Connecticut's History On Prisons

In The First Century

THE FIRST CENTURY: AT THE MERCY OF THE STATES

In the spring of 1777 a small party of armed horsemen escorted a rider along the quiet country roads leading northwestward from Middletown , Connecticut , to the village of Litchfield . There, they stopped at an undistinguished, two-story log building fronting on the village green -- the Litchfield jail. The letter of commitment handed to the sheriff along with his new prisoner informed him that he was receiving William Franklin, late governor of the colony of New Jersey and son of the well-known patriot, Benjamin Franklin. The prisoner was to be held in solitary confinement for an indefinite time and was to be allowed no writing materials and no conversation with anyone except the sheriff, unless exceptions were authorized by Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull.

Federal crimes and federal prisoners were not yet so well differentiated from state or local offenses and offenders as they are now, but clearly Franklin's crime of treason was federal, and his imprisonment by order of the Continental Congress made him one of the earliest of federal prisoners. For the first century, and more, the federal government had no prisons of its own, but was dependent upon state or local jail space it could rent as necessary. After federal courts were created in 1789 they counted on their marshals to scout for prison cells to be utilized at the most moderate fees possible. And far too often the space available was not tolerable at all, except for the lack of anything better.

William Franklin found the space chosen for him to be onerous indeed, but Congress had little choice. In a war that was then going poorly for the Continental armies, quiet Litchfield was usefully remote from the fighting. Although New York City was in British control, General William Howe was preparing to strike out from there toward the south and Philadelphia . That city would, in fact, be in his hands by late September. For the time being, the New England area, except for Rhode Island, seemed to be free from likely incursions of enemy troops, and so...

THE DEMAND FOR FEDERAL PRISONS

I n his annual report for 1875, Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont worried that federal prisoners, when confined in prisons of any state or territory, were to be subject to the same control, treatment, and discipline as the prisoners of the state. "Under this law," Pierrepont said, "great wrongs are done and cruelties are practiced, which call for immediate redress." He went on to give a stinging indictment of the widely prevalent contract labor practices.

In some of the States the system prevails of letting the prisoners to work for cruel task-masters, and while the United States pay for the keeping of their prisoners from 70 cents to $1 each per day, these same prisoners earn a large amount of money, which goes to the keeper of the prison, and of which no account is ever rendered to the United States, while the prisoners are often driven a long distance to work for those who hire them, are improperly fed and clothed, over-worked, sometimes severely beaten for slight offenses, and are made a source of large profit to those who avail themselves of this kind of forced labor. While working under this system of letting, large numbers of United States prisoners have escaped.... The Attorney General is empowered, when at the time of conviction there may be no suitable prison in the District, to designate some prison in a convenient State or Territory; but he has no power after the criminal is consigned to a State prison to change his place of confinement or relieve him from inhuman treatment. Such authority might easily be given by Congress. ¹

Pierrepont was right that Congress could grant the attorney general power to exercise more control over conditions of confinement in federal cases, but Congress would not take such a big step hastily. It was not until 1887, during the first administration of Grover Cleveland, that Congress finally acted to forbid any contracting out of federal prisoners.... ²

THE FIRST THREE PRISONS

T he penitentiary at Leavenworth , Kansas , was the first of the three; and yet, to be strictly correct, there was one earlier federal penitentiary. Now virtually forgotten, it was built beside the Anacostia River in Washington , D.C. Although the facility was known as the United States Penitentiary for the District of Columbia , Congress authorized it as a national penitentiary. The prison opened in 1831, complete with a twenty-foot wall, guard towers, and shops for making brooms and shoes. It had 150 cells for men and 64 for women.

Because the Department of Justice did not yet exist, the penitentiary was placed under the direction of the Department of the Interior, and its warden was appointed by the president. Had it not been for the institution's location and the advent of the Civil War, it might still be in operation. But, adjoining the prison was an army base that needed extensive enlarging when the war started, so the penitentiary was closed in 1862, and the prisoners were transferred to state prisons, mostly to Albany . ¹

The institution was never replaced, and the concept of federally owned and operated prisons disappeared until 1891, when Congress authorized three prisons. Leavenworth, a small town a few miles north of Kansas City on the Missouri River, was picked as the site of the first prison, for the simple reason that a prison already existed there, and it could be taken over, at least temporarily.

Fort Leavenworth had its roots in early measures taken to tame the West. In the 1820s, increasing westward migrations made it necessary to establish a military base for protection of parties traveling the Santa Fe Trail or the Missouri River . The army assigned Colonel Henry Leavenworth to find a location for a new fort and to start its construction. The place he chose in 1827 was later given his name and became what is yet a major army base. In 1875, after a half century of growth and use, the fort was chosen as the site... ²

THE EXPERIENCE WITH PENITENTIARIES

A s the new penitentiary at Leavenworth slowly took shape at the turn of the century, neither police agencies nor prisons were able reliably to identify individual suspects or prisoners. It would be here at this federal prison, under Warden McClaughry, that a significant start would be made in building a national criminal identification service.

