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if-you-fan-a-fire · 11 months

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"The third, and equally critical component of the new penological disciplinary regime at Sing Sing was the development of techniques aimed at the discovery, classification, and eradication of sexual relations among prisoners. Sex had almost certainly been going on in prisons since the first prison was built. But the opportunity for sex had probably been much more restricted in the hard-labor prisons of the nineteenth century; and when hard industrial labor collapsed in many American prisons, as the contract system was dismantled, opportunities (and perhaps prisoners’ energy) for sex were greatly multiplied. Prison administrators of the early twentieth century appear to have known that prisoners were having sexual relations with one another. Nonetheless the subject was not openly discussed or theorized in any sustained manner.

This began to change in the 1910s. From the point of view of a penology committed to the socialization of prisoners as self-governing manly citizens, sexual relations between men posed a particularly urgent problem. Through the lens of the prevailing gender ideology of early twentieth century ... sex between men was intrinsically emasculating of at least one partner – the supposedly passive “receiver,” whether or not the sex was consensual. Such a feminized position, as it were, contradicted precisely the ideal of manly subjectivity that the new penologists sought to realize in prisoners. Added to this difficulty was the problem of “manly discipline”: The new penologists hued to an ascending, middle-class view that, rather than reflexively act on their sexual passions, men ought to channel or sublimate those passions into activities deemed socially or personally useful. On this view, then, the active or penetrative partner, although supposedly the masculine partner in the act, was failing to exercise manly self-discipline; he, too, presented a challenge to the manly ideal. In their Sing Sing laboratory, Osborne and his fellow penologists proceeded to drag prison sexuality into the light of day, examine it, and “cure” it.

Fragments of evidence from the New York prison records of the early 1910s suggest that sex among prisoners at Sing Sing and elsewhere had been happening for some years. In some instances, it involved physical coercion, but in many it did not. As James White’s report had suggested, sex was being traded for food or money as a matter of course. Various reports also suggested that, before Osborne arrived at Sing Sing, such relations mostly went unpunished, and that when a person was punished in connection with prison sex, it was usually in connection with a sexual attack. It was not the aggressor, however, who received the punishment: Any prisoner who complained to the warden that he had been coerced into sex, and any prisoner who sought protection from coerced sex, was likely to be severely disciplined, while the alleged attacker – or attackers – would probably not be disciplined at all. (One of Osborne’s predecessors at Sing Sing, Warden John Kennedy, had sometimes gone so far as to send the complainant, rather than the alleged attacker, to New York’s most feared prison – Clinton). Similarly, when Superintendent Riley heard of cases of sexual assault occurring during Osborne’s wardenship, he proceeded to order the transfer of the complainants to Clinton, which suggests that the punishment of the complainant was standard practice. Indeed, it is likely that the act of complaining, and not the act of sodomy per se, was cause for punishment in prisons of the 1900s and early 1910s.

Osborne and the new penologists broke with the usual approach to prison sex, and on a number of counts. First and most conspicuously, Osborne discoursed at some length – and in public – on what had thitherto been the taboo topic of sex in prison; in true progressive style, Osborne argued that in order to solve the problem, one had first to study and understand it. Describing sex between convicts as “vile” and as a “problem ... which should no longer be ignored,” Osborne made it clear that he considered sex between men to be one of the most serious and little-understood problems of the American prison. In his early speeches and writings on the topic, Osborne drew distinctions between different kinds of men who engaged in sex with other men. On the one hand, he explained to members of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor (NCPPL), there was the man who “allows himself to be [sexually] used”; on the other, there was the man whose “passions are cut off from natural relief.” The latter, according to Osborne, was simply acting on an “ordinary” sexual impulse that, because of the deprived conditions of incarceration, had been directed toward a man, rather than a woman. As Osborne wrote in Prisons and Commonsense, “Here is a group of men – mostly young and by no means deficient in the natural passions of youth – but cut off from the natural means of satisfying them.” Osborne refined this rather crude typology a few years later, in a tripartite taxonomy recalling Sigmund Freud’s 1909 classification of inverts in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: According to Osborne, in prisons one found the “degenerate,” whose “dual nature” made him the passive (and therefore feminine) partner of active, masculine men; the “wolves,” a popular term that Osborne appropriated to describe aggressive men who consistently preferred men to women; and the “ordinary men,” whose incarceration deprived them of their “natural” sex outlet – sex with women – and who consequently made use of other prisoners as “the only outlet” they could get.

