The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice

By Gordon S. Bates

The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice looks at the role the Connecticut Prison Association played in the formation of the state's criminal justice system. Now organized under the name Community Partners in Action (CPA), the Connecticut Prison Association was formed to ameliorate the conditions of criminal defendants and people in prison, improve the discipline and administration of local jails and state prisons, and furnish assistance and encouragement to people returning to their communities after incarceration. The organization took a leading role in prison reform in the state and was instrumental in a number of criminal justice innovations. Gordon S. Bates, former Connecticut Prison Association volunteer and executive director (1980 – 1998), offers a detailed history of this and similar voluntary associations and their role in fostering a rehabilitative, rather than a retributive, approach to criminal justice. First convened in 1875 as the Friends of Partners of Prisoners Society, then evolving into the Connecticut Prison Association and CPA, the organization has consistently advocated for a humane, rehabilitative approach to prisoner treatment.

A Driftless Connecticut Series Book, funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9780819576774

Gordon S. Bates

Gordon S. Bates is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. He was a CPA volunteer; then part of the staff of the Connecticut Prison Association for over 28 years; and now lives in Cromwell, Connecticut.

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INTRODUCTION Two Faces of Justice

Good history begins with a good story.

— James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact

In 1875 Connecticut had one prison (built in 1829), ten county jails (some of which dated back more than a century), and a board of pardons under the governor’s direction. The state’s county courts had been abolished in 1855 in favor of stronger superior courts. Court business increased after the end of the Civil War, and courts of common pleas were established to deal with less serious legal issues. Not all Connecticut towns had a full complement of courts; juvenile cases were still handled in adult courtrooms. As of 1875 organized police departments had been around only in America’s major cities, including Hartford and New Haven, for less than fifteen years.

The state’s criminal justice system was fragmented, generally unprofessional and unregulated. In 1875 the newly formed Prisoners’ Friend Corporation was the only organization in the state, public or private, whose sole focus was to help form and reform the growing field of criminal justice. The founders changed the name to Connecticut Prison Association the following year. Over the next thirteen decades CPA was either a primary advocate or an active participant in every major criminal justice policy change.

My experience with the Connecticut Prison Association spans from 1964 to 1997. As a CPA prison volunteer I visited inmates in the state prison for five years and sponsored two offenders. I was then enlisted to direct the agency’s volunteer programs and did so for eleven years. In 1980 the CPA Board selected me to be the executive director, a post I held for seventeen years. Participating in the work of a private, secular agency exposed me on a regular basis to the realities of crime and punishment for probationers, inmates, and parolees and for all who work in the system. The benefits of public and private partnerships were evident soon after I joined the CPA staff. From the time I first entered the Somers Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in 1964, I became fascinated with the role a voluntary agency could play in a public arena. Much of the creative energy expended in the evolution of criminal justice in Connecticut and in the United States is due to the work done by agencies like CPA.

A voluntary association that has lasted for over one 140 years as of 2015, in a field as complex as criminal justice, deserves recognition and appreciation. Nonetheless, hagiography was never my intent. I was more interested in questions about what kinds of people were motivated to form CPA. What kept it moving forward? Who paid for its work? I was curious about how a private-sector agency had operated in conjunction with a public system notorious for excluding rather than including outsiders, especially those perceived as amateur meddlers or do-gooders. And I wanted to find out, what has been accomplished by the agency in each successive era? Where and why did CPA fail? How has the CPA’s original agenda changed over the years? And how has the CPA’s approach to criminal justice issues fit into, or conflicted with, the approach of criminal justice professionals and others at the state and national level?

Connecticut can boast of many firsts, but in the field of criminal justice Connecticut was never viewed as a pacesetter. The land of steady habits has been, usually, a minor footnote for national historians supplementing the systems created by Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Florida, California, and other large states. Partial descriptions of Connecticut’s approach to law enforcement, as well as brief histories of its courts and correctional components, are available on their respective websites. But if we look at CPA’s existing annual reports from 1880 on; newspaper articles from the same period; references to the CPA in books or articles by professional historians; references to Connecticut’s criminal justice system, including adult and juvenile courts and such services as probation, parole, and alternatives to incarceration; interviews with criminal justice professionals in Connecticut’s system; and extensive reading in the events, issues, and lives around which the story of the United States has been told and retold, we uncover a more comprehensive description of Connecticut’s criminal justice evolution since colonial times.

Although the Connecticut Prison Association is not a huge agency, and Connecticut is not a large state, both recapitulate in their histories the fundamental choices that must be made to construct, manage, or reform the components of a criminal justice system. It is the accumulation of those choices that determines what laws are passed, how they are interpreted, and whether they have been applied fairly and effectively to offenders, to victims of crime, and ultimately to the benefit or detriment of society. In a metaphoric sense the history of CPA reveals the perennial struggle to determine what face of justice has been dominant in Connecticut in each successive era since 1875—a lens through which to trace the development of Connecticut’s correctional facilities, its adult and juvenile courts, and such services as probation, parole, and alternatives to incarceration.

In fact justice is the key word in this book’s title. The most basic meaning of justice today involves fairness: the careful process of giving to each person, group, or societal segment what belongs to each or what each deserves. Fairness, however, like justice, has no single definition. The actual process of deciding what is fair or deserved is often quite complicated.

