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History from the inside out: prison life in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Larry Goldsmith
The prison at Charlestown was by definition an institution of social control, but the prisoners there nonetheless exercised and developed their skills in a "seminary of vice," sometimes with the participation of their guards, as one of their strategies for making their lives more bearable. They devised such strategies in every area of institutional life: in the mess hall, where they demanded more and better rations; in their leisure time, where they insisted upon newspapers, books, musical instruments, and the right to visitors and correspondence from the outside world; and in the workshops, where they sought a measure of control over their assignments, incentives, and working conditions. These strategies, and the complex alliances they developed with prison officers, are no less important a part of the history of the prison than the actions and ideas of those at the top.
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This essay focuses on two aspects of prison life at the Charlestown prison in the early nineteenth century. First, it takes a close look at those actions of the Charlestown prisoners that inspired Chaplain Curtis's curious allusion to "seminaries" of vice. Prisoners were "misbehaving," to be sure, but the specific nature of their actions highlights important contradictions in the rehabilitative agenda and provides a new dimension to our understanding of the development of the institution. Second, the essay examines the educational program at Charlestown. Teaching the prisoners to read and write was a key feature of their rehabilitation, and institutional records provide information not only about why literacy was so important to reformers, but also about how prisoners actually made use of it - and how they influenced the development of the educational program. By bringing prisoners back into the picture, and by understanding their actions as a significant force in the development of the prison, this essay suggests a more complex and dynamic history of the prison, one in which politicians, administrators, reformers, officials, and prisoners themselves engaged in a constant process of negotiation over the terms and conditions of confinement.
Nineteenth-century reformers and prison officials complained continually about the indolence of their charges; indeed, the twin pillars in their theory of reform were the idea that idleness caused crime, and the corollary proposition that only hard labor could bring about its eradication. Ironically, however, Charlestown prisoners labored assiduously at tasks of their own devising, tasks which, though illegitimate, nonetheless required both labor and skill. Such tasks often carried more attractive material incentives than the ones imposed in the prison workshops. They included the practice of purely criminal trades, similar to those for which they had been imprisoned, as well as legitimate trades, in some cases the very same trades they were meant to practice in the workshops, but done clandestinely and for their own private gain.
While some of the behavior bemoaned by the chaplain and the governor may simply have been the disruptive acts of disruptive men, both the substance of their complaints and considerable evidence from the prison records highlight the cooperative, even pedagogical nature of the prisoners' activity. Prisoners not only practiced but also educated one another in the art and mystery of the criminal trades. Within the walls of the Charlestown prison, according to the Prison Discipline Society, they had engaged in "counterfeiting bills and coin; teaching the art of picking pockets, and actually picking the pockets of strangers; preparing false keys and other instruments for breaking houses and stores." The Society well recognized the considerable expertise that went into these enterprises. Picking pockets, it reported,
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