work of other English and European reformers, energetic strides were taken in the United States to initiate new prison architectures and reformatory management methods. Pennsylvania’s Quakers led the way. Although they had been subjected to oppressive treatment, hatred, and rejection in many other colonies, under the protection of William Penn, Quakers began a reform movement in 1790, just after the conclusion of the Revolution. The Walnut Street Jail, established in Philadelphia in 1773, was renovated to be America’s first penitentiary. A three-story building, it was small (twenty-five by forty-five feet) and contained eight six-by-nine-foot cells. Although intended to incarcerate offenders who displayed depraved morals, dangerous characters, unruly dispositions, or disorderly conduct, as well less unruly offenders, it was the first implementation of the rehabilitative principles of isolation through solitary confinement (each cell held only one prisoner), of discipline through hard labor, and of incarceration as punishment, not for punishment.²⁴ In other words, the time served was the complete penalty. Additional punishments, though never eliminated, were officially discouraged.

In 1829 a new prison was built in a section of Philadelphia called Cherry Hill. It had been in the planning stage for more than twenty years, and when constructed the Eastern State Penitentiary became the most expensive—$780,000—and architecturally complex prison in the United States to that date. Its wheel-type design, featuring a central control hub with cell blocks as the spokes of the wheel, had a capacity of up to 450 inmates when it was built in 1829. The management method of Eastern State Penitentiary was a strict combination of silence and isolation.²⁵

No corporal punishment was allowed or needed, since the inmates were never in contact with other offenders or with staff. The whole purpose of the prison was well-intentioned rehabilitation, but the end result was horrific. The system drove many of the inmates insane. Within a decade the prison disciplines were modified to reduce the total silence and isolation. The purpose remained the same. Unexpectedly, few other prisons in the United States copied the Pennsylvania plan. European nations, on the other hand, felt the methods used were excellent and, with modifications, implemented their own versions.

Taking their cue from Pennsylvania’s experience, New York State embarked on its attempt at a reformatory prison. Several lessons emerged from the Eastern State Penitentiary experience. New York concluded that total isolation was counterproductive. Too many inmates could not tolerate the loneliness, and the program did not produce any significant work products. In addition, perhaps most important to many New York political leaders, the cost was far too much to build and to maintain.

New York decided that the Auburn State Prison—at the northern end of Owasco Lake in the upstate Finger Lakes region—would use a congregate system of prison labor, with inmates working together in workshop style rather than individually in their cells. Silence would be maintained at night when inmates were “locked-down” in individual cells and during meals. During the day, at work, some words could be exchanged with staff but not with other inmates. The Auburn plan worked fairly well from the standpoint of the state’s desire for economic profit from prison labor. It was praised for its workshop production. With the low overhead and captive workforce, the prison actually made a profit. Striped uniforms and the lockstep (a shuffling slide step with one hand on the shoulder of the next man) were initiated at Auburn. The purpose of the labor and silence seemed to encourage prayer, meditation, and eventually improved behavior. On the other hand, staff increasingly inflicted corporal punishment—as a way of wielding total control.²⁶

Also, in 1829, a new prison was built in Wethersfield, Connecticut, which embodied the Auburn system. The design was a rectangular fortress, whose walls were made of brownstone blocks quarried from nearby Portland, Connecticut. Its cells were much smaller than those in Pennsylvania. Other prisons were built with the same plan in Boston and at Sing Sing, on New York’s Hudson River. The era of rehabilitative institutions peaked just as the Civil War began in 1661. Then retribution, prompted by the war mentality, returned to the forefront.

Detailed descriptions of the New York and Pennsylvania approaches to prison architecture and discipline will be introduced in the next chapter. It is sufficient to say here that each design represented what came to be called the penitentiary system of incarceration. The facilities existed to reform the offender, with loss of liberty as the main punishment. As reported by Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville after their tour of the United States in 1833–34, each “rests upon these two united principles, solitude and labour. These principles, in order to be salutary, ought not to be separated: the one is inefficient without the other.”²⁷

The penitentiary system, as it put into practice the theory of moral conversion, ran into persistent problems and unintended consequences between 1830 and 1870. Successful conversions were infrequent; corporal punishments were reintroduced to maintain discipline; conditions within the prison walls were minimally humane and declined steadily. Instead of penitence, prisoners saw more violence, madness, and suicide. In the Wethersfield State Prison, the situation deteriorated during and after the Civil War, with financial scandals adding to the disciplinary issues.