One of my mentors, Connecticut judge and former state legislator Robert Satter, writes that while the pursuit of justice is humbling and immensely frustrating, a judge has no choice but to pursue it with diligence and integrity. A judge, states Satter, is like an artist. The former cannot create justice any more than the latter can paint beauty. Each can only hope to approximate the objective of their labors.¹

The legal pursuit of justice has a significant amount of subjectivity, no matter how many facts have been assembled through case law and witness examination. In every case, judges must eventually render judgment on the basis of applicable laws. If they are worthy of their office, the final goal is some approximation of justice. Judge Satter shares his personal approach: Even if I cannot define it, I discern it in each case to be my sense of what is fair, what is fitting and appropriate in the law and under all the circumstances. But how do I know if I have achieved it? … The ambiguity and elusiveness of justice do not, however, make striving for it less important.²

The term Reformatory Justice in the book title, often linked today to correctional institutions for youth, was chosen on the basis of its presence in the original objectives of the CPA. The Articles of Association, written in 1875, contained five objectives, number three of which was to promote reformatory systems of prison management. The term is never defined in subsequent annual reports of the CPA, indicating, perhaps, that its meaning was obvious at that time. The work of the agency over time, however, indicates that the term included the legislative response to crime, the sentencing practices of the courts, the ways that jails and prisons operated, and the two mechanisms of release after imprisonment, probation and parole. The CPA never limited itself to simply assisting offenders to return to society in a healthy way. Its work in every generation was systemic, with the sole exception of law enforcement, which did not come into its purview until the 1980s. Understanding the broad scope of activity embraced by reformatory justice is key to understanding the impact of the CPA’s labors on Connecticut’s eventual criminal justice system.

The metaphor faces of justice used throughout this book is meant to remind us that the cumulative decisions that lead to official justice is approximated or blocked by the actual people who make those decisions. In the courtroom the face of justice may be that of the judge, police officer, prosecutor, defense attorney, one of the witnesses, or one of the jury members. Beyond the courtroom it may appear in the same or different guise in the face of a warden or a cell-block officer, probation or parole officer. The positivist goal of justice may be impersonal, as in the iconic figure of a blindfolded, robed woman holding a scale. Realistic justice, however, appears to us through a process in which facts, experience, wisdom, intuition, and negotiation strive together to achieve, as Judge Satter puts it, what is fair, what is right, what will help.³

When we consider the impact the justice process has on groups of people, justice may assume a face of a much larger scale. Everyday street wisdom differentiates various kinds of justice: the experiential sophistication of the judicial resources purchased by the rich versus those available to the poor; the justice options of the majority race and language versus those shown to minorities; the justice bestowed on those with political, economic, and religious power in society versus justice for those without such advantages. There are many actual and metaphoric faces of justice.

In this book rehabilitation and retribution are paired as the dominant justice options for two reasons. First, because they were the terms most often used in discussions of criminal justice during the last portion of the nineteenth century and the first eighty years of the twentieth. Second, because the desire to retaliate or to redeem the offender is probably the oldest and most universal response to crime in the development of civilization.

The lex talionis rule (contained in the ancient Code of Hammurabi as well as the Jewish Torah) represents the classic expression of retaliation. It was constructed to minimize an overly punitive reaction to crime. The code specifies if a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye; If one break a man’s bone, they shall break his bone; and If a man strike a man’s daughter and … if that woman die, they shall put his daughter to death. On the ancient slab of Diorite containing the Akkadian script, it is affirmed that the code was established so that the strong might not oppress the weak, that the widow and orphan might receive their due.⁴ It was the first great attempt at codifying a sense of fairness in the search for justice.

The Hebrew version of lex talionis was a broadening of the Hammurabi rule, in that it applied to everyone, whereas the more ancient version carried harsher penalties for the lower classes.⁵ In later cultures the literal force of the law was softened by interpretations that determined monetary values for minor injuries and substituted fines or other kinds of payment to replace what has been lost or damaged by the offense.

Rehabilitation and retribution are interrelated, linked together in a perpetual struggle—the search for justice. Sometimes they are severely opposed to each other; at other times one complements the other. Each involves complex concepts of human nature, justice, morality, and religious beliefs. But the passionate desire to have revenge after being defeated, or after a crime has been committed, is lodged deep in the human psyche, often with religious roots. Retribution seeks to send a message that society will not tolerate criminal behavior. Its focus is solely on punishment for the crime committed: the penalty required by law or that demanded by moral commandments. By imposing such punishment, society seeks to satisfy the victim, pay back the perpetrator, and discourage crime. The etymology of retribution suggests that it originally conveyed a neutral sense of either reward for good deeds or compensation for bad behavior. For the past three centuries, retribution has tended to carry the more negative connotation of morally or legally justified punishment for committing a crime.

The idea of retribution was co-opted in the sixteenth century to provide a foundation for a more rational reaction to crime. Retribution became a proportional sanction based on the seriousness of the hurtful or illegal act. It was intended to reinforce the authority of law, impress on the lawbreaker that crime will not be tolerated, and appropriately acknowledge the damage done to the victim.

Scholars distinguish between retribution as revenge for crime and retribution as a proportionate response to crime. One aspect is indiscriminate reaction to a perceived or actual hurt. In its most undisciplined and emotional form, the response is purely revenge. Those who have been insulted and injured act to make the offender suffer at least as much, and often much more, than the victim. When retribution is applied within the law, it seeks to retaliate appropriately, acknowledging the victim’s anger and identifying a fair and proportionate penalty for the crime committed. Just deserts, a term that has been around since the thirteenth century and used frequently since 1980, has a long history with respect to finding an appropriate penalty.

The ranks of retributionists over the centuries have included those who believe loss of liberty is sufficient punishment. Others have advocated shaming techniques, corporal punishment, or even death, depending on the crime. Whatever the type of discipline, retribution has almost always been administered to satisfy the sense of justice felt by the victim or by those in power. The assumption is found in almost every civilization that wrongdoings need to be paid for in some way, whether they are considered actions contrary to law (mala prohibita) or contrary to an innate or universal sense of morality (mala in se).

But the desire to heal the offender, to bring him or her back to social normalcy, also reflects human nature. Rehabilitative justice is based on the belief that restoration of the offender is more moral and more beneficial to society. It focuses on changing the criminal behavior and attitudes and thereby minimizing as much as possible the potential for new crime. Rehabilitation advocates argue that retributive justice is counterproductive, yielding only more violence in response. To stop crime at the source is believed to be more effective than reacting to past crime.

