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History from the inside out: prison life in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Larry Goldsmith
21. A fascinating account of similar struggles over the written word in twentieth-century California prisons can be found in Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, 1994).
22. An Account of the Massachusetts State Prison. Containing A Description and Plan of the Edifice; the Law, Regulations, Rules and Orders; with a View of the Present State of the Institution (Charlestown, 1806), 25; Board Minutes, 9 June 1806.
23. Commitment Register, entry for Andrew McGee, admitted 27 February 1806; Daily Reports, 6 March 1807, 2 April 1807.
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24. McGee's account apparently never found a publisher, although two such personal narratives from Charlestown prisoners did. See James Allen, Narrative of the Life of James Allen, Alias George Walton, Alias Jonas Pierce, Alias James H. York, Alias Burley Grove the Highwayman. Being His Death-Bed Confession, to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (Boston, 1837); and John Southack, The Life of John Southack (n.p., 1809). The unpublished diary of an anonymous Charlestown prisoner, dated 1864, is at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
On the confessional genre and the history of prisoners' writings, see Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York, 1993); H. Bruce Franklin, The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (New York, 1978); Idem, American Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners: Their Writings: An Annotated Bibliography of Published Works, 1798-1981 (Westport, Conn., 1982); and Cynthia Owen Philip, ed., Imprisoned in America: Prison Communications, 1776 to Attica (New York, 1973).
25. Board Minutes, 10 April 1809, 16 January 1813, 13 March 1821; Daily Reports, 18 December 1806, 5 March 1807, 14 March 1807.
26. Board Minutes, 4 April 1821, 2 May 1821; Daily Reports, 16 April 1814, 4 August 1818, 4 January 1821, 19 May 1819.
27. Report of the Committee on the State Prison (1817), 8-9. On an earlier, less formal attempt to set up prison schools, see Daily Reports, 28 March 1814, and 17 January 1816.
28. Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of An American Institution (New Haven, 1988), 37. See also Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 34-53.
29. Report of the Committee on the State Prison (1817), 28. In addition to the distinctions in uniform, only prisoners in the highest class were eligible to receive recommendations for pardon from the Directors.
Formal legislative recognition of the Sabbath school would not occur until 1838; see St. 1838, c. 152 (18 April 1838). The Prison Discipline Society of Boston, in its annual report for 1832, dated the beginnings of the school to 1815, although the accuracy of this latter date is not apparent from the prison's own records. See PDSB 7 (1832), 537.
30. Chaplain's Report (1818), in Massachusetts State Prison, Reports and Correspondence, MSA; Rules and Regulations (1823), 57.
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