Reform movements were gaining strength in several other mid-Atlantic states such as Maryland and Delaware, where prison associations were organized by groups of citizens similar to the origin of the Connecticut Prison Association. During the American Civil War, thousands of men from the Union and the Confederacy experienced terrible conditions as prisoners of war. As word spread of the horrible fate of those captured from each side, the gradual growth of awareness in the public elicited a revulsion against such treatment of war prisoners and a change of attitude about the moral issues involved in the incarceration of civil offenders. Reform movements arose around concerns raised by the plight of thousands of homeless people throughout the United States (including former slaves, street urchins, alcoholics, and mentally unstable persons). Hundreds were arrested for vagrancy, breach of peace, loitering, and a host of minor and major crimes.

Confinement increased as newly developed police forces in all the states, including Connecticut, attempted to clear the streets of all who caused problems for businesses or aroused fears among the settled populace. The conclusion of the war between the states ended one set of issues around war and peace but opened up a wide spectrum of new issues dealing with mental health, the integration of former slaves, those who could not or would not work, the cost and purpose of jails and prisons, and criticisms of the ways offenders were punished in underfunded, deteriorated, and largely unregulated penal institutions.

In 1862 a Congregational minister with the biblical name of Enoch Cobb Wines became secretary of the New York Prison Association. Born in 1806, he was a man of immense energy and bold vision. He set about exploring the possibilities of international and national organizations to foster prison reform. The first national Congress of Prisons was held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870 with Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio as the first president. Enoch Wines also helped to convene the first International Congress in London in 1872. He was the leading reformer of the nineteenth century, active until his death in 1879. So important was he that the National Prison Association (NPA), which he had helped to found at the 1870 congress, began to disintegrate after his death.

His son, Dr. Frederick H. Wines, an equally forceful and innovative organizer, took his father’s place at the head of the NPA in 1883. His position was never challenged. In one summary of Frederick’s life, his endeavor to implement a scientific and rational approach to prison reform is lifted up as a prime example of his intent to move criminal justice forward on the basis of proven scientific evidence and not on guesswork: “A major effort of his activities was seeking to curb the use of prisons as a social laboratory with prisoners as guinea pigs…. In 1898 he announced: ‘I do not believe in inherited crime any more than I believe in the imaginary criminal type.’ ”²⁸

In New England a swelling chorus of Protestant liberal theologies in the latter part of the century joined the efforts of the National Prison Association to redefine offender reformation, reject public punishments, and promote careful and systematic rehabilitation of offenders. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, prison reform was on the upswing for the first time since the first quarter of that century, when the first penitentiaries were built to promote rehabilitation. The 1870 Cincinnati meeting acted as a stimulus for additional states to join the call for more civilized prison management. The publicity around the NPA’s push for reform hit its first high point when Rutherford B. Hayes went from being the initial head of a prison reform organization to being elected as the president of the United States. Hayes served from 1876 to 1881 and played an active role for years.

As a respected general in the Civil War and an ex-president of the nation, Hayes surrounded the reform movement in the 1880s and into the 1890s, until his death in 1893, with a powerful aura of respectability and moral persuasion, a contribution often ignored rather than heralded at the time. No other politician since has taken so great and consistent interest in penal reform. In 1893, among the eulogies of his character and worth as a military leader and statesman, another former Civil War general from Ohio, Roeliff Brinkerhoff, spoke of Hayes’s commitment to the common task of finding a resolution to the “prison question,” an issue of vital importance to America: “The country can survive under high tariff or low tariffs, under free coinage or restricted coinage, but it cannot survive a demoralized people, with crime increasing like a tide that knows no ebb.”²⁹

Zebulon Brockway, warden of the much-admired Elmira Reformatory in New York State, was another star on the rise in 1870. Born in Lyme, Connecticut, Brockway gained his start as a clerk and guard at the Wethersfield State Prison and rose to be an assistant to Warden Amos Pilsbury. In 1861 he was called to be head of the Detroit House of Correction. Brockway’s innovations in prison discipline were revolutionary, based on reformatory ideals he had culled from his own experience and research. Brockway is credited with rethinking not only the standard prison disciplines being practiced for the previous two centuries, which focused on corporal punishments and rigidly harsh living conditions, but also the need for release mechanisms that gave offenders a better chance of becoming constructive citizens. He instituted a graded approach to prison discipline. The most restrictive stage offered no liberty to the inmate, the second stage allowed partial freedoms within the prison, and the last stage permitted the inmate to leave on parole under supervision. It was the first organized parole system in America.³⁰

Among the youngest wardens in the county at age forty-three, Brockway was invited to make a major address at the 1870 Congress of the National Prison Association. Called “The Ideal of a True Prison System for a State,” Brockway’s speech laid out the three essential elements of the reformatory philosophy: indeterminate sentencing, experienced and authoritative leadership in prison management, and humane conditions for prisoners.