The term rehabilitation carries the connotation of doing all that can be done to return an offender to either an original or better condition, helping the offender to acquire new attitudes and behaviors. Its origin, like retribution, can be traced to the earliest indications of a religious consciousness, which extended compassion toward the injured or the rebellious members of the tribe and a desire to retain the offender as a productive member of society. The creation of families, early in human evolution, engendered a willingness to teach good behavior as well as punish bad behavior. Retribution received its strongest rejection by Jesus of Nazareth, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, a stance that, interestingly, has not been characteristic of most of the churches that call themselves Christian. Nevertheless, rehabilitation within the criminal justice framework in the United States has been generated primarily by those who draw their inspiration from the Judeo-Christian teachings.

As an organized movement, prison reform and the interest in rehabilitation is a relatively late development. It arose in eighteenth-century Italy, France, and England and has been struggling to find and keep supporters ever since. Whereas retribution focuses on the seriousness of the crime, rehabilitation focuses on the reform and restoration of the offender. Although prison rehabilitation programs dominated criminal justice in Connecticut, that approach lost favor in the 1970s, yielding to a severe retributive set of laws and practices.

A new effort to promote rehabilitation, called restorative justice, seeks the greatest amount of reconciliation after a crime has been committed, not just between the offender and society but also between the perpetrator of the crime and the victim or the victim’s family. In Connecticut’s history rehabilitation is preferred to restoration. It may be a force in the future but at present it still operates on the margins of the criminal justice system.

In debates about the purpose of criminal justice, two other goals of punishment are usually mentioned alongside retribution and rehabilitation. One is the incapacitation of the offender, and the other is deterrence of future offenses. Incapacitation is the removal of an offender from society by confinement in a jail or prison. It implies no application of either revenge or redemption. Consequently, while it could conceivably move in either direction, in actuality it usually morphs into warehousing offenders to keep them out of sight, out of mind or to lock them up and throw the key away.

Deterrence, on the other hand, is usually separated into two categories: specific and general. Specific deterrence is focused on the offender, with the goal of punishing the offender sufficiently to remove any desire to commit new crimes. General deterrence focuses on those who might commit copycat crimes. Its goal is to send a strong message to potential offenders that crime does not pay, except in the form of punishment, thus dissuading them from engaging in similar behavior. Studies of the deterrent effect of punishments of all kinds have been unpersuasive to most professionals in the field. Among them, for example, is Joycelyn Pollock, a scholar of ethics in criminal justice, who states that forms of deterrence are problematic. The main function of deterrence is to keep the predatory inclinations of society in check. Under deterrence theory, the offender is only a tool to teach a lesson to the rest of us.⁶

Incapacitation and deterrence are construed in this narrative as subcategories under retribution. They function basically as special forms of payback for crime. Neither incapacitation nor deterrence requires rehabilitative efforts beyond imprisonment, and to the degree that they have done so historically the added values are almost always intended to add further punishment rather than assist the offender to reform. One of the tragic ironies of criminal justice history is the frequency in which intentional goals and unintended results overlap.

Retribution (including incapacitation and deterrence) and rehabilitation capture in a unique way the basic dilemma encountered in a community’s response to crime. Is it more effective and morally justified to punish offenders or to work with them? Can both be accomplished simultaneously? This book looks at the historical incompatibilities that have frustrated attempts to do both. Connecticut judicial history, as viewed through the distinctive and largely hidden work of the Connecticut Prison Association, illustrates why retributive justice has tended to dominate even when it is supposedly subordinate to rehabilitation.

CPA’s goal of pursuing reformatory systems of prison management, the second of its five original objectives, also points to its founders’ desires to find a balance between justifiable punishments and the need to enable offenders to reenter society productively.⁷ For more than fourteen decades, the agency has searched for reformatory justice, in which punishment is designed to be rehabilitative, but this rehabilitation never loses sight of the debt the offender is required by law to pay. The CPA promoted in almost every generation the idea that radical retribution in all its forms is counterproductive and immoral; just as it believed that rehabilitation that sentimentalizes crime, or becomes a hidden form of revenge, is unacceptable.

CHAPTER ONE Connecticut’s Cultural Context, 1875

The Nature of American society in its various historical and sectional stages has emerged from a consideration of the geographical, industrial, and cultural factors that have determined penal trends.

— Blake McKelvey, American Prisons, 1936

In 1969 I had an interview with a twenty-six-year-old man named Paul. He spoke fairly good English, although Spanish was his native tongue. He was articulate but not the con-artist type I would meet many times in the future. He was in for manslaughter. I didn’t ask what the occasion of his crime was. That wasn’t my style, but he revealed it anyway. He had been drinking one evening, he explained without much elaboration, with his girlfriend. They got into an argument about the music they were listening to, and it woke up his girlfriend’s daughter, a six-year-old. The youngster came out of her bedroom crying, and he told her to stop and go back to bed. He and his girlfriend resumed the argument, which made the daughter cry even more loudly. One thing led to another, and in his angry need to control the situation, he slapped his girlfriend; then, turning on the youngster, he picked her up and flung her across the room. Her body hit a bookcase, splitting her skull. She died before he or her mother could reach her.

One late afternoon two weeks before I met with Paul, I had returned home to find a shouting match in full swing in our living room. My wife, Wanda, and our nine-year-old Cindi were yelling full blast at each other and not for the first time. My solution was to take over. I told Wanda to shut up, and I picked up Cindi and took her upstairs. Yelling at her for making her mother cry, I used all my strength to throw her on her bed. She barely missed the headboard.

I have no idea what was said during the remainder of Paul’s and my time together. He was nearing his parole date, so I probably told him I’d be in touch on one of my next visits to arrange transportation. (That was one of the concrete tasks the CPA did for released inmates.) He wanted to know if he could be paroled to Puerto Rico, and I would have said I’d look into it. But I knew somewhere in my gut that I would never see an inmate down in a hole again while I stood on the solid ground. And I realized, maybe for the first time, that I could use a rope.