McClaughry early became interested in the Bertillon system, a tedious and complex process of taking physical measurements, which was the only accepted identification system of the time. While he was still in his teens, Matthew McClaughry, the warden's son, had helped take Bertillon measurements at the Illinois State Penitentiary, where his father was then the warden. ¹ The Bertillon system was also used at Leavenworth . Later, both McClaughrys visited Alphonse Bertillon in Paris and became friends with him. Fingerprinting, a far more efficient process, was known by this time, but people did not trust the system and it did not become popular until the middle 1890s when Mark Twain, in his novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, built a story around the technique and caught the public fancy.

In 1904, McClaughry attended the World's Fair in St. Louis where he met Sergeant John K. Ferrier, an officer from Scotland Yard, who was there to demonstrate the fingerprint system being used in London . McClaughry invited Furrier to Leavenworth , and there they fingerprinted the entire prisoner population.

In the preceding year an uncanny event had dramatized the need for the improved system. A new black prisoner, Will West, had been received, and the admitting office staff seemed to remember that he had been admitted previously as William West. Though the prisoner stoutly denied ever having been there, the staffs impression seemed confirmed by the Bertillon records. West's face matched the photo taken with the previous admission, the names were almost the same, and the new Bertillon measurements were essentially identical to the previous ones. The astonishing outcome was that Will... ²

PLACES FOR WOMEN, PLACES FOR YOUTH

J. Ellen Foster, special agent for the Department of Justice, made an inspection tour of the West Virginia penitentiary at Moundsville one day in 1910 and was dismayed to find that male and female prisoners were making surreptitious contact. The women took their daily outdoor walks in a yard where the male prisoners could observe them from the shop windows, and they were able to pass unseemly notes to each other. Foster feelingly reported the problem to the attorney general.

The desire for companionship between the sexes is human and universal. God honors it in the family relation. Angels must weep to see it perverted. The hellish perversion of this heavenly gift is one of the problems which penologists have to deal with.... The knowledge that beyond a wall too thick to be broken through, too high to be climbed over, there are a lot of men of criminal character and rampant desire who accomplish their purpose if they could, this knowledge has a bad effect on the minds of women who are prone to do evil.... Prisoners are physically developed men and women; they are mentally children. God only knows what they are morally in his sight.... These considerations and many more have caused penologists to insist on separate prisons for women. They even declare that where possible a prison for women should be located in a town as far as possible from a prison for men.

The superintendent of prisons took up Foster's complaint and wrote a stiff letter of rebuke to J. E. Matthews, warden at Moundsville.

Dear Sir,

In the report of Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, a special agent of this Department...attention is called to certain features in connection with female prisoners. Mrs. Foster says that it is common practice, or at least an occasional... ¹

BUREAUCRACY ACHIEVED

T he attorney general took a minimal step toward a bureaucracy in 1907 when he created the position of superintendent of prisons, within the Department of Justice. For some years the department had employed a "general agent" and one or two subordinate "examiners" who were responsible for overseeing the conditions of federal prisoners in various state facilities. However, the general agent was ineffectual; he had no resources for keeping statistics or other records, and no authority for enforcing quality services. The work of initially placing prisoners was ordinarily handled by the marshals, while the general agent arranged subsequent transfers when necessary, or attempted to mediate in other individual case problems.

The first person appointed to the position of superintendent of prisons was Robert V. LaDow, a man of impeccable integrity and proven competence in prison matters. He had served as an examiner since 1898, first under Frank Strong, the general agent, and subsequently under Strong's successor, Cecil Clay. When Clay died in 1907, the title of general agent was abolished, and LaDow was promoted to the new position of superintendent of prisons. ¹

By that time, in addition to the old McNeil Island facility, the two giants, Leavenworth and Atlanta , were being built. Both were in use, although they were unfinished; their construction was to demand LaDow's constant attention through his seven years in office.

As already noted, LaDow was followed by a succession of politically appointed superintendents, the best qualified of whom was Albert H. Conner, appointed in 1927 with the political backing of Idaho 's Senator William Borah. Conner's previous experience included three terms in the Idaho state legislature and two terms as the Idaho attorney general. After he was appointed superintendent of prisons, it was Conner who prepared the original draft of the bill that would soon establish the Bureau of Prisons.