Brockway’s speech, and the forty-one rehabilitative “Principles” adopted by NPA at the end of the 1870 meeting, became a blueprint for American penologists. The National Prison Association met annually, except for a brief hiatus in the late 1870s after the death of its founder, Enoch Wines, but it regrouped in 1883 under Frederick Wines and resumed its yearly debates. The NPA would eventually be renamed the American Prison Association in 1954 and by the middle of the twentieth century became the American Correctional Association, by then primarily a trade association for professionals in prisons, jails, parole, and probation. Private-sector agencies are encouraged to participate, but they rarely exercise any leadership in the organization in the modern era.

As the national prison reform movement was getting under way, two developments took place in Connecticut—Hartford and Wethersfield. Both added critical background to the CPA’s formation. One was the building of a new county jail on Seyms Street in 1874. Hartford’s jail had functioned as the county jail for a number of years, and the expansion of it was an indication of more “crime” occurring and a growing offender population being processed by the courts. Like the Pennsylvania Prison Society and New York Prison Association, both of which initiated programs at both the jail and prison level, the CPA immediately involved itself in the problems being faced by inmates of the Hartford County Jail as well as those discharged from the state prison.

The other issue was a new series of scandals surrounding the Wethersfield State Prison. Hopes were high when the prison was established in 1827 that the prison would not only avoid the abominable conditions of Newgate Prison in Granby but exemplify the best possible prison management. In fact, the Wethersfield prison administration never did live up to the expectations. In his 1924 “History of Connecticut Institutions” Dr. Edward Warren Capen warned that in the mid-nineteenth century, Wethersfield had slipped from its status as one of the best prisons in the country to one where the very organization of the institution was suspected of nepotism: “The Warden, deputy, shop overseer, and contractors were at times nearly related. Lack of heat and ventilation, and improper food caused illness and death.”³¹

Prisons and jails are by their very nature negative environments for both inmates and staff, no matter how many creaturely comforts are provided or how enlightened the administration at any given time. Only those who work within such structures know experientially just how negative and difficult it can become and how easily its atmosphere and organizational structure can be corrupted. From the start Wethersfield State Prison had periodically been marred by disorder and charges of mismanagement. Well before 1875 there was a great deal of sentiment for change within the facility and for more resources from the community.

An 1872 report of the Connecticut’s legislative committee appointed to examine the state prison recommended that a new one be built as soon as possible.³² The legislature and the governor ignored it. But one other recommendation did get immediate attention, principally because it cost almost no money. The governor established a State Board of Charities in 1873 and appointed three men and two women as members. They were authorized to visit annually each Connecticut institution, public and private, to determine if the inmates were being treated humanely. There is no evidence that the State Board of Charities delved into the problems of prison management or other systemic criminal justice issues. But the National Prison Association would provide plenty of opportunity to address such issues with a knowledge base wide enough to suggest systemic solutions.

Connecticut was not oblivious to the national and international associations that had developed and the formation of voluntary prisoner-aid associations in New York, Maryland, and New Hampshire. The work of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, formed in 1787 and widely respected, was viewed more as an anomaly, not a pattern to be followed. The Boston Prison Discipline Society took form in 1825, and the New York Prison Association in 1845. Similar associations were formed in Maryland and Delaware in the next two decades.

In 1871 the Connecticut legislature formed a Prison Reform Commission to investigate the progress being made in prison reform. Appointed to that commission were Dr. G. W. Russell and Charles Dudley Warner (publisher of the Hartford Daily Courant) to represent Hartford and Probate Judge Francis Wayland (who had been the lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1869) to represent New Haven. Their specific assignment was to examine the Wethersfield State Prison and similar institutions in other states “to see if there are any deficiencies in our way of treating criminals.”³³

Prison reform was picking up speed.

PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

The influences of European penology and scientific discovery were considerable in New England from the eighteenth century on. Insights and theories from both philosophy and science, conceived in the previous two centuries, were known and debated in the United States long before the CPA began its journey. The founders of the new American government mined the works of English, French, and Italian thinkers for ideas and rhetoric to formulate their foundational documents.