Until approximately 1950, American historians, with rare exceptions, did not examine criminal activity unless it affected national politics or was notorious enough to become a news item. Connecticut is fortunate. Two twentieth-century state historians took the time to describe the penal institutions and the court systems of the previous century. George L. Clark, writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, examined a variety of cultural, economic, and social facets in A History of Connecticut: Its People and Institutions. His chapter on the state’s prisons mentions the Connecticut Prison Association (then almost forty years old). Clark’s book is important for a second reason: it describes Connecticut’s penal institutions in the context of the inventions, discoveries and industries of the nineteenth century and discusses a variety of facets of the state’s culture, including other philanthropic groups, alcohol abuse, the Temperance Movement, the insurance industry, the fine arts, and the rise of the modern city.¹

Norris Galpin Osborn, a decade later, edited a five-volume History of Connecticut in Monographic Form. The last volume contains The History of Connecticut Institutions, by Edward Warren Capen, which includes several sections on the insane criminal, a category of information neglected by George Clark. Both Clark and Capen were reportorial in their comments. Neither attempted a critical examination of the jails, prisons, or courts.

My education in the various disciplines of criminal justice began when I read David Rothman’s investigation of the origins of American asylums for the deaf and prisons for convicted criminals. Rothman, I discovered, was a professor of social medicine in the 1960s at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In his first book, The Discovery of the Asylum, he speculates (with more than a hint of sarcasm) that national historians, with so much more positive topics to write about, had assumed that social reforms (like the asylum he discusses) were simply political programs and not worth the bother of serious historical attention.²

In Rothman’s second book, Conscience and Convenience, he was more direct, stating, To a remarkable degree, American historians have ignored these programs for the criminal, the delinquent and the insane. There is not a single history of probation or parole or indeterminate sentences, not more than two or three accounts of prisons, mental hospitals or training schools in the twentieth century, and only a handful of studies of juvenile court or outpatient clinics.³

Rothman’s general point, published in 1980, can now be viewed as part of the change in historical writing that began earlier. A number of excellent studies of American prisons had been written in the earlier parts of the century. They were, to be sure, specialist voices crying in the wilderness. Most historians who mentioned the nation’s response to crime did so by concentrating on the exceptional crime rather than taking the time to investigate ordinary crime. Usually, organized crime or celebrity crime was the focus. Less attention was paid to wider cultural forces that have influenced, on one hand, the formation of law enforcement, courts, and prisons; and, on the other hand, the creation of private-sector groups designed to help prisoners and advocate for prison reform. Yet those same forces were, in fact, helping to determine which kind of justice system would emerge out of America’s post–Civil War response to crime.

The question of motivation was one of the initial questions that initially led me to research the history of the Connecticut Prison Association. I was curious about what prompted a stellar set of judicial, business, and religious leaders in the early 1870s to form a new organization to help a group of people, labeled as criminals and convicts, who most of society detested. Just as important, I wondered what prompted them to seek to reform the policies and practices of criminal justice that most of society preferred to ignore. The CPA’s annual reports gave only hints of the internal motivations (e.g., religious beliefs or humanitarian inclinations were occasionally mentioned) that were prompting their actions over a period of thirteen decades.

Let’s briefly examine six of those cultural factors or forces at work in 1875 and highlight some of the major ingredients that, in combination, constituted the intellectual and moral setting that surrounded the CPA’s founders in 1875.

CRIME

Criminal, or at least antisocial, activity has long been a major problem at the center of humanity’s self-conscious existence in groups. In the sense of violating unwritten but conscious norms, the broad concept of crime may even have predated settled communities. Whether judged on religious or rational points of view, harmful behavior has never been acceptable in any organized society. Based on newspaper reports, a reaction to the scourge of criminal activity was among the more compelling factors motivating the CPA’s founders.

George Clark provides the first detailed description of Connecticut’s justice system from 1630 to 1900, a story of jails, prisons, witchcraft turmoil, schools for boy and girl delinquents, reformatories, and evolving laws to control crime. Since the Civil War, crime had been a growing problem in Connecticut. While there is no method by which the state crime rate can be determined in the late nineteenth century, crime was, at least occasionally, very much in the news. On January 29, 1873, for example, the Hartford Daily Courant carried a letter from Francis Gillette, former United States senator and father of the famous actor William Gillette. In it Gillette called attention to the cost of a new state jail, estimated at $150,000, and defended that expense by describing the current jail as antiquated and totally inadequate to accommodate the increasing number of criminals. Is it not an insufferable shame and reproach to our boasted civilization that a necessity should exist for enlarged jails and prisons?" he wrote.⁴

A new county jail was built in 1874 on Seyms Street in Hartford. Its maximum capacity was 204 offenders, including a wing of cells to confine 36 women. The population of the Connecticut State Prison in the town of Wethersfield, around 210, had not grown appreciably since it was built in 1827 to replace the former copper mine in Granby known as Newgate Prison. The numbers do not sound impressive to modern ears, but the fact that the two facilities had continued to house over an increasing number of inmates every year was sufficient to remind Hartford citizens that crime was a dark reality that threatened, in Victorian religion’s terms, the ruination of a moral society.

Crime takes many forms, and the definition of what constitutes a crime lies at the heart of the debate about whether convictions and punishments are appropriate, fair, and morally justified. In its simplest form, crime is what federal, state, city, or town law proclaims is illegal. Noted historian of criminal justice, Lawrence M. Friedman, reminds his readers, crime … is a slippery, variable, protean concept; and criminal justice is equally variable, mutable, time dependent, culture dependent.⁵

In colonial times, with written categories of crime in use that date back to English common law traditions, the prevailing response to crime had been the use of public shaming techniques and more drastic measures. Foremost among the shaming techniques was to have the offender, either standing or sitting, confined in a wooden device called the stocks, where the arms and legs protruded through holes and were locked in place. The punishment took place on the town green and could last for a few hours or a few days, with neighbors and others passing by constantly, free to deride or throw objects at the offender. A similar device, called a pillory, differed in that it confined the head and the wrists or arms, with the offender standing. Over a period of hours, or days, the punishment was not only a shaming technique but also a very painful one.