DISSENTER PRISONERS

I n the spring of 1920 twelve respected attorneys from several U.S. cities issued a remarkable monograph. Though workmanlike and temperate, the document was nonetheless a scathing indictment that accused the U.S. Department of Justice of wholesale violations of law and defiance of Constitutional principles. ¹ Particularly prestigious among the several authors were the dean of Harvard University Law School , Roscoe Pound, and future justice of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter. The attorney general, they asserted, had "committed continual illegal acts. Wholesale arrests both of aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any process of law...homes have been entered without search warrant and property seized and removed; other property has been wantonly destroyed." To back up these and other accusations the authors went on to give detailed examples.

The occasion for the complaint was the so-called Palmer Raids of 1919, a draconian response by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to widespread activities of radicals who seemed bent on disrupting the public peace and security. The raids provided a classic example of the triumph of raw emotion over the rational rule of law. The offenders who seemed so threatening just then were the passionate, impulsive sort who have appeared periodically as federal prisoners from the beginning of the Republic, although they were never so feared as during the "Red Scare" that followed the First World War. It is a type that at times has been common, and even numerous, in federal prisons, but ordinarily not seen in state prisons.

Although some true criminals are swept into the fervor of a dissident activity, many dissenters escape being called criminalistic because they do not act out of greed, or for selfish gain, or from desire to hurt. They are motivated by a desire to correct a social or governmental fault, as they see it, and their sense of mission often makes them unique as prisoners; sometimes they are helpful and cooperative; sometimes they resist...

A PERIOD OF GROWTH

I n 1933, Sanford Bates noted with pleasure that there was a modest decrease in the total number of federal prisoners; the figure was down by 1,126 from the year before. He attributed the decrease to several factors, including the repeal of the prohibition law and "the measures taken by the Congress to reduce the prison population by extending the probation system to practically every Federal district court." ¹

Both the parole and probation laws were helpful, though not everyone was pleased. J. Edgar Hoover trumpeted the FBI attitude, asserting that "parole today is becoming one of the major menaces of America....The records show 3,576 members of this desperate criminal group have at some time felt the angelic mercy of parole or probation or pardon, or some other form of sob-sister clemency." ²

By the 1930s, Hoover 's fulminations notwithstanding, the federal probation and parole services were solidly established and becoming more accepted and essential as countermeasures to prison crowding. But probation practice in the federal courts had a lot of catching up to do; the probation law had been late in coming, delayed by strident objections from many of the people who should have been the most supportive.

Early in the century Hastings Hart and Samuel June Barrows had called for a federal probation law, as did Attorney General George W. Wickersham. Over the next two decades, numerous individuals and groups, particularly the National Probation Association, aggressively campaigned for a federal probation system. However, some federal judges opposed the legislation, believing it would erode respect for their courts. One influential staffers in the attorney general's office, the one who always was delegated to provide official reaction to the legislative proposals, viewed the probation idea as "all a part of a wave of maudlin rot of misplaced sympathy for criminals that is going on over the country." ³

PRISONS OF LAST RESORT

O n becoming U.S. President in 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed as his attorney general Homer S. Cummings, a scholarly gentleman who previously had been the state attorney general in Connecticut . Already there in the Department of Justice to work under him with effective mutual respect was the equally astute Director of the Bureau of Prisons, Sanford Bates, held over from the Hoover administration. One of their first collaborative efforts produced the most legendary of the federal prisons, an institution that seemed necessary and appropriate to a problem of the times.

It was an era when crime increasingly threatened the public peace. The Eighteenth Amendment was passed in 1919, and Prohibition spawned a ruthless hierarchy of gang leaders with immense resources. They were difficult to catch and more difficult to convict, even though many of them operated openly within easy public view. In Chicago , Al Capone dominated the bootlegging gangs during the 1920s, and he seemed arrogantly immune to any law enforcement efforts against him. But finally Capone was prosecuted by the Treasury Department and was convicted of income tax evasion; he entered the Atlanta Penitentiary in May 1932 with eleven years to serve. ¹

Stories of Capone's career and his conviction and sentencing were only part of a series of exciting crime stories that appeared in the early 1930s. Police agencies in the spring of 1933 were hunting for John Dillinger, the one-man crime wave in the Midwest . The prolonged hunt for the Lindberg kidnapper also aroused intense public concern. In June 1933, four federal agents and three local police officers were escorting an escapee to Leavenworth when they were ambushed at the railroad station in Kansas City , Missouri . Their prisoner, Frank Nash, a member of a gang of train robbers, had escaped from Leavenworth three years before. As the party moved from the train to a car, gunmen opened fire, killing the three local officers and one federal agent. Nash also was killed. "It was not clear whether the purpose of the... ²

PRISONS IN WARTIME

Within weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, the shops at the McNeil Island penitentiary began to receive tangled masses of electrical cable salvaged from destroyed ships and shore installations. Prisoners tackled about eighty-five tons of the scrap every month, stripping it of damaged insulation and reconditioning it for return to the navy, ready to be reused. Other McNeil Island shops were converted quickly to manufacture rope cargo nets for the navy, while the cannery produced great quantities of foodstuffs for military use, including six thousand pounds of dehydrated potatoes each day.

