ABSTRACT

THE FAILURE OF PRISON REFORM: A HISTORY OF THE OHIO PENITENIARY, 1834-1885

by Jessie Britton

This thesis examines the history of reform within the Ohio Penitentiary between 1834 and 1885 as a microcosm of national changes to the penal system. Its conceptual framework occupies the middle ground between two great philosophers, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, who have examined opposing sides of society—power and sensibilities—as primary motivators of change. Structures of modern punishment coexisted between the desire for more humane treatment of prisoners and a demand for control, making it necessary to examine both administrator records and prisoner testimonials in opposition, in order to discover if reform truly occurred. Within Ohio, substantial “progressive” change to the penal system failed because the dichotomy between power and sensibilities could not be reconciled among official voices. What resulted, then, was a system that adamantly defined progress as order. And, to avoid offending public sensibilities, it obscured the brutality necessary to achieve this end. The Failure of Prison Reform: A History of the Ohio Penitentiary, 1834-1885

A Thesis

Submitted to the

faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of History

By

Jessie Britton

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2008

Advisor______(Andrew Cayton)

Reader______(Mary Frederickson)

Reader______(Allan Winkler)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: The Promise of Prison Reform 9

Chapter 3: The Reality of Prison Reform 26

Chapter 4: Conclusion 40

Bibliography 42

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I could not have written this thesis alone. I would like to express thanks to those who helped me along the way. Andrew Cayton advised and guided me through the thesis writing process, helping to bring me to more thoughtful and fuller conclusions. Mary Frederickson and Allan Winkler offered useful insight and critique as readers on my committee. Judith Zinsser helped during the early stages of my writing, shaping the thought processes that formed the ideas behind the thesis. And, lastly, my mom was a constant source of help as a backboard for ideas and copy-editor. Thank you all.

iii Chapter 1: Introduction

The phenomenon of the penitentiary arrived in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Reformers exalted the era as full of change reflecting their enlightened ideals. Ohio Penitentiary Warden Laurin Dewey, for example, described his tenure at the prison in the early 1850s as “the benevolent spirit of the age.” According to Dewey, nineteenth century Ohio embraced “within its sympathies the unfortunate subjects of prison discipline, and the increasing interest every where felt by the humane and philanthropic on a subject of vast importance to the good of community, and to the welfare of a large class of our fellow beings.”1 Influenced by these new sensibilities, the U.S. penal system rethought the way it used punishment. Americans were no longer comfortable watching public castigations and executions. Older forms of public punishment, which hinged on visible moral lessons and the display of power, became shielded within prison walls. Most important, penal policy came to be guided by the belief that the state had the responsibility to aid in the recovery of the criminal. New practices designed to build the moral character of inmates began to replace the use of prisoners for hard labor. Harsh physical penalties for misbehavior fell into disfavor and instead the practice of revoking privileges as a theory of punishment reigned. A closer examination of the nineteenth century penal system, however, brings the extent of these changes into question. While official records tell the story of enlightened progress, counter-narratives reveal that the period was marked more by tweaking than actual change and that many of the physical punishments of the previous era remained in use. Why didn’t substantial or real change occur? Reformers came to no consensus over what constituted “enlightened” practices. Therefore, no paradigm shift occurred—only minor changes. Instead, reformers praised the small changes as grand ventures into a new enlightened era. These statements about the penitentiary system reflected an official confidence in progressive linear change. Two types of prison reform took shape during this era. The first involved so called “prison societies,” organized specifically to encourage progressive changes within institutions of incarceration. Members of these organizations were motivated largely by religious beliefs. The second group interested in prison reform included individuals inside the institutions, especially

1 Laurin Dewey, “Warden’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1846, 5.

1 wardens. What the two had in common was a belief that nineteenth-century American society was necessarily enlightened, a reflection of a civilized people. However, their approaches to change were radically different. This thesis specifically explores changes made within the Ohio Penitentiary during the nineteenth century—the largest prison in the state and one of the largest in the country. Ohio represents a microcosm of national social and political trends during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The state, in many cases, led the way in reform movements. Many of the conditions that enabled the development of national reform movements existed in Ohio. The Second Great Awakening that began at the turn of the nineteenth century brought renewed activity to Protestant churches. Preachers at revival meetings stressed salvation as a personal will to repent rather than as a pre-ordained condition. Revivalism spread rapidly across the nation, providing meeting places for isolated communities to gather for festivities and prayer. The struggle for personal reform often became a larger, group effort to perfect humanity. The evangelical spirit that characterized revivalists inspired them to partake in social movements, including institutional reform. An important leader in the Second Great Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney, brought evangelical ideas to his position as president of Oberlin College in the 1850s. He urged students to improve both their intellectual and moral lives, stressing that they go out into the world to do God’s business of perfecting humanity.2 Ohio statesmen Marmaduke Wright and William Awl capitalized on the idea of improvement. They persuaded the state assembly to provide public funding for the care of the mentally ill and disabled. State money helped to build a hospital in Columbus in 1838, and similar institutions in Cincinnati, Dayton, and Cleveland by the 1850s.3 At the same time, Ohioans’ shifting thoughts on crime and society sparked discussions about penal reform. These trends reflected national social and political changes. As a national leader in manufacturing, producing raw goods, and urban development, Ohio was on the cutting edge of innovative changes, and it helped set the pace and tone of the country’s priorities. Among Ohio’s efforts to modernize was a persistent interest in reforming the gruesome elements of its penal system. Within this framework emerged a debate over what constituted civilized and

2 Andrew R.L. Cayton, Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), 120. 3 George Knepper, Ohio and Its People (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1997), 183.

2 humane treatment. Arguments across official pages and from inmates criticized certain practices as inhumane and exalted others as the embodiment of a civilized society. Individuals framed their perspectives within the rhetoric of what it meant to be “civilized,” although without a general agreement as to its definition. Diverse voices used this label at various times to defend solitary confinement, water treatment, corporal punishment, and denial of privileges. Clearly, no consensus existed over what constituted the civilized treatment of prisoners. Without a consensus, no real change could occur. The Ohio Penitentiary, like others across the country, did not experience the fundamental changes that reformers advocated and claimed to have occurred. By the late 1800s, prisons looked largely the same as those that had existed in the early part of the century, and prisoner complaints of mistreatment remained consistent. The official rhetoric of civilized change culminated in the 1870s with two pivotal events: the 1870 Prison Congress and the 1878 Ohio Legislature’s investigation of alleged abuse within the Ohio Penitentiary. Section two of the thesis explores the events preceding the Prison Congress. An inherent belief among members of prison societies and reform minded wardens in the linear progress of their society kept the official rhetoric about the Penitentiary optimistic despite repeated demonstrated failures of the system. Section three examines the counter-narratives that present the personal testimonies of those within the prison system whose realities did not match the language of the official voices. These lived experiences reveal that no major changes were made to correct the failures of the prison system. Scholarly examinations of punishment currently rely on the four major theoretical perspectives of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Norbert Elias. Each of these perspectives explores punishment beyond its simple structures and functions. They instead connect punishment to the wider culture, examining how it is shaping and is shaped by society.4 Emile Durkheim’s book The Division of Labour (1893) discusses punishment as a manifestation of the public’s “collective consciousness.”5 In this sense, punishment is a moral issue, upholding a self-sustaining moral order. In the Durkheimian tradition, a crime is such because it violates the collective consciousness. An irrational, unthinking emotion lies at the

4 David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1-20. 5 Garland, 23-80.

3 heart of punishment, producing a shared or general punitive response to the criminal’s violation of the sacred order. Because crime is not a natural or essential concept, thoughts about it range among cultural communities and change over time. As societies become more advanced, deprivation of liberty by imprisonment replaced more severe capital and corporal forms of punishment. The underlying mechanisms and punitive functions, however, remained the same across time and space. Durkheim’s conclusions have proven problematic. His perspective is contingent on an identical overlap between an unspecified notion of the “collective consciousness” and penal law. He also overlooked the effort needed to maintain certain power differentials within society and the ability of penal law to function as an amoral instrument. Nevertheless, the Durkheimian tradition has offered an alternative view to a purely managerial or administrative account of punishment that isolates the function and mechanisms from the wider culture. The Marxist perspective also provides a holistic view of society. According to this tradition, the economy in any society is the key locus of power, and punishment is an instrument used by the dominant sector to maintain control of its position. This perspective appeared forefront in Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged (1991).6 Linebaugh examined crime and civil society in eighteenth century London, focusing specifically on the relationship between the working class and capital punishment. He argued that forms of capitalist exploitation caused or modified criminal activity. The reverse was also true. In short, people were poor and stole to live; their misappropriating led to new criminal laws. Therefore, each hanging represented the conflict of the powerful and propertied against the weak and poor with the specific message: “respect private property.” (xx) Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer had also supported a Marxist perspective in Punishment and Social Structure (1939), concluding that punishment was deeply embedded in the class struggle between the rich and poor.7 Ideological distortion allows punishment to be perceived as an institution benefiting the whole of society, but actually functions to support the interests of the economically elite. Michel Foucault presented a different perspective in Discipline and Punish (1977), focusing on the theme of domination, exploring how power and repression operate within

6 Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1991), xx. 7 Garland, 85-109.