The application of the death penalty between 1650 and 1850 was considerably harsher and for more crimes in the New Haven Colony than in the Connecticut Colony centered on Hartford. A contemporary Connecticut scholar, Dr. Lawrence Goodheart, discovered that where New Haven’s code listed twenty-three capital crimes, Hartford courts listed eighteen, and they were regarded with less biblical literalism and greater leniency than had been the case in England.⁶

The New England colonies varied in the intensity of their desire to minimize crime in its towns and villages. Rather, in writing their own seventeenth-century codes of law to adapt to new conditions in the Americas, Puritans were quite flexible. The Puritan mind filtered out of the Bible what was usable and appropriate for their wishes and their days.⁷ Our interest is in how that filter worked in Connecticut.

Late responses to crime in Connecticut, as it has been in virtually every era, were a combination of two historical options, retribution and rehabilitation. Each imparted a particular appearance or facade to the actual justice administered by the courts and correctional facilities. Each appeared frequently in the nineteenth-century debates about the primary purpose of both individual punishment and the entire criminal justice system. Retributive sentences that removed the offender from society for a set period were developed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and eventually replaced the stocks and pillories. But by 1830 a revolutionary type of prison was constructed in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, which called into question the assumption that confinement was simply for punishment. The Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania preferred isolation as the basis of reform. The Auburn State Prison in New York chose to use a congregate system to engender good work habits among inmates. The Wethersfield State Prison in Connecticut sought a middle ground to foster attitudinal changes in offenders.

The retributive approach thus gave way to the belief, both religious and pragmatic, that rehabilitative measures, if used properly, would accomplish more changes and be profitable as well. In the new prisons various methods were employed to achieve the desired changes, such as Bible study, hard labor, the imposition of silence and isolation, preaching, education, counseling, and friendship. The range of means used to rehabilitate often depended on the degree of retribution that was covertly, or openly, insinuated into the rehabilitative regimens. Religion had much to do with that choice.

RELIGION

The importance of religion as a factor in the development of public attitudes toward offenders and criminal activities cannot be overstated. Religion is at the root of almost all personal and social mores, moral rules, civil law, and practical attempts to control human behavior. Even when not directly responsible, religion invariably molds the attitudes and actions applied within societal life.

The most pervasive religious force (and for a long time the dominant one) in early New England was the Puritan version of Christianity. Puritan Protestantism was only one religious tradition in New England and Connecticut, but its literalistic biblical view of law and sin, punishment and redemption, governed (sometimes unconsciously) the choice of means used to eradicate sinful behavior and guarantee salvation of the offender. Read in terms of their mission, the intention of the Puritans was to save the sinner even if the methods had to be harsh, even brutal, at times. Historian Jill Lepore reminds us that this often became a justification for a vicious application of mercy, seen most vividly in the Puritan denial of the humanity of Native Americans and a denigration of them in the American story. She writes, The ways of the Puritans are not our ways. Their faith is not our faith. And their wars are not our wars.⁸ Puritan Christianity impact on colonial and American culture was immense, but it was often rooted in values and attitudes that denied the status of human being to those deemed evil or worthless.

John Winthrop, a lawyer and organizer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached a classic sermon aboard the Arabella during the voyage across the Atlantic. His message formed the foundation of the Puritans’ subsequent behavior: They were to be knit together as a single body in which the private interests would be subordinated to public concern.⁹ Only by being obedient to God’s commands could they build the city on a hill that was Winthrop’s ultimate spiritual goal. Puritan scholar Perry Miller, emphasizing the positive, summarizes the Puritan ethos: The doctrines of original sin, the depravity of man, and of irresistible grace were not embraced for their logic, but out of a hunger of the human spirit and an anxiety of the soul.¹⁰

The goal for the Puritans was distant but, in the context of their faith, realizable: to construct a harmonious community ruled by the love of God and enforced by divine commandments when necessary. It eventually became evident that Winthrop’s admonition to live lives of Justice and Mercy did not apply to their relationships with Native Americans, who were described as no better than speaking apes by the seventeenth-century English scholar, Samuel Purchas. That tendency toward saving souls even if the bodies they inhabited had to be destroyed continued to plague criminal justice in all subsequent decades.¹¹

The Puritan settlers’ intention to create a theocratic community has had no equal in America. Though the intensity of commitment to that agenda diminished during the following centuries, many of its assumptions were sufficiently embedded in the social consciousness to remain active. Those assumptions have guided the actions of subsequent generations down to the present, even when those assumptions were no longer operative. Puritan Christianity has been considered by most historians of the era to be the most basic, the most important feature of the New England colonies and, to a significant degree, one of the most significant sources of American culture. Historian Mark Noll succinctly summarizes its impact: They were the one group of colonists who aspired to establish an entire society on the basis of their theology and the only ones to have partially succeeded.¹²

The iconic testament to the Puritan form of faith is found in the sermons delivered by John Winthrop. During his three-month long trip across the Atlantic, Winthrop served as his fellow voyagers spiritual as well as governmental leader. He preached regularly during the journey to instruct and inspire his companions. Winthrop’s best-known sermon is titled A Model of Christian Charity. Seeking an image to make his point clear, Winthrop draws on Saint Matthew’s version of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, urging the colonists not toward pride but toward humility. God was depending on their risky mission to succeed. It was a holy experiment…. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.¹³

The phrasing is significant in that it postulates a divine destiny for their voyage as well as a sense of divine judgment if they failed. The Puritans at their worst were certainly characterized by an elitism that bordered on self-righteous arrogance, arising from their sense of being chosen by God. It is commendable, if not always admirable, when it is remembered that they risked everything they had for the sole purpose of establishing a biblically based church and government that would stand as an example to the world. Their goal was not economic prosperity (though it was assumed that God would take care of the faithful), nor was it just personal freedom from oppression (though they would achieve that also if they were faithful). Puritans desired with religious desperation to be such a witness to God’s glory that it would convert the Anglican Church in England, to which they still gave their allegiance, and the oppressive English government, from which they had fled, and inspire all nations for all time to come.

