Two decades later, in 1770, Simsbury was in the news again. Connecticut (like other northern states) was shifting away from publicly situated corporal punishment and replacing it with sentence terms in jails and prisons. It was not alone in that shift of attitude. “Throughout the Western World during the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment intellectuals challenged the death penalty,” an aspect of a slow revolution occurring around the subject of human rights.20
Clearly, by 1750 the county jails were unable to house all the convicted offenders being adjudicated by the courts. Once put forward as a proposal, the abandoned mine appeared to offer a natural and (for the ever cost-conscious legislators) relatively inexpensive site for a prison.
When put into operation in 1773 Newgate Prison was considered a major humanitarian step forward because imprisonment was, for the first time, to be substituted for all capital offenses except homicide. Functioning as both a jail and a prison, the population of Newgate rose and fell over its first few years, as escapes and inmate rebellions exposed its deficiencies and the brutality of its disciplines. Horse thieves, burglars, robbers, chronic drunkards, and counterfeiters, including women and aged inmates, were not only confined underground in terrible conditions; they were also subject to harsh corporal punishments, including the dreaded treadmill. Incarceration by itself was not yet considered a sufficient penalty, and the public debate over the most effective and moral approach to crime intensified.
Newgate’s rural setting and harsh discipline had two advantages, from the vantage point of the Connecticut legislature: it was vividly distinguished from the county jails around the state, and it reflected the emerging consensus that the county jails were too easy for some of the most serious criminals and that they deserved not only a severely separated place but a discipline of the hardest labor and conditions available. Newgate seemed to satisfy both desires. The state’s offer to buy the lease and create a new prison was accepted by the mine owners as a happy conclusion to a failed business.
The lease for the Simsbury property was purchased by the state of Connecticut in 1773, about the same time Philadelphia’s equally famous Walnut Street Jail was designated as a prison meant for the worst of the worst. Newgate too would hold the most serious lawbreakers. In actuality, however, it ended up serving much the same purpose as the larger county jails in Hartford and New Haven, holding a variety of inmates, including federal political prisoners, for varying lengths of time. Newgate was even less successful as a prison than it had been as a copper mine. Both were expensive operations to run, and neither the mine nor the prison was easy to create out of solid bedrock. Its vaunted value as an escape-proof prison became riddled by the embarrassing number of escapees.
The first inmate, John Hinson, arrived in 1773 and fled within three weeks, giving the lie to the natural assumption that Newgate was escape-proof. Hinson climbed out by means of a seventy-foot airshaft that was supposedly too small and slippery for a human to ascend. There were more escapees, yet two years later Gen. George Washington commandeered the prison as a federal site to hold treasonous Tories and deserters from the Continental Army. Such war-related inmates, among the other offenders, including a few women by the early 1780s, characterized the population until the war ended in 1783. “From the first,” states Orlando Lewis in his 1922 history of American prisons, “the prison was the scene of violence, stupid management, escapes, assaults, orgies and demoralization.”21
Although fifty feet underground, over half the prisoners escaped in the first ten years. Riots occurred in 1881 and 1882, with buildings burned and lives lost. The logic of rebellion was not hard to comprehend. The temperature in the mine was constantly between forty-eight and fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, with ground water percolating along all the mine seams and channels. At night, most of the inmates were chained to the damp walls. During the day, when they weren’t working, they were occasionally able to sit or lie on the rock floor, which was usually wet with ground water.
The average tunnel height of about five feet, five inches, meant there were few places where prisoners could stand fully erect in many of the horizontal mineshafts. All but the shortest of inmates had to walk hunched over or crawl on the rock floors to move around. Absolute darkness prevailed day or night, except for the few times when one of them smuggled in tallow to form short-lived candles. Prisoners were ill-clad, ill-fed, and generally ill-cared for.
The first jailer, or keeper, was Capt. John Viets, a landowner and farmer who had been head of the Simsbury militia for a time. When he was appointed in 1773 by the prison overseers accountable to the general court, it was apparently due to his proximity to the site. Viets ran a tavern across the road from the mine entrance. Described as a congenial man, he believed he could easily combine two jobs. One account states that he was overly empathetic to the inmates, a supposition that goes far to explain the numerous escapes that occurred while he was acting warden.22
From the beginning, the inmates were completely unsupervised when sent back down below. As many as 30 to 40 prisoners would be kept at times in the largest cavern, twenty-one feet long by ten feet wide and just over six feet high, with the remainder scattered in the various tunnels. The numbers of those incarcerated increased steadily to over 160. Some were chained. For over fifty years the strong could and did prey on their weaker and more easily terrified companions.
By the time the legislature and the political leadership in Connecticut realized Newgate’s growing despicable reputation and began work to replace it, the mine-prison had become one of the most notorious prisons in the world—a disgraceful blot on both Connecticut’s and the nation’s image as humane societies. The biblical metaphor of a godly country and a land of steady habits, so cherished by Connecticut’s founders and residents since 1620, was permanently stained by Newgate Prison. After the Revolution was over, conditions in the mineshafts and caverns worsened, despite several attempts to improve life for those incarcerated there. By 1825 the Newgate Prison scandal was so widely decried that continuing operations proved politically and morally unacceptable to Connecticut’s leaders and to those advocating for prison reform. Before it closed, Newgate had become America’s version of the worst dungeons used in ancient Rome, in Europe, or in America’s mother country. It was not until the 1820s that Connecticut citizens raised their voices in behalf of prison and jail reform. Only after some clear choices were available, combined with the pressure of the Newgate notoriety, did Connecticut make its move into the era of modern prisons. Newgate Prison was classified as a national landmark in 1972.
MILESTONE 4: PRISON REFORM IN CONNECTICUT
The idea of building a modern prison in Connecticut at the beginning of the nineteenth century originated in work done long before in Pennsylvania, Boston, and New York. The colony established by William Penn set the standard in American prison construction. In 1770 a major segment of the colony’s population, the Quakers, resumed their long-standing crusade for a nonviolent approach to crime control, a crusade initiated in 1681, when the colony was founded. Penn’s compassionate legal framework of freedoms for “Sylvania” lasted only as long as he was alive. Upon his death the legislature reversed many of Penn’s liberal laws and established a highly retributive justice system, restoring the death penalty and severe corporal punishments. The reversal to a more punitive justice system in Pennsylvania symbolizes a general pattern that has recurred frequently in America.
Since colonial times there have been strong rehabilitative movements that have held sway with the promise of reducing crime by restoring criminals to law-abiding behavior. When rehabilitation has faltered or come under strong attack, however, the baseline tendency throughout the United States has been to trust in the power of harsh incarceration to break the antisocial spirit in current offenders and to deter others who have not yet broken or been caught breaking the law. Various combinations