4 society.8 This theory examines power and its materializations, including structural relationships, institutions, strategies, and techniques, rather than politics or people. In terms of power, punishment is key in producing behavior, both legal and illegal. The prison works by creating the criminal. Foucault viewed the transition between public and private punishment as an effort to reorganize power to make it more efficient, not a movement to better the lives of criminals. During this process of reorganization, power—which was traditionally top-down—became decentralized, dispersed, and hidden. In the context of the modern penal system, this model of power translated into a system of self-imposed discipline. The last major perspective is that of Norbert Elias, who placed punishment within an analysis of changing sensibilities and cultural mentalities. According to The Civilizing Process (1939), all cultures promote certain forms of expression over others.9 As societies advanced, behavior gradually came under greater and greater control as it became tied to social status and class distinction. Individuals internalize the fears, anxieties, and inhibitions learned from parents and the social environment. A key feature of this process has been the disappearance of certain aspects of life from the public realm, like bodily functions, death, illness, pain, sex, and violence. This change has had a marked affect on punishment, most notably in the banishment of capital and corporal punishment to behind prison walls. Many scholars have utilized this perspective in explaining changes in punishment in modern societies. In The Spectacle of Suffering (1984), Pieter Spierenburg concentrated on how changing sensibilities mediated the link between state development and penal history.10 His thesis is twofold. First, an original positive attitude toward the suffering of convicts gave way to a rising sensibility in the nineteenth century that was more sensitive to human degradation. Second, these developments coincided with the transition from the early modern state to the nation-state, characterized by a hands-off, impersonal bureaucratic system.

8 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 9 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).

10 Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

5 11 Louis Masur employed a similar analytical framework in Rites of Execution (1989). He argued that the transition of public to private punishment reflected a reconceptualization of the causes of crime and the purposes of punishment. The shift “embodied the triumph of new sensibilities and the reconstitution of cultural values throughout the Western world.”12 According to Masur, reformers believed they had more agency than they actually did. Instead, they operated within a specific cultural context. The results of their campaigns were actually produced and implemented by a “middle-class culture that dreaded vice, craved order, advocated self-control, and valued social privacy.”13 Likewise, Michael Ignatieff’s book, A Just Measure of Pain (1978), focuses on the fight to embody modern sensibilities in the penitentiary.14 This thesis inhabits the middle ground between Foucault’s discussion of power and Elias’s discussion of sensibilities as the primary motivator of the changing structure of punishment in the modern world. This perspective hinges on the idea that two visions can coexist in the modern criminal justice system—“a passionate, morally toned desire to punish and the administrative, rationalistic, normalizing concern to manage.”15 It is reasonable to match a desire for more humane treatment with a greater demand for control. Integral to this perspective are the lived experiences of residents within the penitentiary system. The ideas of the panoptic and of subconscious inhibitions are good theories to explain the purpose and structures of penal institutions. But in real situations, there are no universal controls or behaviors. The middle ground between Foucault and Elias has not been ignored. David Rothman explored both sides of the transition occurring within the area of punishment in The Discovery of the Asylum (1971).16 For Rothman, asylums and prisons emerged as the answer to a greater fear of disorder and moral dissolutions. Instead of resolving these social discords, however, the institutions served to isolate and hide deviants and dependants from public view. Similarly, German historian Richard Evans had relied on a blended analytical framework in Rituals of

11 Louis Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 12 Masur, 3. 13 Ibid., 8. 14 Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (Pantheon Books, New York, 1978). 15 Garland, 180. 16 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, rev. ed. (1971; New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002).

6 Retribution (1996).17 His work focused on the role of criminal law in German civil society, from the early modern period to the collapse of Communist control in eastern Germany. Evans drew on the overarching theories of Foucault, Elias, and Philippe Aries to provide the general interpretative framework of his study, combining the tools of discourse, culture, and experience. In addition to the institutional and theoretical approaches of Rothman and Evans, this thesis explores the diametric scenario between the official records of progressive change and counter-narratives. This interpretation required close examination of two kinds of major sources: the official records of the Ohio Penitentiary and the narratives produced by prisoners, newspapers, and legislative investigations. This thesis relies heavily on local state records from the time period. Newspapers, prisoner writings, the Ohio Penitentiary’s annual reports, and government records reveal not only the facts and data associated with the penal system, but also uncover the sentiments and priorities of the players involved—the public, the prisoners, and the prison administrators. One of the major considerations in utilizing these kinds of sources is understanding whose perspectives they actually reveal. Historians must keep in mind that newspapers exist to make a profit. Official annual reports may exaggerate records to hide the failures and shortcomings of institutional administrators. Prisoner publications can be censored. A limited number of individuals control the production of these sources and do not necessarily represent a holistic viewpoint and each author has his or her own agendas. Using these sources requires cautious conjectures based on a firm understanding of the context and the motives of the authors. Often, the significance of the information comes from the existence of the debate over humane punishment rather than the specific content they allege. Nevertheless, a consideration of the sources in total provides the most complete picture of the prison and the struggle for change. The contradictions inherent in the dual goals of civilized rehabilitation and avoidance of social disorder plagued reform efforts at the Ohio Penitentiary and in prisons throughout the country. The rhetoric of reform apparent in official accounts placated the need to document a record of progressive change in the treatment of prisoners and in their successful transition back into free society. But, crime continued and prison reform did not fulfill its idealist goals of eliminating recidivism and preventing future crime by the end of the nineteenth-century. Why?

17 Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

7 Because the need for order inside prison walls relied on a continuation of practices deemed brutal.

8 Chapter 2: The Promise of Prison Reform

On October 12, 1870, dozens of prison officials and reformers from around the world made their way to Cincinnati, Ohio to participate in the first Prison Congress to discuss conditions in prisons and theories of criminal rehabilitation. Their infectious optimism pervaded the proceedings and represented a significant influence that for a moment in time created potential for major change in ways of thinking about rehabilitating criminals and reintegrating them into society. Throughout the following week, delegates read papers about everything from prisoner diets to length of sentences and then engaged in lively discussion about best practices. Those present became convinced that they could bring about progressive change that would focus on the individual rehabilitative needs of convicted criminals through indeterminate sentencing and humane punishment. Newspaper reporters covering the event shared the excitement with their readers. According to the New York Times: “This ingenious and humane method of treatment, as will be seen, acts at once on the character. The convict is not brutalized by his punishment; his self-respect is cultivated, his control over his passions disciplined, hope is held out before him, and he is continually under moral influences. He comes forth a better man and a more useful citizen. Such, we trust, will eventually be the results of the prison system in this country.”18 It seemed nothing could stop the momentum for change reflected by the Prison Congress. Why were these individuals so enthusiastic? Why were they so sure that change would occur? Prison conditions in the 1870s were, at best, dismal. They perpetually suffered from overcrowding, recidivism, and crumbling infrastructure. Yet, reform leaders traveled from around the country to exalt current reform efforts and celebrate their impending success. Their vision reached wide. Not only did their plans seek to solve the problems plaguing the prison system, they would rehabilitate criminal minds and reintegrate their bodies back into their communities. Society, as a whole, would ascend from a darker past. For the reformers, optimism provided an uplifting vision of the future without the tangles of the present reality. * * * The idea of prison reform was not new. At the end of the eighteenth century, Americans already believed that they could contain and eventually eradicate crime. A new concept of

18 “The Prison Congress,” New York Times, 30 October 1870, 4.

9 punishment, that used incarceration as its main punitive tool, began to outpace sentences of forced labor and public humiliation. Incarceration was meant to affect the criminal mind and reform his character, rather than simply exploit his body. Embodied by the penitentiary, incarceration represented progress in a enlightened age that focused on the well being of criminals. Beyond punishment and reform, a third goal consisted of discouraging repeat offenders and decreasing crime among the general population. As public officials implemented changes, however, they quickly discovered that the reform vision did not mesh neatly with practical considerations. What resulted was constant tweaking of prison systems and policies in a continuous attempt to reconcile an idealist reform vision with pragmatic necessity. Throughout the nineteenth century, officials maintained a consistent and steady mantra of “rehabilitation and reform” to be achieved within the framework of a penitentiary paradigm. This emerging theory came about in response to shifting ideas about the origins of crime from the inevitable product of natural sinners to the unfortunate consequence of a corrupt society. During the colonial era and early Republic, three major considerations guided American thoughts and practices toward individuals labeled as deviant. First, the Protestant Church stood as one of the most influential organizations dictating American attitudes toward crime. Religion defined the presence of deviancy in the world as natural and something that could not be eradicated. Christians viewed crime as a sin, and believed that men were born into corruption, which made non-standard behavior an inevitable component of society. In this sense, responding to deviancy provided a God-given opportunity for men to do good and create relief as necessary and appropriate. Second, civic considerations guided some beliefs about deviant behavior. The image of society was hierarchal, with a series of ranks. Individuals at each segment enjoyed a fixed place with their own privileges and obligations. And third, preexisting Elizabethan codes mandated either extremely harsh or very lax penalties for offenses. Often little gray area existed in the area of punishment.19 Although perceived as inevitable, sin demanded retribution. During the colonial and early national eras, prison systems operated under the notion that punishment served as a deterrent against future crime. The goal of this method, directed at the observers, not the prisoners, sought to save ordinary citizens from wandering down an immoral path. Prisoners

19 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, rev. ed. (1971; New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002), 6-18.

10 themselves became mere puppets of the justice system, beyond rehabilitation, but assigned a secondary practical purpose, lending their bodies to the state through hard labor. In addition, prison officials met deviance by the prisoners with severe and immediate physical punishment. Physical punishment, as well as executions, frequently occurred in front of public audiences. This tradition persisted in large part because of the entrenched belief in the positive impact that watching the events had on viewers. Proponents argued that public punishment served two functions for the masses, one civil and one religious. As a civil lesson, they reinforced the perception of the state as an unquestionable power, thereby discouraging dissention and opposition. Public acts of punishment, then, were concerted efforts by lawmakers to “preserve order” and deter future crime.20 The state also used them to communicate a moral message by demonstrating the ultimate consequence of sin. They served as “a warning” to keep “passions and appetites in constant subjection to reason.”21 In fact, officials overseeing the events manipulated prisoners’ words in order to reinforce this lesson in morality. Individuals attending these events witnessed a graphic demonstration about the state’s power in exercising the supremacy of God. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, beliefs about the causes of crime, strategies for deterrence, and the potential for individual rehabilitation had changed dramatically. A break from Calvinist doctrines of determinism invaded attitudes toward crime and punishment. Americans increasingly viewed themselves as products of their environments rather than pre-ordained characters. Assuming deviant behavior was symptomatic of a failing society, reformers refocused their efforts to finding the origin of crime and eliminating it. Investigators specifically concentrated on the convicts’ upbringing to identify the origins of deviant behavior. No matter at what age the deviant criminal committed an offense, the cause could be traced to childhood. Convinced that deviancy was primarily the result of one’s surroundings, reformers felt that criminals could be cured of their corruption if removed from all temptations and put into a setting run by a steady and regular regimen. A penitentiary could function with such a purpose. It would separate offenders from all contact with corruption, both within and outside its walls. Incarceration would take on a new form. Whereas previously, authorities had neglected

20 John D. Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 26. 21 Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 25.