The idea of living under a covenant with God and subject to the scrutiny of the world gave rise to a moral theocracy within the Massachusetts colony. Their desire was to build a religious framework so strong that it would hold society together regardless of the weakness of some. Despite the awful sinfulness of many, the founders of Massachusetts Bay erected civil and ecclesiastical institutions to ensure that their society would be godly even if the majority of people in it were not.¹⁴

The metaphoric ideal of a resplendent city on a hill, dedicated to God’s glory, was a powerful source of physical and spiritual strength to a people whose survival was never guaranteed or easy. The remarks of John Winthrop faded gradually, but the concept sank deep into American consciousness. The Puritan sense of mission to become a model for the world became one of America’s characteristic ideals, lifted even higher in the nineteenth century, by the idea that God had given the United States a manifest destiny to spread American culture first across the eastern mountains and finally across the continent, by force if necessary.

The Puritan life, carried out as a divinely guided mission, was perhaps the reason why none of the Puritan colonies in New England embraced the transportation of offenders from England, Ireland, or Scotland as a source of labor or skills. More than twenty thousand (and perhaps two or three times that number) criminals were transported to the Americas between 1700 and 1775, most of them to Maryland and Virginia. It need not be concluded that the rationale was based on any great compassion for offenders who were available for transport. Connecticut, like the other New England colonies, simply had no need of that particular resource. Their biblical morality would be more open to the African slave trade.

Puritan Protestantism’s influence on New England society extended down the Atlantic and westward to the degree that one historian thought it not excessive to label it the Righteous Empire.¹⁵ As colonies evolved into states, the general Protestant culture held the upper hand politically, socially, and morally, especially in rural areas, but also to a remarkable degree in the urban regions. The Puritan clergy and laity expounding and living out this vision became the first leaders of government and society. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the civic officials, judges, schoolteachers, and business owners, as well as the resident pastors and theologians, were drawn from the Puritan churches. Well into the eighteenth century, the state governments in Connecticut, and most of New England, did not officially recognize a new town until a theologically acceptable pastor had been installed. Once in place, power does not yield its sway easily. Two centuries passed before the disenfranchisement of the Congregational Church was voted into Connecticut’s constitution in 1818. Connecticut was one of the last of the original colonies to take that step away from a virtual theocracy to allow a more democratic system to emerge. It remains one of the great ironies of the first American immigrants that, having fled persecution and oppression in Europe, they tended to be just as exclusive and oppressive as the governments and churches they had condemned, until the early nineteenth century when they were forced by the legislature to share power and control.

American Puritanism differed in one key regard from dissenters left behind in England. They were far more adaptable over the next two centuries. The rigid systematic theology of John Calvin, which had inspired and guided them, was softened slowly under the exigencies of frontier living as the wildernesses of New England were tamed, the Native Americans subdued, and thousands of new immigrants brought other faiths to Connecticut and every other colony. The foundations of Puritanism evolved to absorb ideas from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Divine sovereignty, predestination, human sinfulness, and total dependence on God’s grace to survive and thrive were remodeled to integrate new ideas about humanity’s willpower and capacity to change. Instead of moral inability, theologians talked of the human power to do otherwise than had previously been though possible. The importance of that shift for criminal justice was immense.

Among the numerous theologians and pastors who transformed the original theocratic concepts of the first Puritans, several were particularly important in creating the Connecticut religious context in 1875: Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Taylor, and Horace Bushnell. All four raised moderating voices within Connecticut that set them apart from the orthodox leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their preaching and writing made the transition from a European theology to a distinctive American theology possible, particularly in Connecticut. What is not well understood (or even well known) is that the Protestant Puritan theology of the state’s religious leaders in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was a major factor in the shaping of Connecticut’s particular approach to criminal justice in their own eras and up to the twentieth century. It was certainly not the only religious influence, but it penetrated more deeply into the cultural context than any other.

Few remember that there were two colonies along the Connecticut River for a time. Hooker’s colony, which covered the eastern half of the region from Old Saybrook on the coast to Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield on the upper Connecticut River, had a rival settlement of Puritans in the western portion of the area, centered in New Haven at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Rev. John Davenport had established the New Haven Colony in 1638. Assisting him in the formation and administration of the colony was Theophilus Eaton, a boyhood friend and a wealthy businessman who saw great commercial opportunity in the venture overseas. Eaton also shared Davenport’s commitment to establish a community in New England that would place both the church and the society around it exclusively under biblical laws. Under Davenport’s extreme orthodoxy, New Haven became a theocracy, more thorough than Massachusetts. Davenport and Eaton together applied an unbending moral discipline that became intolerable to most of the citizenry, as a contemporary study of legal decisions in the New Haven Colony demonstrates.¹⁶ Eventually, Davenport left Connecticut for New Jersey, which he hoped would be a more hospitable climate. In addition, and perhaps most important in a practical sense, New Haven’s choice of political alliances led to a loss of support in England in the 1650s, virtually eliminating its colonial status.

By contrast, Hooker’s approach in Hartford was more moderate. He and his congregation had departed Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put some geographic distance between themselves and another rigid Puritan, Rev. John Cotton, the quintessential conservative Congregationalist in New England. Once in Hartford, Hooker often revealed a broader perspective and greater flexibility in his approach to both ecclesiastical and governmental issues. Most readers will be familiar with his conviction that the authority of the government depended on the free consent of the people. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, usually ascribed to Roger Ludlow and endorsed by the neighboring villages of Windsor and Wethersfield, was set in motion by a sermon of Hooker’s on May 31, 1638. The Fundamental Orders became the basis for Connecticut’s constitution, the first in America and the basis for the U.S. Constitution a century and a half later.