Three philosophers, the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), the English social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and the Italian penologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), among many others, were particularly influential in the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For example, the right to a public and speedy trial, to be judged by peers, to dismiss jurors for various reasons, to examine the witnesses, to not be subjected to coerced confessions, and to be informed of accused acts and who is making the accusations are all protections drawn from the works of classical criminology.³⁴

Beccaria’s work, On Crimes and Punishment, published in 1764, speaks to many universal issues of his day. He was an early advocate of swift rather than delayed punishments to be most effective against crime. In his essay he declares the death penalty unnecessary and counterproductive and discusses better ways to deal with human behaviors such as suicide and dueling rather than codifying them as illegal. Word of his work spread rapidly in Europe and in America. In Connecticut the New Haven Register printed Beccaria’s book in its entirety over seven months in 1786.

Our interest is in Beccaria’s assertion of two principles that became part of the foundation of subsequent penology. The first is that the punishment of convicted criminals is justified only when it strengthens the social contract between members of society. The second is that reformatory penalties are more likely to be effective than punishments based on retribution or revenge. Penalties designed to be reformatory are less likely to further alienate criminals and make them worse. Rehabilitation rather than retribution would therefore serve the greatest good of the community. Both principles would appear in the prison reform movement of the 1870s in the United States.

In the nineteenth century, rational penology was given another thrust forward by the writings of Jeremy Bentham in England and Cesare Lombroso in Italy on the origins of crime. Bentham’s philosophy was based on the idea (called the utilitarian principle) that human beings are motivated primarily by the desire to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. Applying that principle to the control of crime, Bentham maintained that criminal justice should be implemented by laws that compel each citizen to respect the right of others under those laws. The punishment given to violators should be applied to the degree necessary to compel that respect. That concept was widely used by advocates of retributive punishments in all subsequent reform eras.

Bentham wrote extensively about prison reform. His creative architectural design for a prison was called the panopticon. The cell blocks, or wings of the panopticon, came off a central hub, allowing custodians of the prison population, stationed in the hub, to have a constant visual assessment of what was happening in each of the cell blocks.³⁵

Cesare Lombroso’s early attempt to approach crime scientifically provoked the greatest amount of discussion in America. He based his theories on his experiences in Italian social and educational services, first as the director of a mental institution, then as a professor of psychiatry, and finally as a professor of criminal anthropology. He argued, based on his detailed study of the physiognomy of offenders, that criminals had consistent physical characteristics that could be cataloged and then used to trace convicted offenders or identify potential offenders. The fact that he claimed his system could spot criminals before they committed crimes was the most provocative and, ultimately, the weakest part of his method.

Lombroso further contended that criminals consisted of a class of people who were biologically atavistic, meaning that they displayed features of previous generations, sometimes far in the past. In the case of criminals, the features were genetic anomalies dating to a time before civilization. Lombroso, however, also advocated for reform of Italian prisons and for more constructive and reformative treatment of offenders. His views sparked great interest in heredity, the study of which was then in its infancy as a part of the relatively new science of anthropology.³⁶

The prison reformers of the late nineteenth century made extensive use of the Lombroso catalogue of offender characteristics. Although eventually rejected on empirical evidence that it did not work and replaced by theories of environmental influence on offenders, the catalog concept became the forerunner of the more effective means of identifying offenders, such as fingerprint patterns, which proved to be unique to every person.³⁷

The outstanding contribution to the philosophical and scientific culture of the late nineteenth century was undoubtedly the seminal work of Charles Darwin. His concept of evolution had both negative and positive impacts. Negatively, it led to social Darwinism—an assumption that Darwin’s ideas about natural selection could explain the obvious difference of social status, class, and race that existed in society. As biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s phrased it, “In Darwin’s theory, competition is the great regulator.”³⁸

One extreme consequence within social Darwinism was a presumption that nonproductive and antisocial citizens were what they were by the process of natural selection. Since that was a biological consequence, none in those categories were merited the use of society’s resources to lift them to a better life, heal them of their illnesses, or reform their criminality. Social Darwinism flourished for over three-quarters of a century after Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in 1859 and continues to reappear as a covert assumption. But Richard Hofstadter’s definitive study of the movement, Social Darwinism in American Thought, demonstrates that Darwin’s discoveries were socially neutral and could be co-opted out of context for quite contradictory purposes.

On the positive side Darwin’s evolutionary theory enabled other religious leaders of the latter part of the nineteenth century to apply in a completely different way the ideas of evolution and progress. In New England the revised Calvinist teaching of Nathaniel William Taylor, that individuals could will their own salvation, was compatible with Darwin’s struggle for survival. The conviction of Horace Bushnell that people could change to meet the ever-changing demands of their environment merged easily with Darwin’s concept of evolution.³⁹

As the century came to a close, a growing portion of Jewish and Christian thought also embraced the rationalist, more materialistic assumption that all acts had a natural, physical cause, including and perhaps especially crime and antisocial behavior. The scientific method as well as the research of Darwin had produced a new way of viewing social problems. After Darwin, criminality could no longer be seen as inevitable or permanent, at least for most offenders. There were environmental factors, as well as personal deficiencies, that could provide a basis for criminal activity.