11 to supervise the prisoners’ surroundings, allowing those institutions to become seminaries of vice, now they saw themselves as strictly regulated machines. A surge in population rates and manufacturing helped accelerate a growth in a middle class that produced a large, concentrated number of people that “dreaded vice, craved order, advocated self-control, and valued social privacy.”22 Between 1790 and 1830, the number of Americans more than tripled, rising from 3,929,214 to 12,866,020. Much of this growth resulted from increased reproduction rates, which had a dramatic impact on family patterns. Population increased also because of an influx of immigration, comprised primarily of Catholics from Germany, Ireland, and England. Movement to cities, in and out of territories, and up and down social ladders made it difficult for Americans to maintain existing hierarchal ties and a sense of localism. Increased population density escalated the sheer numbers and proximity of deviants. Jails became more overcrowded. An accelerated expansion of industry increased the availability of manufactured goods, which in turn aided development of a middle class that placed an emphasis on the accumulation of material culture.23 The middle class, with greater access to leisure time, provided many of the individuals who made up the bulk of the reform movements that emerged during the early decades of the nineteenth century. In an effort to reverse many of the vices that they perceived as ruining the family, destroying the new republic, and threatening their way of life, reformers banded together at every level from nationwide down to local communities. The construction of new facilities addressed the problem of overcrowding that often plagued existing institutions serving dependent members of society including the blind, deaf, mentally ill, orphaned, and imprisoned. Reformers, like Dorothea Dix, fought to get the mentally ill out of county jails and into state hospitals. Members of prison societies, largely influenced by Quaker beliefs, advocated against the harsh physical abuse experienced by inmates in jails and supported the building of penitentiaries outside city limits to replace the unsightly city jails within urban communities. Cesare Beccaria, author of a 1764 treatise entitled On Crimes and Punishment that equated severe laws with deviant behavior, pointed to the severity of English legal codes as producing crime. Traditional assumptions about the origins of deviant behavior had been

22 Masur, 8. 23 Ronald C. Walter, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang), 4.

12 misdirected and punishments barbaric. This belief could be confirmed by looking at the American past. William Penn had wanted to introduce the Great Law of 1682 into his province in order to provide mild and humane legislation. Queen Anne, however, had disallowed it, instead imposing the kind of strict laws that produced deviant behavior. To citizens of the new United States, this kind of story seemed typical. Beccaria wrote, “The severity of punishment of itself emboldens men to commit the very wrong it is supposed to prevent … They are driven to commit additional crimes to avoid the punishment for a single one.” He offered some advice for those who wished to eradicate deviancy: “Do you want to prevent crimes? See to it that the laws are clear and simple and that the entire force of a nation is united in their defense.” In breaking away from their traditional, English roots, Americans reformed their punishment laws. States abolished the death sentence for all offenses save first-degree murder or strictly limited it to a handful of the most serious crimes. Instead, newer statutes called for incarceration. In this first burst of enthusiasm, reformers expected that a rational system of correction would dissuade all but a few offenders from a life in crime. Americans felt they were on the track to eliminating crime.24 Discussions about the origins of crime and purpose of punishment were guided by an effort to implement more “enlightened” policies that moved away from the older, barbaric ones. Re-conceptualizations of how deviancy originated were based on concepts of balance, proportionality, and humanity in systems of punishment combined with a faith in the reformation of the criminal and redefined sensibilities about public space and social order. Ideologies stressing long-term solitary detention as the best method for rehabilitating prisoners required concrete changes to existing prison infrastructures. New architectural designs based on these shifting philosophies offered plans that would enforce prisoner isolation. Reformers believed that isolation would correct many of the problems faced by prison officials. They based this theory on an increasing awareness that current prison controls were, in fact, encouraging immoral behavior within institutional walls. Frequently, reformers identified prison architecture as a major obstacle to rehabilitation and encouraged new designs that would isolate prisoners in spaces where they would have time to contemplate the immorality of the actions that led them to their cells.

24 Rothman, 59-61.

13 Prisons built prior to the 1830s, with their large common areas where prisoners ate and slept together, lacked mechanisms needed to control prisoner behavior. An open floor plan coupled with lax surveillance produced an environment where prisoners had a certain amount of personal freedom within the prison walls. Critics of this system identified shared living space that allowed continuous interaction between prisoners as the main cause of continued immoral behavior. The issue of congregate living became more critical as capital punishment fell out of public favor and as states began to impose new restrictions on the kinds of crimes that warranted the death penalty. Would-be-executed prisoners, perceived by reformers as especially “hardened,” began to receive life terms rather that death sentences. U.S. reformers worried about the negative impact of intermingling and lax controls and therefore proposed new structural designs based on the principles of isolation. Ohio’s early state prison, built in 1813, reflected many of the problems that nineteenth- century reformers identified as endemic. The first prison, located in Columbus, stood about a mile south of where the penitentiary would eventually be located. This building, constructed of brick on a stone foundation, measured approximately sixty feet long and thirty feet wide, and included a basement located partly underground, and three upper stories. The first story housed a cellar, kitchen, and prisoner dining room; the second was the Keeper’s residence; and the third story contained thirteen cells. The prisoners’ general health was impaired by unsanitary conditions in the old building. Cells were damp and unheated, dark and unventilated, and small. Beds consisted of hay, straw, and a blanket during winter. In addition, prisoners ate a coarse and insufficient diet. Deaths by suicide and from lack of adequate medical treatment were common. Such conditions made the living situation tense and often pushed prisoners to the edge of rebellion. By 1819, the small prison, which originally had “answered all purposes of a pioneer commonwealth,”25 proved inadequate to contain the area’s criminal population. Plans to enlarge the prison with consideration for prisoner health, comfort, and safety, demonstrate how Ohio’s reforms reflected newer national trends.26 An emphasis on prisoner rehabilitation had resulted in two competing prison designs: The Pennsylvania system and the Auburn system.

25 B.F. Dyer, History of the Ohio Penitentiary, Annex and Prisoners (Columbus, OH: Dyer, 1891, printed by Columbus Penitentiary Print), 8. 26 Clara Belle Hicks, “The History of Penal Institutions in Ohio,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly (October 1924): 372-378 and Dyer, 10-13.

14 Pennsylvania reformers emphasized a philosophy of isolation. During the last decade of the eighteenth century, designer Robert Smith had drawn the plans to expand Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail to allow for the solitary confinement of hardened criminals. Embedded in the architecture of the cells was the specific intention of providing isolated space that allowed inmates to reflect on their lives. Smith designed cells that were six feet wide, eight feet deep, and nine feet high. Each included a small window near the top of the cell facing to the street. A double iron grating and an exterior louver prevented inmates from seeing outside. Furnishings consisted of a mattress, water tap, and privy pipe. Heat drifted in by way of stoves located in the corridors. The Pennsylvania system discouraged contact between convicts and staff. Inmates saw a guard or turnkey only once a day and rarely left their cells except for brief exercise or a bath. When guards did have contact with prisoners, they wore masks to ensure anonymity. The prison’s architecture also intended to prevent contact between prisoners through the use of heavy iron doors without grates at the cell entrances. Based on a perception of progressive reform, both the Pennsylvania Prison Society and the Walnut Street Prison Board successfully lobbied the state legislature to authorize the construction of more structures based on this design. Workers built state prisons in Pittsburgh in 1818 and Philadelphia in 1821.27 Initial reports on the effectiveness of this system, however, were poor. In 1831, William Crawford, secretary of the Prison Discipline Society of London, traveled to the United States to observe select American prison architecture and systems of prison management and publish an account of his findings. At the Walnut Street prison, he found poorly ventilated cellblocks and inmates who could, in fact, communicate freely through pipes with residents of adjacent cells. More distressing to Crawford was the use of the solitary cells as an arena of punishment. He found that “there was no seclusion … a statement which is confirmed by the fact of there being in the floor of each cell an iron staple, to which are attached three short chains, for the secure confinement of as many convicts.” Crawford continued, “There is no reason to believe that this penitentiary was at any period of its history, less deserving the censures which its own friends

27 Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 68-73 and William Crawford, Report on the Penitentiaries of the United States (Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 1834), 8.