Unique among colonial leaders in New England, Hooker’s preaching, based on biblical patterns, sought to place the responsibility for choosing the colony’s leaders in the freemen among the population rather than relying only on the learned abilities of the clergy or on royal wisdom. It represented another major shift in Connecticut’s approach to the various issues that faced the new colony. Though not exceptional in its format, the subsequent eleven fundamental orders made no mention of the Crown’s authority; had no religious test for the privilege to vote; put the election of the governor, deputies, and magistrates in the hands of the colony’s freemen; and granted the general court full authority. Connecticut, as a result, became an exceptionally free, moderate, and middle-of-the road state, not only in its religious culture but also in its political organization. As Connecticut evolved and ultimately became one of the United States of America in 1776, it also became accustomed to respond to crime in ways that, although still basically retributive, were more moderate in tone and gradually more rational than religious, distinguishing it not only from New Haven but also from the rigid Puritan base established in Massachusetts Bay.

Hooker also believed and taught that even the most errant and stubborn human being was not beyond the reach of God’s love in this world. Along with his associate, Rev. Samuel Stone, for example, Hooker decided to allow admittance to the church membership as soon as an applicant had achieved some hope of their salvation rather than forcing them to wait until definitive experiential proof of faith was available, because God receives into covenant partnership the weak as well as the strong.¹⁷ That small measure of leniency, tame by modern standards of flexibility, was contrary to the long-standing Puritan tradition. Hooker believed spiritual change was incremental and often hidden from view. His assumption that no one was beyond God’s reach became a foundational part of Connecticut culture, with vast implications for its approach to justice.

The adaptation of a rigid religious discipline to the varied conditions of the Americas serves as an early example of the application of the rehabilitation ideal that came to be an essential part of U.S. culture. Adopted widely by the prison reform movement of the nineteenth century and eventually embraced by the founders of the CPA, this ideal is acknowledged whenever the United States is described as a second chance nation, a metaphor that runs throughout American history. Over the course of the next century, Hooker’s more compassionate approach prevailed, producing what came to be called the Congregational Way, characterized by an extensive and universal charity.¹⁸

A second essential link in the evolution of progressive religious influences on the New England culture was the work of the reverend Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Though his pastorates were in Massachusetts, his preaching had an immense impact on Connecticut pastors through his role in the First Great Awakening (1730–50).¹⁹ He is remembered today, unfortunately, for his few fire-and-brimstone sermons (e.g., Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God). Edwards was, in fact, orthodox in most of his theological positions and preached a strong biblical message about the reality of God’s requirements and the threat of losing the gift of salvation. But he was far more influential during his pastorates through his steady proclamations about living lives of unselfish charity and the duty of all Christians to be good Samaritans as they worked out their eternal salvation in daily life.

The center of Jonathan Edwards’s preaching and writing during the First Great Awakening in the 1730s was characterized by a sense of the heart, amplified by rationally faithful analysis of the scriptures and of the situation facing each individual Christian. What an individual believed was important to Edwards, but much more significant was how an individual experienced God and acted toward others. The concept of a covenantal relationship with other Christians and the community at large was critical for Edwards, linked to the biblical stories of the ancient covenants made by God with humanity. In addition to the quest for a heavenly reward, his audiences wherever he spoke were told that their personal decision to be part of the church was a key not only to their eternal destiny but even more so for the community they shared on earth. Heartfelt love of one’s neighbor rather than theological self-righteousness was, for Edwards, the truly spiritual effect of conversion and the confirmation of its reality. He believed that the most virtuous act one could perform was to help a stranger without expecting anything in return. Even more than the doing of evil deeds, it was the failure to let God’s grace work itself out creatively in ways that build up community that put the Christian in the path of God’s wrath.²⁰

Jonathan Edwards’s powerful intellect and writings strengthened the trend in Protestantism toward conversion as a willful response to God’s love, not just a passive acceptance of divine love. Other eminent nineteenth-century preachers carried on the trend. Many, if not most of them, had been trained at Yale Divinity School, where faculty members like Nathaniel Taylor built the Edwardian strain of theology into a reformed Calvinist curriculum.

Nathaniel Taylor became one of New England’s leading Protestant thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century, teaching and writing a system of Christian thought known as New Haven Theology (also known as New England Theology). Appointed to the Yale faculty in 1822, he taught there for the rest of his life. During his tenure New England was caught up in the Second Great Awakening, a widespread religious revival in America, generally east of the Mississippi and contained within the years between 1790 and 1830. The Second Great Awakening occurred primarily in Protestant churches. The denominations engaged in the revivals were principally Baptist and evangelical Methodist congregations and pastors, but the movement was embraced by a number of Congregational churches as well, including some prominent congregations in New England. Although the transformative power of the movement dissipated after 1830, the passion for conversion in the United States lingered until the Civil War.

Of interest to our narrative is the fact that the center of Nathaniel Taylor’s approach was a theological perspective contrary to the Second Great Awakening, utilizing the insights of the Enlightenment and open to the new sciences being developed. The New Haven Theology, which Taylor taught at Yale Divinity School for several decades, featured an increased optimism about the human capacity to choose the direction of personal and societal life, including religious beliefs. Such a modification of Calvin’s idea of the total depravity of humans stirred theological controversy, but it was in harmony with the diversified culture developing in the new nation. Taylor also promoted another novel concept for the time, the obligation of the church to be involved in society’s problems through participation in voluntary associations as well as through personal charitable acts. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his tour of the United States in 1833–34, proclaimed voluntary societies to be one of the principle features of American democracy, seen in connection with hospitals, schools, and even prisons. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.²¹

Rev. Horace Bushnell is the final religious voice that we will cite in the era leading up to 1875. In Taylor and Bushnell (1802–76), the tolerant spirit of Thomas Hooker was continued and expanded through the new knowledge being derived from modern sciences like biology and astronomy. The result was a very different form of Christianity. The basic teachings of John Calvin had stressed the total sinfulness of humanity and its total dependence on God’s creativity and saving grace for redemption as well as every phase of daily life. Bushnell’s body of work supplemented the stance of Nathaniel Taylor as a staunch defender of free will over predestination in his explication of human nature. Both also chose benevolence over wrath as the chief metaphors to describe the character of God portrayed in the Bible. Taylor’s theology classes at Yale New Haven produced over three generations of seminary students who filled pulpits in Connecticut and other New England colonies in the nineteenth century. They conveyed a more liberal and progressive approach to both church and social issues.

