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

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Larry Goldsmith

It cannot be denied, that [penitentiaries] have been Seminaries established and sustained at the public expense, for educating, in the most effectual and thorough manner, hundreds and thousands of villians [sic] to depredate and prey upon the very communities which have thus encouraged and fostered them. This is no fiction, and our astonishment could hardly be greater, had legislators, with the numerous other encouragements afforded, authorized the constituted authorities of these Institutions to confer Diplomas and Doctorates upon those who had most highly distinguished themselves for their improvement in the science and manifold mysteries of iniquity.

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- Rev. Jared Curtis, prison chaplain, in a letter to Massachusetts Governor Levi Lincoln, Jr., 18 November 1828

When Governor Levi Lincoln, Jr. delivered his annual message to the Massachusetts legislature in 1826, he happily acknowledged the receipt of more than ten thousand dollars from the state prison at Charlestown, the result of an innovative system of convict labor. "But," the governor warned, "there is a melancholy reverse to the picture. There is much reason to believe, that, as a Penitentiary, the system is utterly ineffectual to purposes of reform or amendment." The problem, as Lincoln and the officials at Charlestown had come to realize, arose from fundamental contradictions in the very concept of a penitentiary. Among the most incongruous of these was the desire to reform the Commonwealth's most serious criminals by locking them together, for years at a time, within the close quarters of a prison.

In 1826 the quarters were close indeed. "So few are the number of cells, that, in many of them, from four to sixteen convicts are locked together by night," the governor noted. "In, emphatically, these committee rooms of mischief, the vilest schemes of profligacy are devised, and the grossest acts of depravity are perpetrated. Confederacies and combinations are here formed, by the practised veteran, with the novitiate in crime."(1) In his letter to the governor, two years later, prison chaplain Jared Curtis stretched a similar pedagogical metaphor to describe the problem.(2) His dramatic words were not merely the sort of alarmist oratory designed to prod the legislature into appropriating the funds for a bigger, better prison - although they were also that. Lincoln and Curtis may have highlighted prisoners' more lurid practices for political and melodramatic effect, but it can hardly have been surprising that prisoners, locked together for the evening, without direct supervision and with little else to occupy themselves, should have passed the time by instructing one another in the techniques of expropriation.

Curiously, however, historical accounts of the American prison have largely neglected this dimension of institutional life. The pathbreaking work of David Rothman introduced the subject of institutions and reform to the practice of social history, but Rothman's and other historians' concentration on questions of social control prompted a top-heavy focus on ideology and reform. Subsequent critiques of this "revisionist" historiography called into question its functionalist portrait of a one-dimensional ruling class. In its place, they offered more complex and often more satisfying models of divided elites and multiple loci of power - but still they mostly ignored the prisoners themselves, persisting in a view of the institution "from the top down" rather than "from the bottom up," or, to adapt the metaphor more precisely, "from the inside out."(3)

In part, the absence of prisoners from the history of the prison simply reflects the state of the surviving evidence; prisoners did not leave us with the kind of extensive written records we have from reformers, administrators, and politicians. But in the reports and records of the nineteenth-century prison it is nonetheless possible to discern something of prisoners' actions and motives. In the case of the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown, established in 1805, we are fortunate in having an unusually large and detailed body of evidence. These records, which include a complete register of sentences and discharges, the daily logs of the warden, the minutes of the board of directors, as well as correspondence, petitions, and published annual reports, naturally reflect an administrative point of view, but the close focus in much of this evidence on the day-to-day operation of the prison nonetheless helps bring the prisoners back into the picture.(4)

A careful examination of the Charlestown prison, as seen through these records, provides us with a great deal of information about who was singled out for incarceration, and why. The records provide clues about how prisoners and their guards acted within the walls of their prisons, and they remind us that their actions too affected the development of the institution - that institutional dynamics were not entirely congruent with the ideals reformers had in mind. Prisoners may have been captives, but they were hardly passive. They endured stem lectures, pious sermons, hard labor, and the regimentation of their time, but in the moments they reserved for themselves they returned to those very deeds their captors sought to eradicate. Prison officials clearly had the upper hand, but their attempts to administer penitentiary discipline met with prisoners' continual efforts to thwart or evade their designs. Erving Goffman and Gresham Sykes both described long ago how prisoners, like the inmates of other "total institutions," develop ways of "making out" in the highly restrictive environments they inhabit, and concepts of paternalism and hegemonic control have helped us to understand the social history of other subaltern groups, most notably the slaves of the American South. The behavior of prisoners and guardians alike may have been at variance with formal rules and regulations, but a limited degree of institutional flexibility, whether from conscious policy or simple negligence, often eased the lives of inmates, staff, and administrators alike.(5)

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

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Larry Goldsmith

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