15 have of late unsparingly bestowed upon it.”28 Despite these shortcomings, Crawford, like many of his contemporaries, maintained a faith in the guiding principles of the institution, and especially the soundness of the isolation theory: “Solitary imprisonment is not only an exemplary punishment but a powerful agent in the reformation of morals. In the silence of the cell contamination cannot be received or imparted.”29 The philosophy was not misguided. The major problem facing these prisons was poor execution. A rival prison method developed in Auburn, New York. Reformers once again agreed that solitary confinement should replace congregate prisoner spaces in order to assist in the process of personal reformation. In 1816, Jonathan Daniels designed the initial construction of Auburn prison’s south wing to include room for individual cells. At three feet eight inches wide, seven and a half feet deep, and seven feet high, these cells were significantly smaller than those in the Pennsylvania system. The Auburn system, like the Pennsylvania model, did not initially allow male prisoners to work. By 1824, however, this policy fell into disfavor because of a high rate of insanity and mental illness among prisoners in their tiny cells. A visit to the Auburn prison by New York Governor DeWitt Clinton resulted in the subsequent pardon of most of the prisoners. Warden Elam Lynds, architect John Cray, and board of inspectors member Gershom Powers amended the Auburn model to allow for working in silent association during the day and solitary confinement in cells at night. This system became the prevailing model for all states except Pennsylvania in the following decades.30 The key differences between the two systems came down to a conflict between ideology and practice. On the one hand, Pennsylvania system advocates were not generally those involved in the day-to-day operations of the actual prisons. Without the grim first hand experiences, a staunch sense of idealism pervaded their negotiations. The Auburn system and its architecture, on the other hand, came primarily from decisions made by pragmatic individuals who were builders and prison staff. The Auburn model rarely lived up to the same standards as the Pennsylvania model. The spaces were too small to work in and inadequacies existed in the sanitation facilities, heating systems, and ventilation ducts. William Crawford noted that association between prisoners during the day required excessive use of physical punishment to

28 Crawford, 8. 29 Ibid., 12. 30 Johnston, 75-78.

16 deter the inmates from conversing. Prisons based on the New York system, however, were significantly cheaper to build and for many policy makers, economic considerations offset the less desirable aspects of the model. In 1834, Ohio based its first penitentiary on the Auburn model, utilizing the main features of solitary confinement at night and silent associated labor by day. These policies reflected a sense of optimism about reforming prisoners through a new “system of discipline.” In official records that document the first year of operation, prison officials expressed hope about the effectiveness of their practices. The prison’s physician commented, “The constant labor through the day, and early sleep at night consequent upon fatigue of those in health, tend greatly to the relief of their mental sufferings.”31 Like other prisons built on the Auburn model, however, the operation of the prison did not meet the builders’ expectations. By 1836, a mere two years after the opening of the Ohio Penitentiary, prison administrators noted that their system of discipline might be causing more demoralization than reformation of inmates. The directors observed that “a deep and gloomy shade, hangs upon the picture.” Reports from penitentiaries in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and other states offered similar sentiments.32 Still, prison administrators refused to be deterred from their original goal of aiding prisoners in the process of achieving a stronger moral resolve. Warden Laurin Dewey wrote in 1846 that the Ohio Penitentiary would not shy away from the “benevolent spirit of the age.”33 Four years later prison directors stated, “It has been decided by experience, that kind, humane, but firm and decided treatment, is better than that of a harsh, cruel and tyrannical nature; the former begets a kind and benevolent feeling, and causes the prisoner to reflect, and conclude that although he has violated the laws of the country, and for that he is suffering imprisonment, his reformation is the object desired; the latter renders them revengeful, and malignant, and causes them to conclude that the object of the State is revenge and persecution, which no doubt exerts a bad influence upon their future conduct, when they leave the institution and return to their

31 M.B. Wright, “Physician’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1834, 19. 32 Joseph Olds, Samuel F. MacCracken, and C. Anthony, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1836, 4. 33 Laurin Dewey, “Warden’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1846, 5.

17 homes.”34 Despite the divergence between these idealistic philosophies and actual practices, the reform initiative persisted. Guided by an indomitable faith in their present philosophies, well-meaning reformers and prison officials continued their discussions about how to amend the initial system in order to produce an environment conducive to rehabilitation. This process culminated in the 1880s with specific legal changes in the Ohio Penitentiary made by the state legislature to address some of the perceived consequences of long-term incarceration. The laws were intended to make the prison experience more humane and differential by basing treatment on prisoners’ behavior within the institution. The language of these discussions, no matter what stance the speaker took, expressed an interest in maintaining a progressive course of penal policies toward prisoner rehabilitation and decreasing crime rates. There was, however, no consensus at the top about what policies best constituted humane. Solitary confinement, as the major method through which to promote prison reform, came under fire. Written into the Rules and Regulations of the New Penitentiary at the onset of the prison’s tenure in 1834 was the idea that “the preservation and the effect of the whole system of discipline depends upon non-intercourse between convicts. Assistant keepers will, therefore, make use of every exertion to prevent communication between prisoners.”35 But by 1846, Warden Dewey had detected significant problems in how this policy affected prisoner morale. He began the first effort to reverse the traditional ideology of reformation through solitude. New rules dictated that each prisoner maintain his separate cell at night and labor silently together by day. But prisoners would eat meals in common and attend services and Sabbath school together.36 Persistent overcrowding, despite several expansion projects, also provided a pragmatic reason to reverse the policy of isolation. In 1858, the prison population outgrew management’s ability to find isolated cells, resulting in the use of the prison chapel as sleeping quarters for 135 men.37 Overcrowding resulted in the suspension of regular religious services a

34 Thomas Brown, Matthias Martin, and David Gregory, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1850, 4. 35 “Rules and Regulations of the New Penitentiary,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1834, 10. 36 Dewey, 7. 37 Charles Breyfogle, L.W. Babbitt, J.D. Morris, A.C. Hanes, and John Taylor, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1859, 3.

18 year later.38 By the 1870s, a majority of prison administrators had come to view continuous solitary confinement as cruel treatment and it became reserved only as a method of punishment. Ideas regarding proper discipline shifted dramatically over the nineteenth century as administrators considered the most effective means of maintaining order within the prison. Officials argued about finding a balance between strict routines and degrading punishments that by angering prisoners might deter attempts to rehabilitate them. No consensus developed about what constituted the most effective methods. Punishments at the first Columbus jail were relatively mild compared to later practices. The earliest prison disciplinary techniques consisted of isolation in a dark cell and the withdrawal of tobacco and other privileges.39 When prisoners shifted into the new penitentiary, which was based on the principle of isolation and deprivation, officials came up with new methods that tended to rely more heavily on corporal means. These practices primarily included plunging prisoners in a ducking tub filled with cold water, whipping prisoners with a cat o’ nine tails, and the suspensory slide. After 1846, as the policy of solitary confinement began to fall into disfavor, prison officials created the method of the “dungeon” to their list of punishments—isolation in a dark cell, located underneath the chapel, and dietary restrictions. Time of confinement varied in length, lasting from several hours to several days. These methods quickly became contested. As early as 1846, Warden Dewey spoke out against harsh, physical discipline, especially the use of the lash and corporal punishment.40 Warden Dimmock wrote in his 1852 annual report that although rigid discipline was a necessary tool to prevent crime and reform prisoners, the severity of corporal punishments should be limited. He recorded the number of punishments doled out that year as 120 over seventy-eight prisoners. Of these, forty-seven received the lash, at an average of four lashes per prisoner. Sixty-five prisoners received punishment by showering, and eight were confined in the dungeon. This balance seemed to Dimmock to be the ideal numbers and demonstrated effective enforcement. The Warden further argued that solitary confinement was the cruelest and least effective of all punishments.41

38 Nathaniel Merion, H.E. Parsons, and Theo. Comstock, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1860, 4. 39 Dyer, 10. 40 Dewey, 6. 41 A.G. Dimmock, “Report of the Warden,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1852, 28.

19 By the mid-nineteenth century, both solitary confinement and corporal punishment seemed ineffective and cruel yet prison administrators continued to debate which method was actually less barbaric. Under Warden John Ewing, the prison officially dispensed with the cat o’ nine tails and showering techniques. Ewing preferred using the dungeon—solitary confinement in a perfectly dark cell with a diet of bread and water for several days. This punishment, he stated, was less violent and painful for officers to inflict, while its influence on offenders was far more salutary.42 Subsequently, Warden L.G. Slyke agreed that “confinement in the dungeon and a spare diet of bread and water, have been found amply sufficient for the most refractory” and produced fewer cases of insubordination.43 By the end of the 1850s, prison directors mandated that the dungeon be the official method of punishment. The issue of discipline, however, evaded an effective or consistent solution. In 1863, Warden Nathanial Merion objected to the use of solitary confinement. He argued that the dungeon damaged prisoner health, wronged his employer, defrauded the State by depriving it of labor, and did general harm. He requested of the directors discretionary power to vary the punishment in extreme cases.44 A decade later, physician Norman Gay continued to speak out against using the dungeon, citing the poor sanitary conditions of the physical space. He wrote, “punishment by confinement in a dark, non-ventilated cell is cruel and criminal.” Dr. Gay officially recommended that the cells for punishment be located in the east end of the east hall and that a flue be opened. He observed that when the men emerged from the dungeon, they were almost dead from breathing foul exhalations.45 Despite the insecurities expressed by many of the officials, the words in their reports still reflected faith in the progressiveness of their practices. Prison Directors reported in 1867, “the discipline of the convicts is fully equal, if not superior, to that of any former period.”46 When E.G. Coffin became warden in 1885, he halted much of these debates by implementing a third option for punishment: demerits that resulted in the loss of privileges, loss of good time earned,

42 John Ewing, “Report of the Warden,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1856, 24. 43 L.G. Slyke, “Warden’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1858, 11. 44 Nathanial Merion, “Warden’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1863, 8. 45 Norman Gay, “Physician’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1872, 100. 46 James L. Bates, George Harsh, and John C. Dunlevy, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1867, 3.

20 reduction in grade, wearing stripes, and solitary confinement. Coffin commented, “Our hope is founded on the humanizing influence awakened by kind and sympathetic treatment.”47 Policy makers frequently considered how to individualize the prison experience so that each inmate’s personal behavior could be viewed as a demonstration of his own level of rehabilitation within the penitentiary. That, in turn, would have an impact on what privileges were allowed, with whom he could interact, and prospects of early release. The debate became an open acknowledgement that the policy guiding prison management at the onset of penitentiary construction did not fulfill its main objectives of punishment, rehabilitation, and prevention. By the 1850s, administrators began to question the length of sentences. Warden Dimmock worried that prisoners often did not receive appropriate sentences for their crimes. Creating the ideal conditions for reformation hinged on finding the effective amount of time for prisoners to reflect on their misguided lives. For most crimes, wrote Dimmock, a sentence between one and five years should suffice. “Too long a service becomes lost, the body decays, and he goes down to the grave the most pitiable object that humanity ever wept over.”48 He also worried about overcrowding created by forced congregate prisoner living. Since the needs of the prison continued to exceed the physical limits of the building, Dimmock advocated for a classification system that would separate “hardened criminals” from “young boys” to prevent their co-mingling. Interactions between these two groups, he insisted, would “destroy all the good effects of the moral influence of the Chaplain, and reformatory influence of the Institution.”49 Ideally, a separate House of Corrections would take all minors resident in the prison. In 1870, the Ohio Penitentiary Board of Directors proposed the new concept of indefinite sentences. This principle dictated that adult men should remain incarcerated until they demonstrated characteristics of personal and moral reform or until they died. Advocates believed that this system would make prisoners more receptive to the rehabilitative efforts.50 It also supported the ideology of personalized and appropriate prison experiences. Over the next

47 E.G. Coffin, “Warden’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1897, 63. 48 Dimmock, 24. 49 A.G. Dimmock, “Report of the Warden,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1853, 15. 50 James L. Bates, Stanley Matthews, and George Harsh, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1870, 7-9.