Even before the United States entered the war, the prison system built up its production capacity in anticipation. The attorney general's annual report for 1941 declared, "Defense needs and activities have seized the imagination of both staff and inmates to so marked a degree that our production of cotton textiles, metal products, shoes and other industrial materials has more than doubled." The Atlanta penitentiary increased its already large output of mattresses and canvas goods; the Leavenworth shoe factory, producing shoes for the army, had turned out 125,000 pairs in the three months before war was declared, but in the next three months it produced more than 181,000 pairs. The Lewisburg metal products plant turned to the production of bomb fins and bomb racks, and all other prisons similarly increased their production. ¹

While director Bennett was proud of the Bureau's response, it was not in the production shops that the more significant and enduring effects were seen. Just as the war created profound social changes generally, it also disrupted prisoner management, largely due to the influx of nontraditional inmates who challenged many prison practices.

EXPERIENCES WITH PROGRAMMING

James Bennett's seventieth birthday, August 11, 1964, was also his last day as director of the Bureau of Prisons. Attorney General Robert Kennedy paid a surprise visit that morning, and several others also came to help Bennett end his career with a complimentary flourish. To give the retirement party the proper festive spirit, the attorney general had brought along a large cake which Bennett was encouraged to cut and serve. The director took knife in hand and proceeded to slice pieces for everyone. And the hilarious high point of the action came when he found baked inside the cake -- a hack saw blade!

The New York Times editorialized that Bennett was "one of the most far-sighted men in the enforcement of criminal law." ¹ Generally, his peers expressed similar sentiments. The informal, private assessment of the few who knew the Bureau intimately was that, in his later years, Bennett was becoming less effective, less innovative, and more concerned with defending his record. That belief was reflected in Kennedy's refusal to grant Bennett's request to extend his time in the job. But to be fair, Bennett's career must be viewed as a whole. Appraisal must include his nearly thirty-five years with the Bureau, when he proved to be a strong leader in a conventional mode, a person of impeccable integrity and sound management ability. He also was notably adept at keeping the respect of key political and bureaucratic figures in Washington .

The day after Bennett's retirement party, a new director took office; Kennedy had persuaded Myrl E. Alexander to return to the Bureau from his new academic career, started three years earlier as head of the Center for Study of Crime, Delinquency, and Corrections at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale . Alexander owed no thanks to Bennett for the appointment, for Bennett was frank about his preference for another long-time Bureau manager and ex-warden. "I did all in my power to have one of my deputies, a fellow named Fred Wilkinson appointed. I told...

DIVERSIFICATION AND EXPANSION

I n September 1971, the state prison at Attica , New York , erupted with its famous and tragic riot. Smaller disturbances were triggered by it at other institutions, including a noisy one a few days later at the women's prison at Alderson. That incident led to an exciting new experience for the Bureau of Prisons -- the inauguration, under conditions of severe stress, of a new institution mixing both male and female prisoners in its population.

Although the states had housed men and women in the same penal institutions since their beginnings, the practice had never been a matter of integration; the two sexes were kept apart, in separate sections. J. Ellen Foster was adamant about the importance of this separation (chapter 5), and her view reflected the general orthodox attitude. Other than the high-security female unit that operated at Milan , the only other example of co-correctional operation within the federal system was the prison at Terminal Island , California , where, from 1955 to 1977, the Bureau operated a small unit for women within the grounds, but quite segregated from the main institution.

By 1970, the Bureau was aware of some experience with mixedsex institutions in other countries and was making careful plans to try the idea. Two prisons were picked as the first sites for the co-correctional experiment. One was the new youth facility at Morgantown , and the other was a soon-to-be-opened institution at Fort Worth , Texas . The plan started in the spring of 1971, when several carefully selected younger women from Alderson were quietly and uneventfully placed at Morgantown . As planned and hoped, the women settled into the arrangement uneventfully. By contrast, the Forth Worth opening a few months later was a baptism of fire.

The bitter outburst at Alderson in late September necessitated the immediate move of some of the most rebellious women. A bus was loaded with forty-five of the most disruptive inmates, and, after a one month stop-over in Seagoville, the women, still angry and noisy, were delivered...

This page was prepared by

Kay Lee Director MTWT-Florida

Joanna Ferris Director MTWT-Connecticut

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