6 The Reformatory Movement

Disillusionment with the penitentiary idea, combined with overcrowding and understaffing, led to deplorable prison conditions across the country by the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The American prison experiment, once heralded by European Enlightenment thinkers as one of the greatest achievements of the New Republic, had fallen prey to the scourge of time. In addition, a new concern for the imprisoned arose following the Civil War stemming from the treatment of enemy combatants in prisoner-of-war camps like Andersonville the great hopes of the Penitentiary movement had fallen by the wayside of a broken routine, overcrowding, idleness, corruption, and desperation. New York’s Sing Sing Prison was a noteworthy example of the brutality and corruption of that time.

With a mandate to conduct a nationwide survey on the state of prisons, the New York Prison Association led the charge into a new era. The Report on Prisons and Reformatories in the United States and Canada authored by Enoch Wines in 1867 detailed the extent of their failure to achieve reformation among their charges. A new wave of reform achieved momentum in 1870 after a meeting of the National Prison Association (which would later become the American Correctional Association). At this meeting held in Cincinnati, members issued a Declaration of Principles. This document expressed the idea that prisons should be operated according to a philosophy that prisoners should be reformed, and that reform should be rewarded with release from confinement. This ushered in what has been called the Reformatory Movement.

One of the earliest prisons to adopt this philosophy was the Elmira Reformatory, which was opened in 1876 under the leadership of Zebulon Brockway. Brockway ran the reformatory in accordance with the idea that education was the key to inmate reform. Clear rules were articulated, and inmates that followed those rules were classified at higher levels of privilege. Under this “mark” system, prisoners earned marks (credits) toward release. The number of marks that an inmate was required to earn in order to be released was established according to the seriousness of the offense. This was a movement away from the doctrine of proportionality, and toward indeterminate sentences and community corrections.

The new model of incarceration to follow would focus on the reformation of individuals in a secular sense, stressing the acquisition of skills needed by young men in the post-War industrial era. Young men were plied with educational and vocational training suited to the “modern” manufacture of goods in factories. The director of the first “true” reformatory in Elmira New York, Zebulon Brockway, specified the principles and practices that would “habituate” young men to a lifestyle that would prove useful to them as well as society generally. Inmates would wear uniforms and engage in military drills and tactics. They would learn to read and write, be trained in the trades, exercise, eat a proper diet, engage in recreation, and engage in daily regimen which would prove useful in their functioning when freed as productive citizens.

Rather than concern themselves with the “soul” of the offender, the regimen of the reformatory would be based on a “Darwinian” view of adaptation wherein the routine of the body worked on the mind. A system of rewards and coercion was instituted. At its heart was an “indeterminate” sentencing scheme wherein positive behavior would be rewarded by a “graduated approximation to freedom.” The ideas had been tested by Alexander Maconochie who had instituted a “Mark system” to gain compliance on Norfolk Island, a place for twice or thrice convicted offenders who had previously been transported from England to present-day Australia. The model later coopted by Sir Walter Crofton came to be known as the “Irish Model,” wherein offenders progressed through a series of stages from solitary confinement to public works, and later to an “intermediate prison” akin to a halfway house, and finally to a “Ticket of Leave” system similar to modern-day parole. These ideas, to be discussed more fully in a later chapter, formed the basis for much of the current system of correctional practice in the United States and beyond.