The original historic precedent was the work of two reformers, the English captain Alexander Maconochie, an innovative administrator of penal colonies in Tasmania and Australia in the 1830s; and an Irish prison reformer named Sir Walter Crofton, who earned his reputation as a correctional expert a few years later. Both men devised methods of incarceration based not simply on time served but on graduated periods of labor and education. Prisoners earned or lost “marks,” which enabled them to move up to a more privileged grade or led to a demotion if they misbehaved. Maconochie, in particular, created a “ticket of leave” system as the culmination of a process of gradual improvement.
A parole-release process became linked to the indeterminate sentence at the meeting of the National Prison Association in the late 1880s. In 1887 Zebulon Brockway, one of the seminal minds of the prison reform movement, was nearing the height of his influence as the warden of the internationally renowned Elmira Reformatory. Brockway endorsed the fully indeterminate system for “accidental criminals,” with an unrestricted authority to release them early on parole, an idea that had come to America from England, where it was called a “ticket of leave.”
In 1866 Charles II had passed a statute permitting unwanted (for political or personal reasons) offenders to be transported, on the whim of the king or one of the king’s retinue, to one of England’s colonies. The idea was reaffirmed in a general way by George II in 1718 and again, more frequently, by George III after the American Revolution, specifically for the transportation of English convicts to Australia. Alexander Maconochie, one of the most able superintendents of England’s Australian prison facilities, had extended the concept of parole, or ticket of leave, to allow trusted prisoners to take over land grants to develop the wilderness around the Tasmanian penal colony. The success of this decision was historically significant in opening up Australia for the general forced emigration of a diverse population from various parts of the British Empire.43
John Taylor’s first reference to the need for an expanded parole-release mechanism came in his 1898 report to the CPA. He listed four men as paroled by the state board of pardons and commented, “This system of parole, or probationary trial, is the only logical way of discharging any prisoner who is ever to be released.” Taylor strongly urged that it become the rule instead of the exceptional method of release.44
Just prior to the turn of the century, the terms parole and probation were interchangeable. By 1900 the two concepts had been clarified, with parole following incarceration and probation applying to supervision in the community in lieu of imprisonment. In 1903 the state passed the first Adult Probation Law, Public Act 126. The law provided for the appointment of thirty-one probation officers, all volunteers and two of them to be women. Taylor admitted that none would have experience, since this was a brand new system. He cautioned his board of directors that progress in the implementation of the law would be slow but expressed his certainty that the work would be as efficiently performed in Connecticut, as it was currently being done in neighboring states.
Section 8 of the Probation Act assigned the general supervision of all probation officers to the CPA. It was a huge expansion of Taylor’s work. The law required the judges of all district, police, city, borough, and town courts to appoint one or more probation officers. It permitted the judges of every superior court and every criminal court of common pleas to do so as well. Taylor faced the daunting task of setting up a new system, with report forms for the people under supervision, record books for the office, descriptions for each probationer, and methods to keep track of completed forms. The parole staff would total forty by the middle of 1904. Each one was expected to file a quarterly report. Taylor was to file a report to the governor at the conclusion of each year, covering the operating process he had devised, the results of supervision for each probation officer and the probationers, and recommendations for improvements.
The willingness of John Taylor and the CPA Board of Directors to take on this enormous new workload is both understandable and incredulous. The public relations benefits to the agency were immense. The passage of the indeterminate-sentence law two years before had lifted the CPA above anonymity. It was now a force to be reckoned with legislatively and politically. After a quarter of a century of intensive but relatively low-key work with discharged offenders on the local scene and two decades of involvement with the National Prison Association, the agency had become a highly visible and respected entity in Connecticut and beyond. It was the accepted right arm of the Wethersfield State Prison and a distinct voice of advocacy within the national debates about penology. This new law in 1903 established the CPA as a de facto part of Connecticut’s criminal justice evolution. They had worked hard to achieve this reform and it without doubt one of the most enduring legacies of the agency’s history.
At the same time, the ready acceptance of this expansion of their organization into probation supervision is characteristic of situations where new ground is being broken. There was an understandable innocence on the part of the CPA about the amount of organizational detail and complexity involved in parole supervision. No one in the state had any past experience by which to measure the extent of the work involved. Another significant difficulty was the state’s willingness to use and to financially exploit the willingness of a nongovernmental agency to pioneer the provision of new services.
Taylor’s responsibilities for the parole system was on top of all the ordinary prison visitations he had to make for offenders being released without parole at the completion of their sentences. In his reports for 1902 and 1903, he states that a total of 335 prisoners had been discharged, of which he had assisted 309, plus 19 from years prior to 1902, 31 discharged from jails, and 3 from other state prisons, 362 in all. That meant providing clothing and tools and finding places for them to live until employed.
There were other, personal, complications within the organization. Francis Wayland was aging. He had been suffering from diabetes, bronchitis, and poor circulation of blood in his legs for the previous five years. He had dropped out of the National Prison Association in the late 1890s and cut back his involvement in the CPA, though remaining as president of the board of directors. He died of natural causes on January 10, 1904. Taylor was also getting older. He had suffered a stroke in 1901, later referred to as a “paralytic shock.” He used a cane much of the time for the rest of his life.
Both Wayland and Taylor had devoted most of their waking moments to furthering the cause of prison reform on practical, legislative, and theoretical levels. One can only wonder in retrospect at the apparent ease with which they accepted this new challenge of creating and supervising a new system of probation for Connecticut’s prisoners. Their commitment to the welfare of their state and to the restoration of offenders was typical of nineteenth-century reformers. A sense of moral obligation, based on their religious concern to care for the outcast, combined with a noblesse oblige mentality derived from the Victorian era, seems to have been bred in the bones of the CPA leaders. Their unselfish work to improve the community was replicated in later years by scores of similar agencies in criminal justice and many other social causes. It underscores a major theme of this narrative: the immense but largely hidden and often forgotten contribution of voluntary agencies to America’s social and humanitarian development.
Monetary wealth does not seem to have been part of their motivation. John Taylor was receiving a modest $2,100 in yearly salary in 1904, and there is no indication that he received any significant increases in the next five years before his death. Wayland himself bragged in 1883 that John Taylor was the “cheapest investment for the benefit of