21 two decades, the state assembly passed a series of laws that helped to further the advocacy for individualized treatment of prisoners. Passage of the 1885 General Sentence Act gave courts the power to impose sentences that would allow for possible release after serving the minimum term mandated by the conviction. The prison’s Board of Managers could consider the behavior of these inmates within the penitentiary to decide if they were eligible for early release. If not, prisoners could remain incarcerated for the maximum term provided by law for the crime.51 Reformers disliked determinate sentences, which were based on the character of the offense, and favored indeterminate sentences that were based on the character of the individual. The Habitual Crime Act, also passed in 1885, allowed courts to sentence repeat offenders to life in prison. Prisoners commented that they hated these laws because there was no fixed time to build their hopes on. Instead, their incarceration time depended on their previous record and good conduct while in prison.52 Discussions regarding prison reform and changes in prison systems occurred within a national context and were influenced by international trends. Records indicate that penitentiary administrators and members of prison societies remained dissatisfied with both the current system and proposed alternatives throughout the nineteenth century. Some even admitted outright that the current system produced more recidivism than reform and was not successfully achieving their goal of rehabilitation. In 1870, two hundred delegates of various prison societies and prison boards from across the country met in Cincinnati to discuss strategies. They argued that the system of pure punishment and retribution failed to reform not only because of its reliance on the fixed sentence, but because it was founded on the notion of a “mythic morality.” In addition, isolation, lockstep marching, and striped uniforms debilitated one’s manhood.53 In response to these concerns, delegates passed the “Declaration of Principles,” comprised of thirty- seven principles that created standards and guidelines for correctional theories and programs and

51 J.J. Johnson, Isaac D. Smead, Thomas S. Murphy, R.M. Rownd, and W.R. Phipps, “Report of the Board of Managers,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1887, 1081. 52 Ibid., 1000. 53 Thomas G. Blomber and Karol Lucken, American Penology: A History of Control (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000), 70.

22 reflected the thrust of the so-called reformatory movement emerging from the Cincinnati Prison Congress.54 The Declaration of Principles covered four general categories. First, delegates decided that the three major purposes of the prison were to punish a criminal act, treat the prisoner for the protection of society, and assist in his moral regeneration. They also emphasized religious training, industrial training, and an end to contract labor. Second, delegates addressed the issue of prison organization. They proposed the professionalization of all penal personnel and the removal of prison administration from political control. This involved relocating control of the prison to a nonpartisan board and creating a federal bureau of criminal statistics to aid prison administrators. Third, to prevent crime, delegates suggested that public education be made mandatory. Finally, on the issue of legal reform, delegates called for indeterminate sentencing for all offenders. They argued that both repeated short sentences and excessively long ones undermined rehabilitation efforts. They also stressed the need for differential treatment for insane criminals, the free use of executive clemency, and state compensation for persons wrongly convicted and imprisoned.55 These declarations centered on individual care and the scientific treatment of offenders based on a medical model. Ohio’s sentencing and prison reform laws of the 1870s and 1880s clearly reflected these new attitudes. At the time of the 1870 Congress in Cincinnati, there was a general consensus among prison societies and penal officials about the need to move away from both the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems. Delegates instead began to tout the Irish system, first developed in the 1850s by Sir Walter Crofton. This approach emphasized training and performance as the main instruments of reform. Prisoners underwent three separate phases: a period of strict solitary confinement; a period of congregate work, in which the prisoners could advance to higher levels by credits earned for industry and good behavior; and finally, a period in which prisoners could be offered a conditional parole into the community.56 Sentences were indeterminate and release was contingent entirely on behavior within the prison.

54 John Phillips Resch, “The 1870 Cincinnati Prison Congress: A Centennial Commemoration,” 1970, 17. 55 Resch, 17-20. 56 Haynes, Fred E. Criminology, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1935), 317

23 Records produced by the 1870 Congress reveal a “mixture of optimism, an evangelical spirit, and a common faith that they were making rapid progress toward the true solution of the great problem of crime and its treatment.”57 Another international congress held two years later in London brought four hundred delegates together but could not maintain the momentum needed to fuel the movement. The last prison congress of the decade occurred in 1875, and was poorly attended by those who simply reaffirmed the same gospel.58 Despite the initial burst of hope, enthusiasm for the cause dwindled. Prison activism has historically cycled in and out of favor, influenced by conditions external to the movement itself. In the early nineteenth century, prison reform emerged as one of many responses to a rapidly changing American environment brought about by urbanization and increasing population. Toward the end of the century, a series of depressions forced the reallocation of reformers’ attention and resources. Prisoners, among the most marginalized and stigmatized individuals in society, no longer warranted the immediate attention of reformers. Some had to admit that people in prison are generally there because they did something really bad. Organizations refocused their attention to the homeless, starving, unemployed, but honest individuals affected by the economic downturn. For the moment, prison reform was put on hold. During the 1880s, other states struggled with the same debates that occurred within the Ohio Penitentiary. Many states constructed reformatories, which generally housed younger prisoners and operated on a three-grade system. Release dates from these institutions were often contingent on visible proof of reformation. New York was the first to design such a place, implementing a reformatory system in 1876, followed by Michigan in 1877. By the end of the century, nine more states had enacted the system, including Ohio.59 These changes served to further the individualizing process and sought to rectify some of the perceived failures of generalized treatment for all convicted criminals despite their ages and previous records. Reformatories, however, had their own set of problems. Like other institutions of incarceration, they experienced overcrowding, understaffing, and mismanagement. And, although it went

57 Resch, 8-9. 58 Ibid., 21. 59 Blomber and Lucken, 76. The other states were: MA in 1884, PA and MN in 1889; CO in 1890; IL in 1891; KS in 1895; OH, IN, and WI in 1895, 1896, and 1899.

24 against official policies, individuals within reformatories experienced brutal corporal punishment and solitary confinement.60 By 1910, nearly every adult reformatory in the country used an indeterminate sentencing structure and parole. A decade later, courts gave almost half of all offenders admitted to prison an indeterminate sentence. Parole laws also had gained wide favor by 1900, when every reformatory had parole, and twenty states had parole laws for prisons and penitentiaries. By 1923, half of all prisoner releases were under a system of parole. The concept of parole was based on the similar and earlier idea of “good time” already in practice. Twenty-two states had enacted gain time laws between 1860 and 1880. This reduced the length of sentences anywhere from between half to a third. Critics of the system found, however, that the use of parole was frequently employed to relieve overcrowding rather than to reward reformation.61 Throughout the nineteenth century, practical issues and public perceptions butted heads with reform ideology. Day to day needs within in prisons, especially problems created by persistent overcrowding, meant that officials, regardless of how well meaning or philosophically tied to the ideology of reform, used methods that could best address immediate crises in their institutions. By the mid-nineteenth century, many states and commissions had authorized investigations of penitentiary operations and had published their findings. These reports reveal that while the movement for reform had much support, in reality, penitentiaries did little more than incapacitate criminals and that conditions were actually worsening. Experts concluded that cases of recidivism in the nineteenth century were far greater than those of reform.62 By the late nineteenth century, penitentiaries had, in fact, failed to achieve the goals of effective punishment, rehabilitation, and prevention because they did not veer far enough away from their original paradigm. The Ohio Penitentiary’s chaplain, L. Warner, wrote, “The prison officer has two distinct interests to guard—the interest of the citizens, and that of criminals—and these often conflict. In securing one, he may lose the other.” In his opinion, prisons as reformatory institutions had proven to be failures.63

60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 73-77. 62 Ibid., 50-60. 63 L. Warner, “Chaplain’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1858, 35-37.

25 Chapter 3: The Reality of Prison Reform

Clevelanders awoke on December 8, 1877 to read the headline in the Cleveland Leader “Penitentiary Horrors … The Way in which the Ohio Penitentiary Officials Reform Convicts.” The article contained a story told to a reporter by an ex-convict, who had spent eleven years in the Ohio Penitentiary. He shared his experiences and those of friends he knew in the prison. One of those individuals, Frank Bechtel, had been sentenced to three years at the Pen. Bechtel strained his back while working in the prison factory. He complained about the pain for two weeks. One morning, when he could not get out of bed, the prison doctor had Bechtel stripped and burned on his back with a “blow-pipe and spirit-lamp … until the flesh began to roll off.” Guards then threw Bechtel into the dungeon without dressing his wound. Afterward, he could only walk with crutches, permanently crippled. The convict-informer also told the story of James Quill, sentenced to five years in the Pen. For a breach of discipline, Quill remained in the dungeon for fourteen days, during which time he was ducked in ice water twice a day for the entire two weeks. He weighed 192 pounds upon entering solitary confinement and 155 upon leaving. Later, he contracted heart disease. A guard shot a prisoner named Smith when the inmate refused to work in the cooper shop but was acquitted at his subsequent trial. Nor was the kind of treatment experienced by Bechtel, Quill, and Smith unusual. The convict stated that a guard would strike a prisoner with his club on the slightest pretext. Officials employed various other methods of punishment, including the sweatbox, the bullrings, the ducking tub, and the dungeon.64 Although some Ohioans were already involved in prison reform efforts, articles like this contributed to a growing sense of disillusionment with the supposed progress being made in the movement to civilize prisons. In describing conditions generally considered barbaric, the article was one of the first steps toward removing the mask that obscured the reality of daily life in the Ohio Penitentiary. * * * The 1877 Cleveland Leader article alleging prisoner abuse within Ohio’s largest prison prompted the state assembly to authorize an investigation by the Standing Committee on the

64 “Penitentiary Horrors … The Way in which the Ohio Penitentiary Officials Reform Convicts,” Cleveland Leader, 8 December 1877, 3.

