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

In its attempt to counter the romanticization of criminal capacities and accomplishments, however, the board held the Charlestown prisoners up against a standard of questionable relevance: the extent of their formal education, and in particular their ability to read and write. "A well educated person is seldom seen here," it noted. "There is not a graduate of any college among the convicts, excepting one from England. . . . It is undoubtedly so in all other prisons, and the fact shows the importance of our public schools as the best defences against the vices and habits which lead so many to crime and the penitentiary."(18)

In its attacks on prisoners' ignorance, the board echoed a tenet of educational reform, increasingly influential by mid-century, that shifted the emphasis from idleness to illiteracy as the major cause of crime. A stereotyped view of the ignorance of the poor and the foreign-born lent credibility to the explanation. No doubt most immigrants were poorly educated, but the high standards and blunt categories by which reformers judged them obscured significant degrees of literary ability, and often overlooked the cultivation of skills of greater practical significance; as we have seen, prisoners at Charlestown of developed and shared both artisanal and criminal skills that served them well, even if they had little to do with the written word.(19)

Nevertheless, the Charlestown prison register indicates that a great many prisoners entered the institution with some ability to read and write, and other evidence suggests that those who lacked such skills were eager to learn. Roughly two-thirds of the prisoners admitted in 1830-34 could sign their names, and the proportion rose steadily, peaking at just under three-fourths in 1845-49. Following a decline in the 1850s attributable in large part to an influx of Irish immigrants, the overall literacy of the prisoners returned to its previous level and then continued to increase until the prison closed, temporarily, in 1878. Nearly three-fourths of the prisoners admitted in 1860-64 could sign their names, and by 1875-78 the number exceeded 80 percent. The resumption of this upward trend carried the Irish-born with it; though they lagged behind the native-born, the number of Irish prisoners signing the register rose sharply after the Civil War.(20)

Prisoners' continual demands for the privileges of pen, ink, paper, and lamps, and their heavy trade in a contraband economy of letters, newspapers, and books, suggests the enthusiasm with which they embraced the written word. That they did not always direct their reading and writing toward legitimate ends put prison reformers once again in an ironic position. At times, of course, pen and paper might serve as instruments for the subversion of discipline, the practice of vice, and the transaction of illegitimate commerce. Thus, the same officials who held up reading and writing as a panacea for crime also expended considerable energy devising and enforcing rules for controlling it.(21)