Central to the message of the New Haven Theology was the desire to go beyond the restoration of the individual sinner. In a radical shift this new theology proclaimed that the true ministry of the church was the transformation of society by charitable deeds. The shift from personal salvation to the renewal of the world placed a part of the responsibility for salvation from sin firmly on the individual. This point of view, rooted in the work of Jonathan Edwards and the philosophical treatises of John Locke, adopted the idea that humanity exercised freedom of the will from the beginning of creation. The proponents of the new biblical perspective gradually abandoned the concept of original sin. Sin itself was increasingly considered to be a human choice, rather than the work of the devil or any other bad spirits. The work of the church was to respond to the needs of one’s neighbor, not excluding those in prison. Given that Jonathan Edwards preached for years in North Hampton, Massachusetts; Nathaniel Taylor taught at Yale; and Horace Bushnell was a stalwart presence at a Hartford Congregational Church, Connecticut was a prime recipient of the changing theology and changing culture. The state’s criminal justice components in the nineteenth century changed along with the rest of society, and the basic change was a fundamental tendency toward rehabilitation of offenders in the midst of the perennial pressure to focus on pure punishment. Together with Taylor, Horace Bushnell helped to shape a new Calvinism by the end of the century. Centered around practical, pragmatic Christianity, it eventually displaced the old, more rigid and more salvation-centered Calvinist approach.

The importance of these competing theological worldviews should not be underestimated. The prevailing understanding of human nature is crucial in determining the approach any given society takes to criminal justice. It makes all the difference whether offenders are considered a salvageable part of humanity, worth the effort to rehabilitate and return to free society as productive citizens, or are perceived as lost souls locked into sin or, worse, as subhuman, born of bad seed whose particular race, nationality, behavior, or other characteristics place them in a category of disposables.

The positive understanding of human nature provided by Edwards, Taylor, Bushnell, and other Protestant teachers and preachers was not a minor eddy in the Protestant current flowing through nineteenth-century America. It was one of the most powerful aspects of the culture. The change in attitude toward evil and sin permitted a much more empathetic and hopeful view. Prisoners were now persons worthy of visitation by people willing to assist them in their pursuit of personal salvation rather than preach to them about eternal salvation. Three features of Puritanism are pertinent to our portrait of the cultural soil in which significant aspects of the choice between a justice of retribution and a justice of rehabilitation could flourish.

A RETRIBUTIVE AND REHABILITATIVE MIX OF MORALITY

One of the earliest estimates of the Puritan impact on American values and social systems came from an outsider, Alexis de Tocqueville. His impression of the various prisons he had visited, including Connecticut’s Wethersfield State Prison, is centered on the ambiguous commitment to retribution and rehabilitation that he witnessed. His conclusion underscored the deep connection between criminal justice and religion: When I reflect upon the consequences of this primary circumstance, methinks I see the destiny of America embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man.²² Part of that mission and destiny was a response to crime and wrongdoing that modeled the divine retribution to sin outlined in the Bible and the divine concern for the salvation and restoration of every soul. Puritanism and the subsequent American criminal justice system have struggled to balance the two faces of justice ever since.

A COMMITMENT TO THE RULE OF LAW

Based on scripture, the law superseded any one individual’s wisdom or power. No human tyrant could ever replace God’s laws. The law, however, depending on its perceived purpose, can also become tyrannical. The Puritan gift could be used. On the one hand, the application of the punitive aspect of the law, to enhance public safety by retaliation against the offender, became one of the most compelling factors in establishing a retributive system in America. Rehabilitative reform, on the other hand, invariably involved attempts to the make the punishment redemptive.

A CONCERN FOR PROPORTIONALITY IN PUNISHMENT

Puritans were judicious in their analysis of wrongdoing and lawbreaking, insisting on the basis of the scriptural lex talionis that the punishment fit the crime. Although some Puritans advocated that punishment be visible not only temporarily but forever after (as in branding with an appropriate letter or cropping the nose or ear), a more compassionate strain of Puritanism gradually became dominant. From Thomas Hooker to Nathaniel Taylor, an evolving Puritanism promoted, even as it was absorbed into the culture and was therefore less obvious, a more rational sense of proportionality in criminal sentencing. The evolving approach featured a growing confidence in the capacity of people to change and for offenders to change for the better.

PRISON REFORM

The roots of intentional prison reform can be found in the last half of the eighteenth century in England. John Howard led the way. A country gentleman, Howard was appointed the high sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. Upon inspecting the jail of his shire or county, he became appalled with the nasty conditions and set about rectifying them, an unprecedented action at the time. His own moral conscience was touched when he discovered that most of his jailed wards were either too poor to pay their taxes or had violated some minor royal edict. Two years later he toured hundreds of jails and prisons at his own expense, noting with great detail the deficiencies and inhumanities of each one.

In 1777 Howard sent a detailed treatise, State of the Prisons, to Parliament. His vivid descriptions of the toxic and dangerous conditions in the prisons and jails galvanized Parliament to unusually prompt action. The Penitentiary Act of 1779, among other improvements, mandated single-occupancy cells in all English prisons and the use of the title penitentiary houses to identify all such institutions from that point on. It was a propitious beginning, but the actual conditions within the jails and prisons were slow to change for the better, despite the law.²³

Between 1800 and the Civil War, stimulated by John Howard’s legacy and the work of other English and European reformers, energetic strides were taken in the United States to initiate new prison architectures and reformatory management methods. Pennsylvania’s Quakers led the way. Although they had been subjected to oppressive treatment, hatred, and rejection in many other colonies, under the protection of William Penn, Quakers began a reform movement in 1790, just after the conclusion of the Revolution. The Walnut Street Jail, established in Philadelphia in 1773, was renovated to be America’s first penitentiary. A three-story building, it was small (twenty-five by forty-five feet) and contained eight six-by-nine-foot cells. Although intended to incarcerate offenders who displayed depraved morals, dangerous characters, unruly dispositions, or disorderly conduct, as well less unruly