Indiana Prison Reform, 1880-1920

BARRED PROGRESS: INDIANA PRISON REFORM, 1880-1920 Perry R. Clark Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of History Indiana University May 2008 Accepted by the Faculty of Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. ______________________________ Robert G. Barrows, Ph.D., Chair ______________________________ Annie Gilbert Coleman, Ph.D. Master’s Thesis Committee ______________________________ Jason M. Kelly, Ph.D. ii Acknowledgments Although my name appears alone on the cover page of this thesis, the final product could not have been achieved without the guidance and assistance of the numerous people involved in the research and writing process. My professors at IUPUI have been the most warm, patient, and student-oriented group of academics I have ever come across. Robert Barrows, my professor and thesis committee chairman, provided countless hours of advice and took patience to an entirely new level as deadlines consistently needed extending. He is a remarkable teacher, inspiring mentor, and just an overall great man. Annie Gilbert Coleman and Jason Kelly, the other two-thirds of my thesis committee, used their creativity and expertise to expand my understanding of history and, in the end, make me love my trade even more. The rest of my professors, colleagues, and friends in the history department at IUPUI have helped more than they will ever realize. I thank John Taylor, Owen York, Maureen Craney, and Nancy Robertson for their conversation and their ability to make the fifth floor of Cavanaugh Hall both more entertaining and more educational. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to the Vicki Casteel, the Indiana State Archives, and the Indiana State Library for retrieving much of primary source material used in this project. I would not even be in the position to write a thesis without the immeasurable support of my family and friends. My mother and father—Ruth and Rich—have stood by me through thick and thin, and their opinions and words of advice have always been valued above all others. I particularly thank them for their unconditional support for my decision to pursue graduate school, a path that has proved more trying and more rewarding than I ever could have imagined. Steph and Ryan have shown time and time iii again why they are the best big sister and brother in the world. Steph and her family constantly took interest in my work and demonstrated the same pride they did when I was a young basketball player for the Forest Park Rangers. Ryan—my brother, role model, and former roommate—contributed numerous valuable resources, including his home, as I continued my work in Indianapolis. I also thank my friends—particularly Kevin, Allen, Robyn, and Mark—as well as my bandmates, for being my second family and keeping me sane with the occasional conversation, drink, or jam session. Finally, I dedicate these pages to my grandparents—Bob, Millie, Hilda, and Jim—whose love and hard work have given all of their descendents, including myself, the opportunity to follow our dreams. I hope that I can live a life half as rich and full as the ones they have led. iv Table of Contents Introduction.....................................................................................................................1 Chapter I “She Owes Something”: The Rise of the Modern State Prison System in Indiana ............4 Chapter II Skill and Morality in the Progressive Prison ..................................................................47 Chapter III The Significance of the Frontier in Indiana Penology ....................................................87 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 124 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 127 Curriculum Vitae v Introduction On January 9, 1821, the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill authorizing the construction of the state’s first prison. Within a century, Indiana’s prison system would transform from a small structure in Jeffersonville holding less than twenty inmates into a multi-institutional network holding thousands. Within that transition, ideas concerning the treatment of criminals shifted significantly from a penology focused on punishment, hard labor, and low cost, to a one based on social science, skill-building, education, and public funding. These new ideas were not always sound, however, and often the implementation of those ideas was either distorted or incomplete. In any case, by the second decade of the twentieth century, Indiana’s prisons had developed into the large, organized, highly-regulated—yet very imperfect—system that it is today. This study focuses on the most intense period of organization and reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thesis is divided into three chapters, each approaching Indiana’s most important period of prison reform in a different way. The first chapter takes a traditional approach, covering Indiana’s most essential reforms such as the decline of corporal punishment and the development of the Reformatory, indeterminate sentencing, parole, grading system, and educational programs. Most northern states adopted these reforms either before or around the same time as Indiana. In this sense, the Hoosier State is not unique. This chapter’s aim is to fill a gap in historical literature by incorporating new and revealing sources, and also by providing much needed state-based coverage of a penal system that, despite its superficial lack of distinctiveness, had its own sense of development and reform. 1 The second chapter takes a more important and demanding approach specifically focusing on convict labor and exploring the meaning behind convict labor from a variety of perspectives: inmates, prison officials, manufacturers, and “free” laborers. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Hoosiers clearly adopted a new outlook on labor and its relationship to the prison system. While manufacturers and labor organizations intensified their fight to remove the competition of convict labor, the idea of convict labor itself transformed from a device of punishment and state revenue into a tool for constructive rehabilitation, moral development, and skill-building. Indiana serves as a suitable example to perform a more in-depth historical analysis of the meaning behind work in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prison. The least conventional of the three, the final chapter focuses less on Indiana’s prison system as a whole and more on one of the state’s most innovative penal institutions, the Indiana State Farm. Indiana built its penal farm to house misdemeanants in a central, state-controlled location rather than in the state’s notoriously atrocious local jails. Although other states utilized the penal farm, most notably those in the South, Indiana’s stands out as exceptional not only because of its largely rehabilitative purpose, but also because of the language surrounding its inception and development. The Indiana State Farm offers an opportunity for us to clearly see the Hoosier pioneer ideal manifested in a state institution. Furthermore, the farm also serves as a good case study for environmental historians to examine the relationship between inmates, the institution, and the surrounding environment and to actually place agency in the inmate, an overlooked and seemingly powerless historical being. 2 These chapters are not intended to provide a complete history of Indiana’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prison system. Other matters, such as those related to race and gender, have largely been left out. The Indiana Women’s Prison, for example, was the first of its kind in the nation and certainly deserves investigation, but the issues surrounding its origins and development cannot be examined within the scope of this study. Despite their limitations, the aim of these chapters is to offer a new take on a Midwestern prison system in the midst of an exciting national, reform-minded, and “progressive” movement. Although national trends often sent states on similar paths, most significant prison-related activity occurred on the state level. With this in mind, historians must investigate the inner workings of individual state prison systems in order to have a true understanding for one of America’s most important and—as present-day developments suggest—most controversial institutions. This history of Indiana’s prison system is designed to add to the quest for a more complete history of the American prison. 3 Chapter I “She Owes Something”: The Rise of the Modern State Prison System in Indiana On the surface, Indiana’s modern “correctional facilities” appear to face many of the same dilemmas as their nineteenth-century ancestors. Much like prisons of the 1800s, today’s prisons are plagued with overcrowding, political scandal, inmate recidivism, the question of privatization versus state control, the issue of mental illness, and so on. However, the twenty-first-century prison has something that the nineteenth-century prison, for the most part, did not have—a genuine goal, successful or not, to rehabilitate inmates primarily through education, skill-building, and science-based treatment. This change in penal philosophy did not take place over the course of a year, or even a

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