A major portion of this group, many from Christian perspectives, gradually formed into a dissenting movement away from the competitive interpretation of social Darwinism. The values of humanitarianism were affirmed as well as an intense desire for a more compassionate and justice-oriented society. The movement came to be labeled the Social Gospel. Its foremost proponents came from a variety of religious backgrounds. For example, Rev. Washington Gladden was a Congregationalist; Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch was a Lutheran; William Dwight Porter Bliss was an Episcopalian.

The Social Gospel was part of a larger political movement, which eventually was called the Progressive movement. Its primary focus was still economic, with a focus on poverty relief, workers’ rights, and taxation, with occasional glances at the issues of criminal justice. At the core of their activity was a belief in the inevitability of progress. From the point of view of the Social Gospel, God could be seen working both from outside and within the created order, enabling all humanity, with its God-given free will, to evolve to a new level. Humans, whether at the top or bottom of the ladder, were capable with the proper assistance of becoming strong, self-conscious co-creators of a better society. The ideas of the Social Gospel and Progressivism were fought tooth and nail by the conservative evangelical Christians and secular conservatives of the day.

Horace Bushnell’s seminal ideas about shaping human development through individualized Christian education were perhaps the most influential religious factors in the formation of prison reform in New England. Bushnell’s theology was translated, as the century ended, into progressive theories of public education and moral training for both children and adults. It was a short step to apply Bushnell’s ideas to the reeducation of youthful delinquents and even adult criminals. It may be that the fittest survive in each generation, but anyone could join the ranks of the fittest with the proper guidance. With these ideas, coupled with the Social Gospel, more and more people began to assume that surviving and thriving were not just natural occurrences within a rigid biological framework. They were within the capacity of everyone.

By the 1870s a unique combination of philosophical penology, scientific discoveries, and Protestant theological liberal thought was an important part of the intellectual landscape, particularly in Connecticut. It gave credibility to the possibilities that all people can change in ways never before imagined in the old Puritan framework. In a much more flexible way, it was now considered feasible that offenders might change for the better. It created an atmosphere of hope for advocates of prison reform and encouraged the move away from society’s dependence on incarceration and discipline to tame the beast of criminality.

In addition to Bushnell, several other connections provide suggestive influences that were probably at work within the Connecticut prison reform movement. For example, Francis Wayland’s tenure as dean of the Yale Law School coincided with the addition of William Graham Sumner (the preeminent social Darwinist of the age) to the Yale faculty in the 1872.⁴⁰ We also know that both Wayland and Noah Porter (a progressive preacher) were among the founders of the CPA and that Washington Gladden (one of the foremost Social Gospel advocates) was Horace Bushnell’s close friend.⁴¹ Bushnell (a strong believer that people can transcend their environment by education) was one of the Hartford leaders who helped to sponsor a major public meeting on prison reform in 1873.

When that background of connections is added to the history outlined earlier, it is clear that the CPA’s founders were immersed in a unique context made up of theology, science, and philosophy. The choices made by those who gathered to create a new prison reform agency represented a perspective shaped by the new penology initiated by John Howard, influenced by evolutionary principles, and at least marginally connected to the forces giving birth to the Social Gospel. We turn now to other social forces, equally powerful in their influences on the cultural context of 1875.

IMMIGRATION, EMANCIPATION, AND URBANIZATION

The impacts of the changes wrought by the American Civil War on America’s regional cultures were enormous. Three factors particularly stand out in connection to criminal justice. They were the end of plantation slavery, unprecedented waves of immigration from Europe, and the subsequent urbanization that took place in every state of the Union—including Connecticut. The America that was hailed as a land of economic opportunity and second chances also became in the twentieth century a nation deeply divided by racism, budding nationalism, and a widespread fear of crime.

