Discovery of the Asylum

During the 1820s one generation of prison reformers gave way to another. The first generation lacked "any clear idea what these structures should look like or how they should be administered." ²² The early reformers, such as Benjamin Rush, had argued that incarceration was more humane than hanging, but they had only a vague idea of how the prison should promote rehabilitation.

The new generation offered the prison as the solution to the problem of criminal disorder. They had "discovered the asylum" as an institutional solution to fundamental social dislocations, including insanity and poverty as well as crime. Like their predecessors, prison reformers of the Jacksonian era had strong religious ties, especially to evangelical denominations that stressed the perfectibility of humankind, and they were also deeply involved in other social reform causes, such as antislavery and prohibition. Perhaps their single most important voice was that of Louis Dwight, leader of the Boston Prison Discipline Society, the most influential prison reform group from 1825 to 1854.

The prison rested on two interrelated concepts. The first was the idea, associated with Beccaria, that crime was the product of an unhealthy environment and that a person placed in a healthy one would eventually reform. This idea flowed from a second proposition: human beings were rational creatures capable of self-reformation. Environmentalism, rationalism, and optimism fused in the prison. It offered a refuge of rehabilitation in which hard work, discipline, solitude, silence, and religious study supposedly altered old patterns of behavior in favor of new, socially acceptable ones.

What distinguished prison reformers of the Jacksonian era from their predecessors was a grand vision that molded architecture and administrative control into a total institution. Within this general framework two competing systems emerged: the Auburn, or congregate system, and the Eastern State Penitentiary, or separate system.

The Auburn system took its name from the prison in the town of Auburn, New York. Opened in 1819, the facility initially imposed a regimen of solitary confinement for the worst offenders, leading to nervous breakdowns, disease, and suicide. Four years after it opened, and after an inspection by state authorities that revealed shocking conditions, Warden Elam Lynds devised a new system of prison discipline. Prisoners slept in individual cells but worked and ate together. The design of the prison, in the form of a fortresslike castle with a large central gathering area and separate cells, was

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ideally suited to Lynds's program. The warden imposed total silence, doing so in the belief that inmates would contemplate their own rehabilitation and that they would not have the opportunity to learn additional evil ways from other inmates. Discipline and order were reinforced by making prisoners move in a lockstep shuffle, with eyes downcast and one hand on the shoulder of the man next to them. Those prisoners who refused to cooperate were subjected to rigorous punishments, including whipping and torture. Alexis de Tocqueville reported, after visiting Auburn in 1831, that "the silence within these vast walls . . . is that of death. We felt as if we traversed catacombs." ²³

The rival system in Pennsylvania was built at the Eastern State Penitentiary at Cherry Hill, opened in 1829. The architecture of the building captured its approach to corrections. The Eastern State facility was designed in the form of spokes that radiated from a central administrative hub with small cells forming a honeycomb up the sides of the spokes. Each prisoner had his own exercise yard, denying him contact with other prisoners. More so than in the Auburn system, the Eastern State scheme denied prisoners access to outside influences, curtailing mail and visitors. It had fewer recidivists (repeat offenders) than Auburn, but it also took a greater toll in human life through suicide.

The faults and advantages of both systems were evenly distributed, but the costs were not. State legislators favored the congregate prison not only because it was cheaper to build and administer than its separate counterpart, but also because the Auburn plan offered the additional feature of prison industries, which held the never- realized promise of making the prisons self-supporting. The Auburn plan "provided the best of both worlds, economy and reform." ²⁴ By the time of the Civil War, however, these remained elusive goals, as prisons, like insane asylums and poor- houses, evolved into holding facilities rather than the institutions of rehabilitation that their optimistic founders had so fervently sought.

House of Refuge

Houses of refuge and youth reformatories appeared at about the same time that the second wave of prison reform took hold. They too promised to rehabilitate individual children by placing them in an environment free from corrupting influences.

The origins of reformatories for disobedient children lay, to some extent, with attempts in the colonial and revolutionary eras to care for the orphaned poor. George Whitefield in 1740 organized the first orphan asylum in Savannah, Georgia. Overseers of the poor following the Revolution regularly dispatched children to another rising public institution, the almshouse. Troublesome and disobedient children, however, were frequently dispatched to jails. Because children were considered highly impressionable, reformers made removing them from direct contact with adult offenders a priority. If the young were vulnerable to corruption, they were also eminently teachable.

What began as a private philanthropic effort early in the nineteenth century evolved into a state-supported enterprise by midcentury. The experience of New York was typical. The first separate reform organization, the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, appeared in 1825. Reformers connected juvenile crime to poverty, and the leaders of the New York City society concluded that instead of relieving the

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conditions of poverty directly they had to take children from their families and place them in an environment that emphasized discipline and training. In the spring of 1825, the New York legislature chartered the New York House of Refuge as a private charity. Within three years philanthropists founded houses of refuge in Boston and Philadelphia.

The legislatures that chartered these houses of refuge also forged a policy that facilitated commitment. Children were incarcerated by order of a judicial body, by a recommendation of local overseers of the poor, and by the personal inclinations of a parent. There was little in the way of due-process protections for children, a consequence that grew quite naturally out of the belief that the state, through the doctrine of parens patriae, had a direct and growing responsibility for the care of children.