26 Penitentiary. Committee members expressed concern about the charges that “inhuman, barbarous, and cruel treatment is inflicted upon convicts confined in said prison, for trivial offenses, which, if true, would only be tolerated in the dark ages, and should not be allowed in this nineteenth century of our boasted civilization.” Representatives took strong objection to the allegations, believing it to be “the imperative duty of the Legislature to care for the poor, unfortunate persons confined in said prison, and make such investigations as are proper to be made relative to the discipline and treatment of such persons, and thereby afford them proper and humane treatment, in accordance with the age in which we live.”65 The Committee sought the testimonies of guards and administrators, contractors, prisoners, and prison physicians to shed light on the reality of the conditions within the Ohio Penitentiary. The 1878 hearings provide a window to the debate over what constituted civilized practices in penitentiaries. They attest to the fact that the reform efforts did not result in a significant move away from the traditional paradigm guiding prison ideologies despite the sense of optimism among those working toward change. In addition to their investigation of overall prison conditions, the Committee was especially concerned with the actions of one individual—Deputy Warden James A. Dean, and his alleged role in the 1861 death of prisoner Robert Whalen. A. Loofbourrow, a guard at the prison since 1856, reported to the committee that Whalen had been punished by Dean in the bullrings a week or two before his death for “getting out of bed and easing himself at the bedside of another prisoner.”66 Loofbourrow stated that Whalen was hung by his wrists so that his feet just touched the floor for about ten minutes. The harsh treatment forced Whalen to the infirmary, where he soon died. Dr. D. R. Kinsell, the penitentiary’s physician, performed a post-mortem examination, and discovered a rupture in the spinal column. Kinsell reported that he believed the punishment was the cause of Whalen’s death.67 The description of Whalen hanging by the wrists from a prison wall harkened back to a dark age of barbarity when human life held little value. The readers of the Leader, Ohio legislators, and other observers, were horrified that their society still exhibited the characteristics of their supposedly less enlightened ancestors.

65 “Testimony Taken by Standing Committee on Penitentiary under House Resolution No. 31, by Mr. Johnson,” Ohio State Assembly (Columbus, 1878), 1. 66 “Testimony,” 15. 67 “Testimony,” 50.

27 Modern societies liked to think of themselves as “civilized.” During the period between the 1830s and the end of the nineteenth century, prison reformers associated “civilized” social behavior with a heightened regard for the well-being and reformation of incarcerated criminals. However, diverse groups, including institutional administrators, prisoners, government officials, and reformers perceived these ideologies differently. Inside prisons, the rhetoric of reform masked the realities of day-to-day life. Administrators assumed that progress occurred along a timeline, and they frequently contrasted their current situations with previous practices. Ohio Penitentiary Directors noted in 1867 that “the discipline of the convicts is fully equal, if not superior, to that of any former period.”68 Prisoners, quite naturally, perceived of progress in terms of their own treatment. Government officials were concerned with the state’s image as well as the efficient functioning of institutions under their jurisdiction. They measured progress through positive response to public policies. Reformers, the most idealistic of all these groups, focused on the improvement of the human condition. Ohioans engaged in an open debate over the direction and success of the Ohio Penitentiary as part of a larger era of reform. In practice, attitudes toward penal policy demonstrated that a variety of opinions existed over what constituted “barbaric” and “civilized.” There was no clear linear path to, or definitive notion of, enlightened prison practices. For prison managers, the debate over proper disciplinary procedures was especially varied. Whatever individuals argued, whether they advocated corporal punishment, solitary confinement, or a demerit system, all echoed the same philosophy of “civilized.” Theories about prisoner rehabilitation dictated that a shift in behavior could only be prompted by isolation. When implemented, however, the blanket theory could not account for individual prisoner personalities and behavior problems. Still clinging to their overall goal of rehabilitation, prison officials recognized that there was no ideal path toward this end. Theories guiding the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems established certain expectations about how prisoners should respond to the penitentiary environment. When situations could not be controlled entirely, officials dealt with individual deviations in an immediate and harsh way. Often, the debates over prison reform came back to the competing definitions of “civilized.” The crux of the debate existed between two seemingly irresolvable stations: did civilized behavior mean treating prisoners humanely or did it mean maintaining social order?

68 James L. Bates, George Harsh, and John C. Dunlevy, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1867, 3.

28 Prison officials found that reconciliation could only occur when the definition of civilized remained flexible and when the treatment of prisoners resulted in general order. During the nineteenth century, prison officials utilized a variety of disciplinary practices, employing a flexible definition of civilized to accommodate sometimes severe treatment. The use of physical punishment, in fact, was written directly into the institution’s policies and regulations, promising that for all willful violations of the rules, “corporal punishment will certainly be inflicted.”69 One of the methods, “ducking,” consisted of a large tub housed beneath the insane asylum filled with either river or tap water. At the end of the daily shift, a guard marched prisoners who had committed violations to the ducking tub, where they were blindfolded and plunged underwater multiple times. During the entire process, “he soon comes to the conclusion that he will do about anything required of him, and he returns to his shop a sadder and wiser man.”70 Any number of prisoners was punished at the same time this way. The method remained in use for decades, its practice often obscured in records, indicating an awareness of possible negative public reactions to such flexible definitions of civilized treatment. The tub itself generally remained outside the realm of public knowledge and deliberately avoided on prison tours. A second frequent form of physical punishment was the “bull-rings.” Prisoners were handcuffed to the rings so that their feet just barely touched the ground. They remained in the rings from minutes to days. Beatings also occurred, whether with hands or with instruments like the cat o’ nine tails or guards’ canes. Sometimes guards were more creative. Edward Conway, incarcerated at the Ohio Penitentiary between March 1876 and January 1878, testified that guards burned his eyes with a hot iron after he failed to complete his work quota.71 There was controversy over what were acceptable forms of physical punishment. Penitentiaries were based on the idea that the public, physical disciplinary methods of the previous generation of criminal justice were not beneficial in a process of rehabilitation. Yet, within prisons, many of the forms of punishment, common in the previous era, were still employed by prison officials. Physical punishment, then, became a way of controlling prisoners’

69 “Rules and Regulations of the New Penitentiary,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1834, 13. 70 The Prisoners of the Ohio Penitentiary: The Daily Routine of Their Lives, What They Are Compelled To Do, The System of Their Government, Their Punishment, Etc. (Columbus, 1883), 24. 71 “Testimony,” 31.

29 bodies when they refused to conform to the rules and regulations necessary in rehabilitation and the maintenance of order. Prison officials, however, were not ready to admit to an abandonment of their theories of humane and civilized inmate treatment. To them, physical punishment could still exist in a civilized system if it contributed to the overall rehabilitation of prisoners’ minds and to maintenance of order within the prison. Guards employed extreme solitary confinement where a set of cells underneath the chapel was set aside for use as “the dungeon.” In what Guard W.P. Dawson called the most common form of punishment, prisoners were isolated in a dark cell, where they ate only a few times a week.72 The use of the dungeon contradicted the early ideals of Ohio officials, who intended to use solitary confinement for prisoner reflection and rehabilitation. Instead, the lack of food and light made the experience a form of suffering under cover of positive, enlightened practices of solitary confinement. Despite the limited aspect of physical abuse, the promise of the dungeon carried great weight among prisoners. S.D. Miller, resident of the Ohio Penitentiary for three years during the 1870s, stated, “the continuous fear of the guard made men afraid of going to the dungeon every night.”73 Prison officials also utilized a demerit system, which awarded or revoked points for behavior within the institution. Collection of points correlated with certain privileges like freedom of movement, solid colored clothing, and the possession of items like tobacco. A variety of opinions about how humane this treatment was existed among prison officials and workers. S.A. Parsons had been a guard in the east and middle hall at the Ohio Penitentiary since 1876 when he testified. He stood before the house committee and stated, “I have never seen any inhuman treatment since I have been here.” Committee members pushed Parsons to clarify what he meant by “humane,” asking him about the practice of confining prisoners to the dungeon: “If they were there fourteen days, would that be humane?” Parsons maintained his assertion: “Yes, sir, for they are fed three days a week; a few bad cases have been kept in four or five days; in two cases—Donahue and Locklin—they were kept in fourteen days; they were very bad men, and kept there for fighting.”74 Parsons believed that sparse provisions and isolation, which resulted in physical debilitation, constituted more humane treatment than

72 “Testimony,” 60. 73 “Testimony,” 58. 74 “Testimony,” 36-37.