The aftermath of the Civil War left Connecticut unscathed in terms of military battles but vastly different in terms of the economic and sociological impact of the war on the region. The two decades following its end were harsh. A new urban situation was developing in those years that caused everyone a good deal of anxiety. As historian Robert Owen Decker writes, “The 1870s were terrible years, as a great depression came in 1873 and six years of hardship followed. Large numbers of unemployed walked. They worried the Hartford police. Men and women took to the roads in large numbers, and many rough gangs were organized. Not until 1880 did the economic upswing come.”⁴²

It was certainly the case that the state and the rest of the Northeast were at the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. It was also true that the Civil War had provided an economic platform on which merchants in virtually every industry could transform their wartime factories to produce goods not only for their own states and regions but also for the burgeoning settlements between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Historian Howard Zinn reminds his readers that for the remainder of the century after the Civil War, new sources of energy and power transformed American life and the cultural environment. Human muscles were replaced by steam engines and electricity, wood by iron, and then iron by steel: “Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets and factories…. By 1900, America was traversed by 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter and the adding machine speeded up the work of business.”⁴³

At the same time, city populations in particular were expanding, due primarily to immigration. That brought new issues and opportunities for society to face. Connecticut’s business leaders were priming themselves to participate fully. For example, the manufacture of woolen items and the publishing of books and magazines had been the dominant Connecticut enterprises before the Civil War, along with an industry that most people don’t associate with Connecticut, the making of brandy and gin.

The prevalence of the liquor trade had prompted the formation of the Connecticut Temperance Society in 1829, but despite the plethora of sermons and public outcries about the availability and detriments of alcohol, Hartford still had 114 distilleries in 1845 that produced more than seventy-five thousand gallons of cider brandy and over three hundred thousand gallons of gin. Dealing with the effects of “Demon Rum” would figure prominently in the work of the CPA then and in every succeeding generation.⁴⁴

After the war other forms of manufacturing were created and rapidly expanded, including silk textiles, firearms, leather works, and machine tools. Eventually, the industry arose that became the icon of Hartford and Connecticut: the insurance industry. The Aetna and the Hartford insurance companies, initiating a brand new fire-insurance concept, rose to prominence in the 1880s and were joined by the end of the century by other companies to provide insurance not only to businesses but to individuals for a variety of potential threats and disasters.

Economically, Connecticut was on an upward curve for the decade of 1865–75. Its prosperity matched the advances of other business tycoons all along the East Coast. While the citizenry at the bottom of the economic ladder were struggling to survive, those at the top were raking in millions of dollars and living in such lavish style that the period merited its nickname as the Gilded Age. Mark Twain used the characterization to his advantage in a play that was very successful despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it mocked those at the top of the ladder. In particular, the Northeast industrial development exploded. In the words of one historian, “A greedy, grasping, materialistic quality characterized the age…. The democratic process began to falter as the Northeast, with its industry, its cities, and its financial developments caught step with the rest of the modern age…. Economic nationalism had become a fact.”⁴⁵

Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 generated another massive cultural shift of the antebellum period. The official end of slavery is generally considered to be his greatest moral legacy to the nation, and it affected every part of the nation. The declaration of emancipation brought about a political realignment that led to a division between slave and free states, which in turn precipitated a retributive political Reconstruction effort that did more harm than good. An exodus of former slaves was set in motion to the northern states, primarily to the urban centers.

Connecticut abolished slavery by law in 1849, the last of the New England states to do so. Racist attitudes were as deeply engrained in the northern states as in the South, despite the persuasive power of the abolitionist movement. The linkage in the nineteenth century between the slave trade and Connecticut’s own burgeoning economy and institutions of higher education has been firmly established. Indeed, much of the philanthropy of the twentieth century was made possible by the profits derived in the preceding centuries from slavery. The sweat and blood of black men and women and their children made the industrial as well as the agricultural revolution possible. Their release from their enslavement gave them only a brief period to celebrate.

According to John von Rohr, in Connecticut, as in much of New England, the ownership model used to hold and treat slaves was based on Old Testament scripture. In it, a person who in most of the South was called and treated as a “slave” was euphemistically and legally treated as a member of the family and called a “servant” in the North. The change in terminology also led to an ambiguous status. Servants lived in a limbo somewhere between the conditions faced by a plantation slave and those faced by an indentured servant. Although usually freed after a specified time, freedom proved to be no favor in reality, as northern cultural prejudices against black people found more subtle ways to hold them down financially and socially. “Paradoxically,” claims von Rohr, emancipation in New England was more oppressive than bondage, pointing toward later discriminatory practices.⁴⁶

The data available in annual reports throughout the early years of the CPA does not include any breakdown of offender populations in the county jails and the state prison in terms of race. There is evidence, however, that people of color were already disproportionately represented in the jails and prison and resented by many in the general population, especially after the Civil War.⁴⁷

To complete our survey of the years after the Civil War, a singular cultural shock to the nation was caused by the successive waves of immigrants that moved into the country. Between 1840 and 1860, according to census reports, over 4.3 million persons of all ages from overseas took up residence in the United States. With the influx large cities became huge, and small towns became cities. All told, between 1820 and 1900, over 19 million immigrants settled across the land, and by 1880 one quarter of the total population in the nation lived in cities of over 8,000 people.⁴⁸