From its inception in the Jacksonian era, the "crime" of juvenile delinquency was a vague category of antisocial behavior. A child, for example, could be classified a delinquent because his or her parents failed to provide proper support. Children could also be placed in a reformatory for status offenses; that is, they were susceptible to incarceration because of some personal condition (e.g., vagrancy) rather than some action they had taken, such as stealing.

The refuge attempted to infuse the child with middle-class values: thrift, industry, and social responsibility. Release came either with age or, more often, with an apprenticeship; this program worked well until the 1850s, when the emerging industrial economy reduced the need for apprentices and thus the opportunities for adolescent laborers. Children were returned to society with the proviso that they could be reinstitutionalized if they became unruly or uncooperative. The policy of conditional release developed in the houses of refuge was extended later in the century to adult offenders through parole and probation. The house of refuge seldom achieved the more noble purposes for which it was designed, and by the time of the Civil War it had become, like the penitentiary, a "warehouse for the unwanted." ²⁵

Police

Historians generally cite the establishment of a day watch in Boston in 1838 as the first urban police force, but Philadelphia had experimented with a similar arrangement as early as 1833. Whatever the first date, the antebellum police differed from their counterparts after the Civil War, and the nineteenth-century police, taken as a whole, were far removed from modern urban law enforcement institutions. The police changed from "an informal, even casual, bureaucracy to a formal, rule-governed, militaristic organization." ²⁶ Duties changed along with organizational structure. The first police forces were charged with maintaining the orderly functioning of cities, a small part of which involved catching criminals. In the era after the Civil War they undertook to control the dangerous classes, with a growing emphasis on crime. Today, they are exclusively associated with crime and traffic control.

The slave patrol in the South and the night watch in the North and South were the antecedents of the police. The slave patrol in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1837 had a force of 100 officers. In rural portions of the South, patrolmen exercised control over slaves who were away from their plantations as well as aiding in catching and returning escaped slaves.

The night watch, which had its origins in England during the thirteenth century,

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was a preventative patrol meant to give out the hue and cry when an offense had occurred. The watch worked reasonably well in small communities where personal and direct control based on an underlying social consensus existed. This informal consensus waned as U.S. cities grew in size and as their populations included greater numbers of strangers with socially and ethnically divergent origins. Urban riots, a commonplace event in the nineteenth-century United States, revealed the growing social tensions. Clashes between Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Irish Catholics, for example, exploded in several nineteenth-century cities. The slavery controversy fueled additional lawlessness, with attacks on white abolitionists in Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and other major cities. The most deadly riot occurred in 1863 in New York City where police and state militia units subdued draft rioters only after federal troops joined them in the fourth day of the upheaval.

Early police forces in the United States drew their inspiration from the English, whose experience with the impact of industrialization and urbanization preceded that in the United States by almost a half-century. Parliament in 1829 passed the London Metropolitan Police Act, which emphasized the prevention of crime. The police exercised social control by developing a continuous presence throughout society, with officers walking patrol over regularly assigned routes, known as "beats." The act's architect, Sir Robert Peel, required that beat officers be uniformed and supervised through a system of military-style ranks.

Lawmakers in the United States owed much to the English model, but they also departed from it in significant ways. First, the English police were a national organization controlled by a member of the king's cabinet. In the United States, however, the police emerged as a local force responsive to local political demands. Police administration in England was imposed from the top down; in the United States it was created from the bottom up. Second, the English police, free from the people's direct control, fashioned high standards of professionalism. In the United States, police work was a job for amateurs who owed their posts to political rather than professional considerations. Third, early American police forces did adopt a strategy of crime prevention, like the English, but they initially rejected both uniforms and military-style management as antidemocratic.

Police forces in the United States professionalized at a slower pace than their English cousins. The New York City police, for example, only became uniformed in 1853 and only after considerable debate. James W. Gerard, a prominent New York reformer, argued that the "great moral power of the policeman of London in preventing crimes lies in his coat." Uniformed officers prevented crime by striking fear and dread in the hearts of the "criminally-disposed population . . . by their well-known intelligence, activity, unflinching firmness, and incorruptible honesty." ²⁷

Antebellum police forces were deeply enmeshed in local politics, a condition that persisted into the late nineteenth century. An individual with the right political connections could be hired despite the lack of obvious qualifications, and good officers could be discharged from their jobs with the shift from the administration of one party to the next. There was no formal training for recruits; supervision of beat officers was weak. The police were just one more element in the emerging urban machine that the development of mass political parties in the mid-nineteenth century fostered.

Early police forces played a small role in detecting crime, leaving that task to the thief catcher, an individual who was seldom a police officer and who, despite the title,

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did not actually catch thieves. Instead, the thief catcher recovered stolen goods, operating in the capacity of a modern-day fence. The most famous of these individuals, who were far more numerous in England than the United States, was George Reed, a constable in Boston during the 1820s. "The secret of his wonderful success," wrote a contemporary about Reed, "was in his having in his employ parties who were in his power, whose liberty and in some cases, it was intimated, their permission to ply their vocation, depended on the value of the information they were able to furnish him."²⁸ During a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century, the police often functioned as intermediaries between thieves and victims, negotiating cash payments in exchange for stolen goods. In New York, for example, the police might have charged as much as seventy-five dollars to secure the return of a watch.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 789