The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates

ordered the ten counties to follow Hartford’s lead—to “provide and maintain … a prison or house of correction” by December of the next year—or face a fine of twenty pounds.¹³

      The seventeenth-century terminology indicates that terms such as prison, jail, or house of correction were still interchangeable. All were titles that had been used in England since the sixteenth century, among other labels such as asylum, workhouse, and bridewell. Only bridewell failed to make the lexicon of justice in America. By the end of the seventeenth century, the term jail was the most commonly used to designate the county facilities.

      The detention of offenders until their date of trial was the initial purpose of jail in the Americas. That purpose was foremost in Connecticut through much of the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth centuries. Morality crimes such as being a rebellious child toward one’s parents or elders, masturbating, breaking Sabbath, cursing, using tobacco in public, and performing bestiality were subject to arrest and conviction. Although witchcraft was eventually rejected by society, as we have seen, it remained on the law books. The death penalty was also a viable option, though that sentence was less and less often imposed.

      The penalties exacted for many offenses short of homicide, especially in rural areas, tended to emphasize the disgrace and shame of conviction, using the whip, the pillory, or the stocks (“a measured brutality”) to expose individuals to ridicule and cultivate repentance. Restoration of stolen property was enforced. Bartlett adds that “only rarely was the penalty of imprisonment added” during colonial times.¹⁴

      The pace of urbanization of Connecticut was steady but slow in the seventeenth century, as settlers had to establish farms out of land meant for forests, not crops. Had stones and rocks been a commodity, every citizen in the state could have been wealthy. As it was, Connecticut’s lack of arable land led to two steady trends. The first was an exodus toward the “Western Reserve” in Ohio and elsewhere, where good land was available.

      A second trend was a movement of people of all sorts toward the cities of Hartford, New Haven, New London, and Fairfield and the smaller towns in between. With these demographic adjustments going on, crime categories and the laws slowly changed from those based on personal moral lapses to those based on the protection of private property. A new goal became more and more operative, namely a revitalization of the order and social control necessary for businesses to prosper.

      The jail was the repository for growing arrest rates as the United States moved toward the Revolution against England. The delinquents came primarily from the servant class, usually captives imported from Guiana in the West Indies to serve as slaves, and from an increasing number of vagrants from out of state. The result was an offender population that invariably exceeded the capacity for which the county jails had been built. A revolving-door syndrome had begun.

      Lawrence Friedman, in his review of American criminal justice, is caustic about the systemic neglect of those in jails. After reviewing the proliferation of reform laws and organizations from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Friedman concludes that, while prison became the focus of reform, jails became the forgotten tool of criminal justice. The result was a “squalid mass … of men and women picked up for drunkenness or vagrancy,” as well as a repository of “brawlers, thieves and countless others.”¹⁵

      Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the jails of Connecticut proliferated and underwent very little change as new counties were formed. With a more complex society, the criminal justice system continued to expand. Each county was required to build a jail if one was not already in operation. Connecticut’s office of sheriff was created in 1750, when courts were established in all five counties for the purpose of settling both civil and criminal matters. Initially appointed by the governor and living off a fee structure, sheriffs at some point became an elective office with a state salary. Sheriffs often had significant additional powers from time to time, including serving writs, boarding vessels, even raising a militia if called on by the justice of the peace. The office of sheriff eventually evolved into a “keeper of the peace” under the direction of the courts, whose main work was to arrest offenders and make sure they showed up in court if not confined.¹⁶

      As the nineteenth century began, the jail was the hidden foundation of the criminal justice system in Connecticut. Ten county jails existed across the state. Simsbury housed one state prison, Newgate, named after a notorious prison in London, England. An array of courts now heard cases, including city courts, probate courts, county courts, the superior court, and a supreme court of errors. Police forces were formed or considered in most cities, following England’s example, and county sheriffs steadily gained in political power.¹⁷

      Two major ideas concerning the county jails surfaced in Connecticut in the 1830s. One was the need for a state facility for the insane, who were, until that time, held in the county jails. After many attempts to pass the necessary legislation, an institution for the mentally ill was built in 1865 in Middletown. The need for county jail rehabilitation also garnered attention and approval. Hartford County built a new jail in 1837, incorporating many of the features of the state prison, particularly its industrial “contract system,” in which prisoners were leased to private contractors to manufacture a variety of articles. One new jail, however, could not cover all the gaps.

      The warden of the state prison, Amos Pilsbury, offered, with the consent of the Connecticut legislature, to pay any county $1,000 out of his own pocket to help build a similar jail.¹⁸ Pilsbury’s plan, however, which had been so successful in making the prison a profitable enterprise for the state, failed in the jail setting. Jail sentences were too short for job training to have any effect; too many inmates had no work experience, not to speak of manufacturing experience; and the majority had poor work habits. Such defects could be overcome over time in a prison context but proved too great a hurdle in the jails. Ironically, jail contracts also deflected more contracts away from the prison than had been expected, reducing its overall profitability. The revitalization of the jails envisioned by Pilsbury was never realized.

      Conditions in the county jails continued to limp along, with few improvements for the next century. Genevieve Bartlett’s 1935 report to the CPA annual meeting concerning the plight of the county jails ends with five “Suggested Changes in County Jail Procedures.” At the top of the list is a recommendation to distinguish the use of the jail as a detention center for those awaiting trial and use it only to confine those who had been convicted. Those waiting to go to court, she maintains, are the most neglected people in the system and should have a spectrum of services provided for them. After all, they had not yet been proven guilty of any crime. The concept was never adopted.

      Bartlett’s next documented change suggests the creation of “crime clinics” to gather facts related to the reduction of crime. That idea would resurface in the 1950s and have a brief period of activity. A third recommendation mentions a focus on rehabilitation from the time of arrest, with a “complete analysis of the physical and mental state of the delinquent and his relation to society.” That idea never materialized. The fourth proposition involves the “abolition of the workhouse.” The state should make separate provisions for the feeble-minded, the recidivist (or career criminal), and the vagrant, all of whom were mixed haphazardly with those awaiting trial. Vagrants and the mentally ill should not even be mixed together. This most fundamental of Bartlett’s written suggestions, it would not see fruition for a century. Finally, she urges the creation of a “State Farm for Misdemeanants.” In such a setting, there would be a much better chance to restore some of the offenders to society.¹⁹

      The idea of a farm connected to jails and prisons had very attractive features and eventually became a reality at future prisons in Niantic (for women), Enfield (for lower-risk felons) and a reformatory in Cheshire (for young adult males).

       MILESTONE 3: NEWGATE PRISON

      As mentioned earlier, Newgate Prison was opened in 1873 on the site of an abandoned copper mine. Several Connecticut entrepreneurs, as early as 1705, had discovered copper ore in a ledge of rock in Simsbury, Connecticut (part of the present town of Granby). Manufacturers had initiated a statewide search for commercial metals to manufacture more durable farming and factory tools at home rather than importing