Connecticut’s census increased by over 150,000 people in the thirty years prior to 1860, and the urban population of the state went up by 197 percent between 1820 and 1860. The percentage of foreign born in the state increased from 21 percent in 1870 to 30 percent by 1910. The result was a steep rise in pressure on the immigrant population to learn the language, find jobs and housing, and fit into the new culture. Conversely, the cities were hard-pressed to provide work and places for immigrants to live and to keep law and order in the streets. The time was ripe for all kinds of discrimination.

After the Civil War, coincident and interrelated with all these changes, crime increased. Especially in the cities, crime grew both in the varieties of offenses and in the breadth of ages of the offenders. The most prominent criminal offenses requiring imprisonment were drunkenness, pauperism, and vagrancy, with a few cases of assault and battery and an occasional murder. There was also a growing interest in how to handle the number of people being processed by the state courts and ending up in jail or prison. Legislators, consequently, gave more time to crafting new laws to define and control both the individual criminal and the sense of disorder being created by crime.

In view of all these factors, conditions were good in 1875 for a response such as the formation of the Prisoners’ Friend Corporation. In its alliance with the state, led by participants in or supporters of state government, the corporation became a part of a complex industry that would develop gradually around the burgeoning criminal justice system. The religious compassion that was undoubtedly behind the agency was mixed with the civic desire to give Connecticut the best possible prison and jail system, using the most modern concepts of penology and giving the released offenders the best possible chance to be constructive citizens.

THE PROLIFERATION OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS

The formation of voluntary associations in the United States has a long history and has received intense study in the twentieth century. It was during the nineteenth century, however, that the formation of voluntary associations became a veritable art form, filling almost every niche in American society in which contrary opinions had been raised or in which some injustice was perceived. Listen to William Ellery Channing, an esteemed Unitarian preacher and poet (1780–1842), preaching about the situation: “You can scarcely name an objective for which some institution has not been formed. Would men spread one opinion, or crush another? They make a society. Would they improve the penal code, or relieve poor debtors? They make societies. Would they encourage, argue or manufacture a science? They make societies. Would one class encourage horse racing and another discourage travel on Sundays? They form societies.”⁴⁹

The process by which people band together, formally or informally, to achieve a common goal is probably as old as the emergence of Homo sapiens and may even go back as far as the Neanderthal culture. It seems to have been one of the ways in which humans moved beyond simply surviving in hostile environments as individuals to thriving in communities. Some students of the subject hold that it is the primary way. James Hunt, an authority on the subject, goes so far as to state that “man as a historical being is to be understood in terms of the types of associations (voluntary and involuntary) under which or in the face of which he lives or in which he participates.”⁵⁰

In the nineteenth century there were in the United States so many voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville concluded, “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or applied to a greater multitude of objects, than in America.” Tocqueville went on to distinguish three permanent associations: the State, the Church (by which he meant the established churches), and the Corporation. He recognized other associations of a less permanent nature and wrote with amazement about the number of these small, often very transitory, groups he found in America.⁵¹ What has become especially clear since Tocqueville wrote is that many associations display a surprising and unpredictable durability. For example, the Women’s Relief Corps, the Union of Home Work, and the Widow’s Society, all typical voluntary associations in Hartford, came into being in the same era as the Connecticut Prison Association. All had a relatively short existence, often terminated within fifty years of their inception, but left behind an important impact on society as a whole. Among them were state associations to improve the way crime was processed and criminals were treated during incarceration. Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Delaware, and Maryland led the way in America. By 1875 the time was ripe for the same reaction to criminal justice in Connecticut.

David Knoke and James Wood identify four categories of social influence associations in the American experience: legal-justice, health, civic action, and neighborhood-community. The categories are interrelated and defy strictly interpreted boundaries. The CPA has exemplified elements of all four. From its inception the CPA functioned as a legal-justice association, drafting bills and advocating for them in the state legislature. It has also demonstrated elements of the civic action type, organizing volunteer programs and working with municipal governments to change or implement public policies.⁵²

In the health field, from 1875 to about 1940 the CPA had legislatively mandated responsibilities for offenders deemed “insane” and has continued to mount programs to deal with all manner of health-related concerns of offenders. Finally, it has worked in and helped to organize neighborhood groups to effect changes in the treatment of adults and youth offenders in the community. Modern studies have also described the CPA as a “benevolent” or social influence type of voluntary agency, which is usually formed to seek some palliation of suffering or the provision of support for a segment of the population.

