The assumption that criminal behavior was a combination of pressures from without and weaknesses from within each individual was not common, but it was representative of a strong school of thought that was prominent in New England. CPA was implementing, consciously or not, the message that Horace Bushnell, Nathaniel Taylor, and other Protestant clergy and teachers of the day had been preaching for five decades. Their message held that a benevolent God had created all people with the capacity to choose their patterns of behavior and belief. Each person was also endowed with a capacity to grow and to change, either by religious conversion or by utilizing his or her God-given abilities and moral values. By 1865 these beliefs had become sufficiently active in the culture to make the rehabilitative prison reform movement a dominant force against a culture that in all probability would not have otherwise supported reform.
Taylor’s reports often alluded to an observation that may have surprised even him: most offenders are ordinary people, a mixture of good intentions and personal flaws. They may have been misled or have made bad judgments, but he convinced himself that many, if not most, of his charges were capable of resuming a law-abiding and self-sustaining life. Given the right kind of punishment, support, opportunities, and encouragement, he believed, most could be restored to society.
The problem offenders faced, Taylor theorized, was one of moral deformation and practical deficiencies. In maintaining this confidence as he went about his work, Taylor was part of a fundamentally countercultural movement that had started earlier in the century. In his 1870 address to the National Prison Congress, Zebulon Brockway asserted that crime had two sources, the individual and the society into which the individual was born and raised. “The causes of crime,” he said, “are primarily in the creature, secondarily in the circumstances that surround him.”18 By stressing the environmental impact on the offender, Brockway was adding impetus to the growing scientific interest in the causes of crime outside the offender, omitting the devil and other religious forces. By stressing the creaturely basis for crime, Brockway was indicating that he was still part of a long history of blaming the offender for making bad choices or falling prey to greed or one of the other seven deadly sins. Although the religious aspect has been replaced by psychology and sociology, the debate has never diminished as to which locus of criminogenic activity, the individual or the environment, is the most basic force at work.
The presence of professional or career criminals was not ignored, but the answer to horrific crime was lengthy imprisonment—or incapacitation. Such people were considered irretrievable, damaged permanently by their environments. They belonged in prison for as long as the law allowed. However, average offenders, according to Gibbon, were people who had been harmed by their background but had not been irreparably damaged. Such offenders only lacked strength, training, moral principles, and personal support. It was a perspective that was reflected on virtually every report of the annual Proceedings of the National Prison Association.
The remedy to human malfeasance in the agency’s early years was to offer a combination of moral reformation and practical assistance. Taylor was a progressive Calvinist, but he was still a Calvinist. He took seriously the power of temptation and did not expect everyone to respond positively. Yet he was equally pessimistic about the vaunted efficacy of pure punishment to cure people of their disposition to commit crime. He was acutely aware of the powerful attractions toward a negative life that surrounded newly released inmates and the personal demons that could undermine their best efforts. All considered, he rejected retribution as the sole purpose of incarceration and advocated for reformatory programs to assist offenders to change.
Taylor and the association members expected to have many more successes than failures, as long as two prerequisites for reformation were in place: an institution that could be trusted to instill discipline, cultivate good work habits, and encourage repentance; and a method of individualized assistance available from the day of release. In report after report throughout his long career, Taylor declared, “It is our promise to each man who needs it, to stand by him with material assistance until he can find honest employment, provided his conduct is what it should be.”19
The approach, and the CPA Board in general, presents a remarkable example of the progressive Protestantism of the time and the subtle but powerful impact of the Enlightenment. At the core of eighteenth-century Enlightenment was conviction that a rational approach to life could be both effective and beneficial in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and justice without constant recourse to the revealed truths of religion. At the heart of progressive Protestantism in the nineteenth century was the conviction that there existed a God-given potential for steady improvement within human nature without constant dependence on conversion. The promise of the new sciences (especially the powerful ideas of evolutionary biology and psychology), combined with progressive theology being preached throughout New England, was the foundation on which they built their assistance.
Those assumptions would be tested severely and challenged increasingly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Despite the latent and sometimes vocal skepticism of much of the surrounding culture, they would dominate not only the CPA’s approach but also that of the state’s criminal justice system well into the next century.
WEATHERING THE EARLY STORMS: LOCAL AND NATIONAL
The first year for which we have a relatively full account of the work done, 1878, Taylor gave his report to the board: 123 prisoners had been discharged from Wethersfield State Prison between January 1 and December 31. Only those released during the last nine months of the year could be counted because, according to Taylor’s report, the new policy was not effective until April. From that date, 85 men had been released and, of that number, 81 received assistance. For the next thirty-one years, Taylor would continue to give a careful and detailed account of the flow of inmates to the free world and the various ways he had rendered help to them. Although the percentage of offenders given assistance slowly dipped as the prison population gradually increased, it was maintained at well over 90 percent of those discharged until the end of his life.
It is extremely easy and common for later generations to underestimate the degree of difficulty encountered by those initiating, programmatically, any new social policy. No doubt, John Taylor had much going for him. There was that strong idealistic current of public opinion that had helped to bring the agency into being. Its effects ranged from outright support to grudging tolerance of the work he was doing. At the same time, beneath this thin, modern layer of progressive thought lay a much-thicker layer of traditional views about criminal justice. While there were, for the moment, few public detractors or critics of his efforts, they were never entirely absent or silent. Criticism at the state level was paralleled by mounting questions being faced on the national level.
In addition, the American economy faltered twice before the end of the century. The first was a downturn for six years after a panic in 1873, when the largest bank in the country failed. The second was a series of recessions from 1879 to 1896, initiated by the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange, affecting Europe and the United States. Jobs were hard to find on every level, and Taylor’s work was difficult in the extreme. Yet Taylor regularly shared letters from discharged inmates. (We can assume that he reported those depicting the most success.) With that caveat, three samples from 1880 to 1900 illustrate the responses that strengthened his realistic willingness to help the men who accepted his friendship:
I am earning two dollars per day and have steady work. I made fifty full days in the last two months. I have faithfully kept the promise I made to you not to drink anything that can intoxicate, and I intend to keep it during life. I was married in September … and have a good wife…. Thanking you for the kind interest you have in my welfare.
In compliance with your request, I write to say that I arrived here on Monday evening and started to work the following morning. I have been very kindly received and have not met with anything unpleasant on account of my past history…. I am not able to make full wages yet … but I earn sufficient for my present wants.
It is with great pleasure I write to you for my husband,