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