To fully understand the CPA within the context of voluntary associations, it is helpful to recognize that beyond the delivery of actual services such organizations are necessarily involved in the exercise of power. That is true particularly of associations that request and receive public funding or that act as advocates for some segment of the public. Social influence associations, in particular, even those not focused on advocacy per se, are apt to expose areas of genuine human need, which in turn can be traced to basic forms of injustice that demand change.

The resulting tensions, especially if they are reported in newspapers or other media, can cause both embarrassment and resentment externally within the governmental and legislative arenas or internally within the social service networks. Those tensions can become severe, as government officials seek to deny, redefine, or redress those deficiencies. They can be resolved only with the use of the political or moral power that is present on either side of the dispute. As James Hunt makes clear, “The forms of association which exist in a society in a historical moment are the forms of power in that society, and an effective social ethic requires the organization of power for its purposes and in the forms that permit the realization of its purposes.”⁵³

Summarizing the thought of James Luther Adams, the foremost American proponent of voluntary associations, Hunt argues that there are three obligations for the responsible citizen: first, to educate or reeducate the general citizenry about social injustice; second, to participate in associations that deal with social injustice, especially as it affects underprivileged groups; and third, to facilitate a public discussion of new possibilities in social policy and the organization of society.⁵⁴ Only those voluntary associations that learn how to assess their degree of power, how to leverage it, and how to manage it intelligently in the midst of their cooperation and competition with other voluntary agencies are going to persist over time. By all those standards the voluntary association called the Connecticut Prison Association has been one of the most successful voluntary associations in Connecticut during the past 150 years.

This brief survey of the cultural context that prevailed in Connecticut in the 1870s suggests, despite a natural concern about the impact of crime as the population grew, restorative justice retained strong roots dating back to colonial times. The Puritan emphasis on God’s grace, coupled with a deep-seated mission to save the lost, imparted to all of New England a sustained religious emphasis on caring for the offender’s spiritual and physical well-being. The New England Theology, led by Nathaniel Taylor and amplified by the radical teaching of Horace Bushnell, both of whom used biblical sources to stress the capacity of the individual to change and evolve, offered a new morality that was scientifically plausible. Sin was no longer the simple explanation.

Human choice made both crime and restoration not only possible but also plausible. The new penitentiaries of the early nineteenth century had constituted a good beginning but had lost sight of their mission. The energy of the prison reform movement after the Civil War found sustenance in the newly enlightened humanitarianism springing from seminal philosophers in Europe, in the obvious failures of punitive incarceration, and in the potential power of voluntary associations to lead the way to reformation of the individual by reforming the prisons. Restorative justice had much in the culture to support it in 1875.

On the other hand, support for retributive justice increased in the mid-1870s, following the Civil War. As the oldest method of dealing with crime, punishment had the inherent value of common sense. Just as parents had to discipline their children to make them realize the errors of their ways, so society had to react quickly and as harshly as necessary to at least curb the inclination to commit crimes. In the battle over free will versus predestination, a majority of the population, the clergy, and the political leaders still leaned toward the presumption that criminals were born, not made. Reformation schemes struck them as throwing good money away on a hopeless romantic notion and essentially immoral project.

If chaos was to be avoided, a steady current of voices protested, crime must be controlled by all the force that society could muster. If criminals were born that way, the new science of heredity gave many the idea of cutting off future crime at the source by sterilization. For others it would be enough to make survival less likely through punitive incarceration. If criminals have committed crime by choice, then they should pay the consequences of law-breaking. Much of the evidence accumulated in the subsequent chapter underlines the presumption that the retributive face of justice was bred in the bones of many segments of society that sincerely believed that severe punishment was needed to protect property, maintain order, and make sure the criminals, not the citizens, were filled with fear.

The intellectual context of the CPA story indicates that the two faces of justice were both in evidence in 1875. Justice, of course, is never merely an intellectual debate. Justice takes practical forms in laws, courts, custodial facilities, and various kinds of services in the community. It also emerges from a number of cultural mores, attitudes, religious beliefs, economic developments, and laws passed in Congress or at the state level. All shape the channel through which the waters of progress are supposed to flow.

The door was opening for a new reformatory phase of activity in the Connecticut criminal justice system to improve conditions within the prison and a chance for an honest living for those being discharged. The Prisoners’ Friend Association was in the works. The new phase would be initiated this time by a private agency designed by judges and clergy, backed by the governor, and welcomed by the warden of the beleaguered Wethersfield State Prison.