History from the inside out: prison life in nineteenth-century Massachusetts

4. I have focused my attention in the present study on the Charlestown prison in the period 1805-1878. In the latter year, the state transferred the entire population to a new prison at Concord, intending to close the institution forever. The Concord prison soon became crowded, however, and in 1884, the legislature ordered its conversion from a state prison to a reformatory; it sent those prisoners considered less reformable back to the Charlestown prison, which then remained in operation until 1955. See St. 1878, c. 62 (14 March 1878); St. 1884, c. 255 (21 May 1884); St. 1955, c. 770 (12 September 1955); and St. 1956, c. 731 (5 October 1956).

Nearly all the records of the Charlestown prison are at the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. The records include an assortment of Commitment Registers, totalling twenty-five bound volumes, and covering the period 1805-1960 (carrying over to the state prison at Walpole, where prisoners were sent in 1955); five bound volumes of Daily Reports, 1805-1829, kept first by the keeper and later by the warden; five bound volumes of minutes of the Board of Visitors (later called the Board of Directors and then the Board of Inspectors), 1805-1879; six bound volumes of Punishment Books, 1854-1955, with brief details of individual punishments inflicted; a volume of Warden's Memoranda of Prisoners, 1858-1902; and miscellaneous unbound reports and papers covering the period 1809-1851.

A more detailed description of these records, and a more comprehensive look at the prison, can be found in my "Penal Reform, Convict Labor, and Prison Culture in Massachusetts" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1994). The bulk of the records were not rediscovered until 1981, and to my knowledge the only other study to have used them is Hirsch's Rise of the Penitentiary, which does so only minimally. For brief institutional histories of the prison, see Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 162-181; and Anne Bauer, "The Charlestown State Prison," Historical Journal of Western Massachusetts 2 (Fall 1973): 22-29.

5. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York, 1961); Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, 1958). See also Glen A. Gildemeister, Prison Labor and Convict Competition With Free Workers in Industrializing America, 1840-1890 (New York, 1987), 70-126. The seminal work on paternalism and slave culture is Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974). On paternalism and the use of hegemony as a concept in historical analysis, see T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 567-593.

6. PDSB 2 (1827), 62, 16.

7. Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Massachusetts State Prison (Boston, 1823), 61. Public curiosity about the institution was apparently great; the annual report for 1829 records Fees of Admittance" amounting to $413.50, which, at 25 cents per ticket, amounts to 1,654 paying visitors that year, Report of the Warden of the State Prison (Senate No. 2, 1829), 17. By 1854, the legislature's Joint Committee on, Prisons reported a "great influx of visitors, now amount[ing] to about 6,000 annually,' and it reported its opinion that "the present system of promiscuous visiting is highly injurious in its tendency, both in its moral effect and as it regards the discipline of the prison." Report of the Joint Committee on Prisons, 31 March 1854, in Legislative Papers, St. 1854, c. 302 (13 April 1854), MSA.