The combined workhouse and jail in Hartford served the whole Connecticut Colony for almost a century. The terms were interchangeable during that period. The facility was to be self-supporting, with the master of the workhouse getting one-third of the income from the labor done and the rest of the income going to the inmates or their families. Like many of the early colonial jails, the workhouse was linked to a tavern with the innkeeper as the master, to generate further income. The outcome in Connecticut was no more successful financially than workhouses had been in England. In both countries alcohol was readily available to the inmates, and drunkenness was frequent. Innkeepers, given such a position, considered inmates to be a captive clientele. The common use of alcohol made sense since the purity of the water could never be guaranteed. Eventually, by 1742, as jails became more common in the larger towns such as Hartford, the combination of tavern and workhouse was ended and inmates were confined in the official county jails.
Despite the presence of county commissioners, supervision was random and the jails continued to function as ultrasevere workhouses, with inmate labor unquestioned and unfettered by any restraints. The early belief in the reforming and redeeming power of prison labor was constantly undermined and diminished almost from its beginnings but especially in the later reform eras. Neglected and ignored by the public and the fragmented criminal justice system, jails were almost without exception characterized by a highly punitive and brutal pattern of treatment. There was little if any accountability as to what work was done, who was forced to do the work, or what limits should be set.
In 1935, on the sixtieth anniversary of the CPA, a member of the agency wrote a thorough report, The County Jail in Connecticut, for the agency’s committee on the jails. The writer’s name was Genevieve Kinne Bartlett, and she lost no time getting to the heart of the matter. She stated that the county jail had “failed in its two objectives of reforming the prisoner and of making a self-supporting institution.”10 They not only did not deter crime; they made criminals by mixing all kinds of offenders together without supervision and without help for the weak and defenseless. Such a condemnation of the jails was not new. It had been voiced before and would be voiced in all subsequent decades. In England, where the prototype of the modern jail originated under Henry II in the twelfth century, and in seventeenth-century America, where the early colonists tried to reinvent it, the jail has been an ambiguous response to crime and a nightmare to millions of offenders. Whether prisons or jails came first historically depends on the definition given to each. In terms of the original purpose, to simply hold offenders until some penalty could be administered, the difference between jails and prisons is primarily one of size (prisons larger, jails smaller) or length of confinement (prisons longer, jails shorter).
Connecticut’s story is typical and instructive. Jails took form after 1650 in most of the larger towns. They were essentially unregulated, but, unlike later prisons, jails were virtually hidden from public view. Consider the metaphor of a theater to distinguish the respective visibility of jails and prisons. Within that metaphor, the prison would occupy center stage in the auditorium. Its various reformations, from retribution to rehabilitation, would take turns in the spotlight, being celebrated and condemned. Huge audiences would be applauding or bemoaning the play and the players.
For over two centuries prisons have been the fortresses that separated the “bad” from the “good” and, ideally, made society safer. Within their populations they housed the stealthy burglars, the bank robbers, and the coldblooded murderers. The poor who stole to feed their families were mixed in with them, along with the fallen women, the innocent ones, and the outlaws who fought the establishment and lost. In both appearance and folklore, prisons have had a certain aura of romance attached to them.
Jails, by contrast, would be represented in our metaphoric theater by a platform in a corner of the basement. There would be dim lighting, with only a few people in the audience. Punitive retribution would be practiced behind curtains, with no reviews in the daily paper. The conditions would be considered deplorable if anyone in the audience cared. Due to the noise from center stage above, the cries for relief did not penetrate beyond the basement walls. There was little romance even in fictional jail confinement. Its inhabitants, the dregs of society, drew little empathy.
Two other features have historically made jails susceptible to stagnation and abuse. One is that jails have usually been small facilities. The other is that jails have held inmates who were convicted of less serious crimes and were sentenced for very short periods. The small size and the constant turnover meant fewer programs and less time for whatever programs were initiated. The English criminal justice system, though it had been cruel, provided the only structure with which the colonists were intimately familiar to protect their new society. Consequently, by 1630 the official records of the Boston Bay Colony contained a “lawful corrections” provision, which specified traditional crime categories and most of the conventional array of punishments currently being used in the homeland. They clearly carried their culture with them, even as they intended to reform it in accordance with holy scriptures.11
Unlike the ill-fated settlement in Jamestown, the thirteen colonies were responding successfully to the massive challenges of a harsh climate, importing or raising a food supply, and gradually suppressing or driving out the original inhabitants of the Americas. Within a few decades reality reared its head over idealism. Obedience within the fold of colonial laws had been uneven from the beginning, and as the population increased, it became worse. One contributing factor was the immediate tendency (and often a necessity) to huddle together in protected, tightly packed villages, which grew, with further immigration, into towns and then cities. Urbanization has been accompanied by increased friction, competition for limited resources, and conflicts of all kinds since urbanized civilization began millennia ago. It would continue to worsen in the colonies.
In the Americas it was natural for the immigrants of all persuasions to urbanize immediately. The first buildings were forts. The subsequent villages, with homes, a church, and activity centers, were surrounded by wooden walls. Not far beyond the walls lay the wilderness, and in the Bible-centered world of New England the wilderness was where Jesus was tempted and bad things happened. The New England wilderness was not something to be admired and preserved. It was a primeval place to be tamed and settled or avoided. The Native Americans who inhabited it were at best primitive humans and, at worst, minions of the devil.
By itself, then, wilderness was viewed not only by Puritans but also by the vast majority of immigrants to the Americas as wild, dangerous, and filled with “savages.” The cultural assumption, almost unquestioned, was that the endless forests they found were clearly meant by God to be cut down, the land cultivated, and the empty places replaced by houses and businesses, parks and streets. The village, town, and city were precisely where civilization became real and blessed by God.
The City of God described by Saint Augustine was the perennial Puritan New England model. Consequently, a premium was placed by those in authority and on the apparatus needed to minister to and control those who broke the laws. Those who would not capitulate and convert were exiled to share the wilderness with the beasts and the Native Americans, both of whom were threats to life, liberty, and godly conduct.
The resolution eventually lay in creating a permanent jail (or gaol) and gradually expanding the use of incarceration. In 1635 Boston opened its first jail. Five years later, on April 10, 1640, the general court of Connecticut stated emphatically, “Forasmuch as many stubborn and refractory Persons are often taken within these libertyes, and no meet place yet prepared for the detayneing & keeping of such to their due & deserued punishment, it is therefore Ordered that there shall be a House of Correction built, of 24 foote long & 16 or 18 foote broad, with a celler, ether of wood or stone … which is to be done by the next Courte, in September.”12
The general court of Connecticut was set up to act as the only judicial body in the colony. In 1664–65, however, a different structure was created: the county, analogous to the English shire (from which the office of sheriff derived). Hartford, New Haven, Fairfield, and New London were designated as counties, for the two express purposes of settling local judicial matters and providing a jail to hold prisoners