30 direct forms of punishment such as beatings. Using a flexible definition of what was civilized, he was able to reconcile the harsh treatment of prisoners with order and rehabilitation because it was not direct physical punishment. Others agreed that the prison’s methods met the standards of civilized practice. Warden L.G. Van Slyke, noting that the subject of prisoner discipline had attracted much public attention over the past several years, extolled the state of his facility, commenting, “it is the pride of Ohio that the laws and discipline are the most humane, that prisoners have the most privileges than those of any other state. And yet, they are also the most well-behaved.”75 Of the ducking tub, ex-warden Colonel Innis commented, “I think it the most humane mode of punishment used in the prison. It has been in use, I see by reports, thirty years.” The treatment was humane for Innis because it resulted in the control over individual prisoners and order of the general prison population. However, Innis condemned the practice of confining prisoners to the dungeon: “I think it is cruel, inhuman, and a disgrace to the State. I think civilized people ought to be ashamed of the 1050 old cells in the prison. I think the State at large, in permitting these cells to remain as they are, are inflicting greater punishment on the prisoners than any that is done by officers of the institution.”76 While testifying in front of the state assembly, Innis reassigned blame for the poor conditions to lawmakers, claiming that prison officials were restricted by inadequate resources allotted to them. Doctors, who were more directly involved with the physical and mental well-being of the prisoners, tended to be more outspoken against the physical methods used against prisoners and less hesitant to unmask the contradictions. They more often recognized and recorded the negative effects of these punishments. Because they relied on scientific and medical expertise, their definition of humane connected to the health of the prisons’ bodies, and not the social order in the prison. In 1872, Dr. Norman Gay, the Penitentiary’s physician, called punishment by confinement in a dark, non-ventilated cell cruel and criminal.77 Later that decade, Dr. James A. Norton agreed that isolation in the dungeon was cruel. According to his testimony: “I remained in the dungeon twenty minutes, and I experienced all things imaginable, and I had the door opened and saw the same effect on the prisoners in the dungeon, and such kind of imprisonment

75 L.G. Van Slyke, “Warden’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1858, 12. 76 “Testimony,” 46. Reports about the origins of the ducking tub vary. Captain Grove testified that the tub had been in use since 1813. 77 Norman Gay, “Physician’s Report,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1872, 100.

31 and punishment is liable to bring on disease that men are not aware of, for I felt the effects of it myself for sometimes afterward.”78 Dr. D. Halderman agreed that the more creative forms of physical punishment, like ducking, the bullring, and the dungeon, were “less humane than the older methods of the switch, paddle, or cat-o’-nine tails.”79 Dr. D.R. Kinsell noted the negative consequences of application of the punishments: “cases of lunacy, apoplexy, brain trouble, and incipient consumption are increased by use of the ducking tub. The dungeon has a similar effect.”80 Not everyone agreed that the physical punishments utilized in penitentiaries were degrading or harsh in nature. Deputy Warden Dean argued that the physical methods were only barbaric if performed improperly.81 Prisoners themselves, however, described what could only popularly be perceived as inhumane treatment. Prisoners and their doctors interpreted the appropriateness of punishments based on the negative impact they had on individuals’ physical and mental health and well-being. Wardens and guards measured their definition of humanity against prisoner behavior and order within the prison. They saw progress when punishments resulted in strict control of prisoners. While reformers emphasized the goal of rehabilitation for prisoners, guards wanted control of inmate behavior. Those arguing that physical methods were humane were those enforcing control. To define these practices as inhumane would be admitting that the system was retrogressive. Private punishment was a step away from the public retributions of the past meant to convey a wide message to a group of onlookers. Private punishments, often hidden from fellow inmates, were meant to control individuals. The public exposure of these methods of control was not part of the reportedly enlightened penitentiary system. If prison officials truly believed that this kind of treatment was humane, they would not have conducted the punishments in private. When their practices were exposed, they were forced to reconcile ideology and practical application. The prisoners’ behavior became the reason why physical punishments were necessary. Often, idealism and practicality butted heads. This was the problem that separated the supporters of the Auburn and Pennsylvania prison systems. While some reformers wanted to enact systems of graduated prison experiences that focused on reforming prisoners solely

78 “Testimony,” 17. 79 “Testimony,” 17. 80 “Testimony,” 51. 81 “Testimony,” 19.

32 through non-physical means, others believed that they could not maintain order or authority without relying on bodily methods. Guards, forced to explain why they disciplined certain prisoners, often reported that their actions were defensive. The argument of “self-defense” became another form of reconciliation between the debate over humane treatment and social order. The Standing Committee on the Penitentiary questioned Guard Bernard Ritter about an altercation he had with a prisoner on January 5, 1878 that caused Ritter to leave the prison. The guard testified, “I had a great deal of trouble with him, and he undertook to get advantage of me; I grabbed him by the neck, and we had a tussle; he ran to the deputy’s office, and said he would murder me before he got out of the penitentiary; when he said that to me, I hit him with my club; I was helped by the other guards, and he was sent to the dungeon.”82 Another guard described a similar experience that resulted in the death of a prisoner in October 1876. W.P. Dawson described the incident in which he was involved. A prisoner had caused a commotion during dinner and was sent to the dungeon for one night. Before he entered he said, ‘G—d d—n you I am going to kill you;’ he called me a name—s—n of a b—h. I says to him, go along; I don’t want anything to say to you, and while I was talking to him, he got his cooper’s adze, and come toward me, and he used the same name, and said he would kill me. I struck him with my cane and knocked the adze from him, then he ran to the bench for another weapon, but failed to get it, and then he clinched me, and said, ‘Now, Dawson, I have got you and g—d d—n you I will fix you right here.’ When we clinched, I threw down my cane and threw him across a barrel, and his head rested on the bench; he cried for help, but did not get it, and I could have killed him there, and while I had him down, he tried to reach for an axe, but failed to get it, and when he saw that he was beat, he threw his arms across his breast, and said he gave up, and after I let him up, he ran for me again, then I drew my revolver, and he would have taken it away from me had it not been for Mr. Beatley; then I would have nothing to defend myself with; … as he raised the iron to strike me I shot him.

82 “Testimony,” 45.

33 A jury found Dawson’s actions to be justifiable homicide.83 Although the public seemed dismayed and surprised by the alleged abuse in prisons, they were not willing to hold individual prison officials accountable for the violence, especially when it could be explained so well. After all, according to the testimony, the guard did everything humanely possible to avoid killing this prisoner. What the jury and the public did not hear, however, was the prisoner’s motivations for his actions. Nevertheless, they willingly accepted the explanations offered by officials that cited the need to control prisoners. Moreover, the situations between criminals and law enforcement necessarily set up a good guy versus bad guy scenario in which the public was unlikely to support criminals. A general unwillingness to hold individuals accountable for seemingly endemic problems made an overall shift in the traditional penitentiary paradigm impossible. Perhaps the public felt that the civilized treatment of prisoners was not worth the price of losing control and social order. The jury’s actions in Dawson’s case indicate that like the prison officials, the public defined humane treatment as keeping potential social disorder inside of prison walls and away from their consciousness. Official reports that contained glowing evaluations of the progress made within the penitentiary masked a harsher reality. Because a heightened emphasis on the enlightened or civilized treatment of prisoners prevailed during the middle of the nineteenth century, prison administrators officially denounced the more questionable disciplinary practices like ducking, the bullrings, and other corporal punishments. The Ohio Penitentiary’s annual reports claimed that these practices had become outmoded and replaced by non-physical methods. When pressed, however, some individuals, including guards, doctors, and prisoners, admitted that these practices were still unofficially in use. Keeping an arsenal of unofficial tactics proved three things. First, the practices were not humane. Second, they were not progressive. And third, the official practices did not work. In 1858, Warden L.G. Van Slyke wrote that no corporal punishment had been used within the prison in the last three years, resulting in fewer cases of insubordination. He noted, “confinement in the dungeon and a sparse diet of bread and water, have been found amply sufficient for the most refractory.”84 The legislative investigation in 1878, however, helped to expose the many discrepancies between official and unofficial practices. What started as a

83 “Testimony,” 61. 84 Van Slyke, 11.

34 journalistic investigation of prisoner Robert Whalen’s death developed into a full-scale state inquiry and increased public interest in what went on inside the walls of the Ohio Penitentiary. In addition to testimony gathered during the 1878 hearings, newspaper coverage as well as prisoner publications revealed that this kind of abuse might have been more widespread than just one individual. The penitentiary’s administration could not stop the emergence of these counter- narratives. Accounts written by prisoners and former inmates provided compelling descriptions of penitentiary life contradictory to the official records, which challenged official and public definitions of humane. In Five Years in Hell or The Ohio Penitentiary, published in 1883, Orange L. Pettay described prison experiences that clashed with the official records. Born in southeastern Ohio in 1849, Pettay spent much of his early life staying out of trouble. At age twelve, he was running on the Ohio River and by fifteen, he served as a private in the ninth Ohio Cavalry. During his twenties, Pettay taught in public schools. Life took a down turn, however, on March 31, 1877, when Pettay stole $221 in Guernsey County. It earned him a five-year sentence at the Ohio Penitentiary, serving from June 1878 to August 1882. An accomplice testified against Pettay and received two years. After the first, he entered the Lunatic Asylum, where he soon died.85 A typical day at the Ohio Penitentiary, according to Pettay, revolved around work. During the summer, prisoners labored in the factories for twelve hours a day. They worked from sun up to sun down in the winter. Treatment by the guards was brutal. After a few weeks working at the Pen, guards and foremen became so hardened by constant associations with the prisoners’ sufferings that they would have inmates punished for minor accidents or minor incidents. Pettay had little faith in the character of the guards: “No good man desires a situation which he can only keep by abusing, driving, cursing, beating, and damning defenseless men.”86 Perhaps this kind of treatment by guards was preemptive, provoked by the fear of possible prisoner misconduct and disorder. Pettay described the kind of harsh treatment experienced by prisoners at the hands of the guards. By the time of his tenure at the Pen, the ducking tub had been in disuse for five years. Instead, officials had replaced the earlier cold-water treatment with electric shock. Men were

85 Orange L. Pettay, Five Years in Hell or The Ohio Penitentiary (Caldwell, Ohio: Citizens’ Press Print, 1883), 9-33. 86 Pettay, 34-35.

35 stripped, shackled, handcuffed, blindfolded, and made to sit upright in a tub with water filled to the waist. Shocks came when guards dropped electrodes from a battery into the water. Pettay claimed that he was punished like this three times in a single day. Guards also stripped and blindfolded prisoners and made them stand in a tub, where they sprayed them with a powerful hose.87 While guards and wardens might claim abandonment of ducking, other forms of water related physical punishment persisted. The need for social order and control, whether preemptive or reactive, remained present in the prison as long as officials feared they might lose power. The violent nature of these techniques kept them generally out of the official reports and off the usual tour. However, simply because these practices occurred in the nineteenth-century rather than in previous eras, prison officials believed, or justified, that they reflected a more civilized mentality and an increased awareness of the humanity of prisoners. Pettay blamed much of the violence on Deputy Warden James A. Dean. The seventy- four-year-old Dean was not a physically imposing man, standing six feet and weighing only 135 pounds, Pettay credited the deputy with destroying 2,200 men, both body and soul. Of Dean, Pettay stated, “his choicest food is sighs from broken hearts; his only music, the pattering sound from drops of blood, while his poisoned soul is fanged to strike his fellow’s life!”88 Pettay blamed contractors who oversaw the prisoners’ work for much of the abuse. He held these foremen responsible for doling out three fourths of the punishments, with an average of fifty men disciplined per day. This, he claimed, was the only way that the contract system could be maintained. Contractors operated outside the official guidelines and rhetoric of reform of the Ohio Penitentiary. Their main concern was the quick and efficient production of material goods. Prisoner order, therefore, had to be maintained through strict and swift physical enforcement. If a prisoner died from these beatings, it would be called death from fever, heart disease, or hemorrhage of the lungs. In some cases, the Parole Board pardoned individuals beaten so badly that death was imminent. In this way the prison avoided having too many deaths in its records, and continued the façade of humane.89 Pettay believed that the system was counter-productive in the effort to reform prisoners. Crime, he wrote, was the mark of an unstable mind. The Ohio Penitentiary, in fact, was set up in

87 Pettay, 74-78. 88 Pettay, 39. 89 Pettay, 37-63.

36 a way that turned semi-bad people into hardened criminals: “Since, in this State, imprisonment is not other than pure slavery, and slavery is always degrading, it has no tendency toward reform.”90 Unlike prison officials, inmates recognized that harm to the body and mind resulted in social disorder, proving that official efforts at so-called reform were ultimately counter- productive. Increasing rates of recidivism confirmed this point. Pettay was not the only person to accuse the Ohio Penitentiary of harsh conditions. Charles L. Clark, who had previously spent time at the Illinois State Penitentiary, entered the Ohio Penitentiary on February 2, 1899 as inmate number 31581 for one year. At the time, it was the largest U.S. prison with 2,400 male and female residents. Severe overpopulation produced an even greater need for control. Clark’s account verified much of the violence that occurred within the institution. “The punishments in Columbus were fierce,” he asserted.91 For minor infractions of the rules, inmates suffered loss of good time with the revoking of Chapel privileges. Instead of attending services, prisoners were forced to walk lockstep as fast as possible in a circle for forty-five minutes. For serious infractions, such as failure to meet work quotas, prisoners received a “water cure.” Clark described the punishment: “A man would remove his clothes and be strapped in a bathtub and a strong stream of water turned on him. As the man was blindfolded he never knew when or where he would be hit. This was the most severe punishment inflicted and a man generally [sic] came out of it half drownded.”92 Clark described the “humming bird,” in which a prisoner “would be stripped and blindfolded and an electric battery applied to different parts of his body.”93 A strapping post was also used to beat men who refused to satisfy prisoner contractors or officials. Clark, like Pettay, blamed the contract system for much of the abuse: “Most of the punishments were inflicted because of the demand of the Prison contractors because of the reports for not doing tasks. Many men were driven desperate and insane because of these conditions. Most of the 20 or so prisoners in the insane asylum had been driven insane because of the abuse inflicted upon them generally as a result of not satisfying the demands of some

90 Pettay, 85. 91 Charles L. Clark and Earle Edward Eubank, Lockstep and Corridor: Thirty-five Years of Prison Life (Cincinnati, Ohio: The University of Cincinnati Press, 1927), 69. 92 Clark and Eubank, 69-70. 93 Clark and Eubank, 70.

37 Contractor.”94 From his perspective as an insider, Clark believed that the manner of disciplining the prisoners was not conducive to the betterment of the convict. These methods remained within the paradigm of what previously had been considered as barbaric. Additional descriptions of questionable practices came out during the 1878 investigation of the prison. W.L. Merdith, sent to the Ohio Penitentiary for three years and eight months under the charge of grand larceny, testified in front of the investigative committee. When asked about his treatment, Merdith confirmed some of the harsh conditions. Prisoners taken to the ducking tub were usually plunged underwater two to three times and six wiped with the same towel. Water came chilled from the refrigerator. The prisoners then had to spend the night in their cold, wet clothing. Merdith described how he was once kept in the bullrings from evening until 2:00 A.M. for going from one shop to another without leave. For taking off his coat and shoes, he was sent to the dungeon. Merdith was also hit by the guards with their canes and saw other prisoners hit as well.95 Prisoner Robert Manning was ducked every day for talking.96 Jacob Houston testified that he was put “in the hole” for “making signs,” talking, or even coughing. John Reid, who served two years and seven months for cutting a man, spent time in the dungeon. Although he never saw the actual ducking done, he did see the tub with ice in it. He once saw a batch of eight men go in and come out wet. S.D. Miller, incarcerated for three years, described treatment as poor. He was punished with the dungeon, ducking, and the bullrings. He knew of sixty-five men being ducked at the same time.97 In describing these individual accounts, the counter-narratives culminate to describe a pervasiveness of these kinds of incidents, demonstrating that these practices remained an important part of the prison paradigm throughout most of the nineteenth-century. The practices on prisoner bodies and minds remained barbaric and unenlightened. However, officials redefined the practices as “humane” within the context of maintaining power, control, and social order. Consequently, the rhetoric of reform suggested progress in the prison while the reality of the paradigm remained the same. The Ohio Penitentiary’s past consists of two stories: the official record and the counter- narratives. These sources show that enlightened and progressive change was defined in a specific manner that played out only in the rhetoric of official prison records. The reports

94 Clark and Eubank, 69-75. 95 “Testimony,” 25-26. 96 “Testimony,” 32. 97 “Testimony,” 34-58.

38 created a mask covering methods of punishment that prison officials felt where justified by the need for order. They defined progress by order through control over behavior of the prisoners and the effective utilization of incarcerated labor. Counter narratives revealed a cruel and inhumane system of treatment. Prisoners, doctors, and antebellum reformers were concerned with the well-being and rehabilitation of prisoners and their eventual reincorporation into society. They defined progress according to the theories of enlightenment encapsulated in the rhetoric of the times. Legislative reports and newspaper investigations helped remove the mask. Yet change refused to happen. In the debates between the civilized treatment of prisoners and the desire for social order, order prevailed, securing the dominance of the penitentiary paradigm during the nineteenth century.

39 Chapter 4: Conclusion

The invention of the penitentiary emerged as a desire to progress away from the barbaric rituals of past punishment and toward a more civilized future. The initial vision of the penitentiary embodied new enlightened sensibilities that aimed at reforming prisoners’ minds rather than just punishing their bodies. Planners and architects designed an entirely new arena for punishment that forced inmates to reevaluate their lives and renounce their actions. The initial goals of the penitentiary were grand. The institution was supposed to eliminate recidivism by aligning the minds of prisoners back to a normal way of thinking. It was to prevent future crime by standing as an imposing reminder of what happens to criminals. And, the penitentiary stood as a punitive measure against criminals. A steady belief in progressive linear change enabled those involved in prison reform to see positive reform in every action. Throughout the nineteenth century, prison reformers insisted that every step taken brought penitentiaries closer in line with a modern, enlightened society. Despite the rhetoric of change and modernity persistent throughout the language of prison reformers, however, substantive change did not occur during the first fifty years of the life of the penitentiary. Why didn’t change occur? Partly responsible was the fact that no consensus emerged about what constituted civilized or humane prisoner treatment. At the inception of the idea of the penitentiary, a dichotomy existed between well-meaning philanthropists and prison administrators. Throughout the early existence of the penitentiary, this debate continued. One was based on treatment of the body and mind; the other was based on order, control, and power. For philanthropists, like those who conceived of the Pennsylvania prison system, the experiment of the penitentiary proved a failure. The earliest reports coming out of prisons confirmed this thought. William Crawford, the secretary of the Prison Discipline Society of London hired to document American prisons in 1831, found abuse and corruption without problem. His major conclusion was that penitentiaries most often failed because of poor execution of the philosophies rather than the concept itself. Prison directors and wardens also observed failures. In 1836, prison officials at the Ohio Penitentiary documented that enforcement of solitude and silence among prisoners had created “a deep and gloomy shade”

40 within the prison.98 Even attempts to tweak the system with individualized and differential treatment of prisoners, did not work. These observations demonstrated to contemporaries that beyond the punitive effect, penitentiaries failed to accomplish the original goals of prison reformers. Recidivism and crime remained an ever increasing fact of life. Nevertheless, the penitentiary continued to be the prevailing model for the American criminal justice system. Why? Because it maintained order among prisoners and it instilled a sense of ease among the public, comforted by the fact that they were separated from criminals. As long as regular, law-abiding individuals did not have to live among criminals, they were content to forgive officials’ abuses and let the system operate. Yet, sensibilities had changed by the nineteenth century that mandated the relegation of punishment to the private realm. Prison officials had been aware of what Emile Durkheim called a “collective consciousness” that caused a general sense of unease among the public at the thought of barbaric punishments still in use. When the knowledge of brutality within prisoners leaked to the outside, it greatly disturbed the public, prompting investigations and mild governmental chastisements. Real progress away from the barbaric traditions of the past was not possible when the very system defined progress as order, and brutality as necessary to maintain that order. So, instead of real change, prison officials redefined what it meant to be “humane.” The public consciousness could thus be appeased and the façade of civilized treatment maintained.

98 Joseph Olds, Samuel F. MacCracken, and C. Anthony, “Report of the Directors,” Annual Report of the Ohio Penitentiary 1836, 4.

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44