Finding ways to channel the natural passions of “ordinary” men and youths turned out to be one of Osborne’s key projects at Sing Sing: Indeed it was a recurring theme of his wardenship. Osborne developed several tactics in his fight against the “vile” practice: He emptied the cellblock of the surplus of prisoners (whom he installed in a dormitory), so as to ensure that there was only one man per cell; he attempted to direct the natural passions of the supposedly ordinary men to nonsexual activities; he implored the Mutual Welfare League to police prisoners’ sexuality and to “condemn vice and encourage a manly mastery of the passions;” he set about identifying and isolating both the “degenerate” men who offered themselves as passive partners and the “wolves” who actively preferred other men; and he redoubled his efforts to smash the underground economy that James White had identified as a principal stimulant of prisoners’ sexual relations. (According to White, the systematic theft and underdelivery of prison provisions led to hunger among the prisoners, who then sold sexual favors for cash, and used the cash to buy the stolen food on the prison’s black market).

This latter tactic was especially crucial in Osborne’s strategy. As Osborne put it, every prison had “some degenerate creatures who are willing to sell themselves, any time, for a few groceries,” and the key to the prison sex problem in general was to ensure that prisoners were, on the one hand, well fed (and therefore not in need of procuring cash for extra food), and, on the other, afforded appropriate mental, physical, and spiritual outlets for their natural passions. In theory, the reconstitution of every prisoner as a waged consumer and producer in a simulated economy would ensure that the prisoner was no longer in a position of emasculating dependence. As long as convicts were eating well, engaging in a market economy that rewarded hard work and promoted financial responsibility, and sublimating their life force in educational and recreational activities, Osborne reasoned, the sex market in prisons would lose both its buyers and sellers.

Osborne’s conceptualization of the prison sex problem underscored the new penology’s central commitment to innovating various disciplinary activities that would absorb and direct prisoners’ energies in the face of limited industrial and other forms of labor. As the new penologists saw it, plays, motion pictures, lectures, musical events, and athletics not only addressed the problem of underemployment and initiated prisoners into the personality-building pasttimes of the ideal citizen, they sublimated the libidinal drive of the ordinary convict. Indeed, Osborne established a number of new activities at the prison in the name of vanquishing the “unnatural vice” that the prison investigators had documented in the early 1910s. Prisoners converted a basin in the Hudson River into a large swimming pool in 1915, because, as Osborne put it, swimming was a “practical method of reducing immorality” and an activity in which prisoners would “work off their superfluous energies. ... and head off unnatural vice.” (Four hundred prisoners per day were working off their “superfluous energies” in the pool by 1916). One of Osborne’s support committees, The New York State Prison Council, reiterated this point in defending the innovation of moving pictures, lectures, concerts, and other stimulating activities at Sing Sing. “These were established not as Amusements;” the Council explained somewhat defensively, “but as a definite means to an End” (caps in original): That end was “keeping the men out of vermin-ridden cells and of stimulating their minds – inured to the gray and sodden monotony of Prison walls.”

It was in no small part to combat prison sex that Osborne and the new penologists paved the way for the introduction of psychiatric and psychological testing to Sing Sing in 1916. Osborne and his supporters considered psychomedical study a crucial tool in their efforts to more accurately classify prisoners and to develop a specialized state prison system; to the classificatory system that administrators had established in the 1890s (and which classified and distributed convicts according to sex, age, sanity, physical fitness, and supposed capacity for reform), the new penologists added the distinctly psychological categories of sexuality and personality. In their view, sexual “degenerates” were a distinct category of prisoner and the prison system ought to identify and deal with them separately. Whereas the new recreational activities, better food, and prisoner self-policing were aimed at eradicating the sexual relations of the supposedly ordinary prisoner, the small army of doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists who descended on Sing Sing in 1915 and 1916 were chiefly concerned with the group of prisoners Osborne had described as degenerate.

The new penologists’ effort to conscript psychiatry and psychology into prison reform was complemented by the reformers’ enhancement of general medical facilities at Sing Sing in 1915 and 1916. In February 1915, the New York State Department of Health inspected Sing Sing and recommended that a separate ward be set up for patients suffering from sexually transmitted disease (STD). This recommendation was seconded a few months later by two state investigators who suggested that Sing Sing open a new hospital in which “psychopaths,” STD patients, and convicts suffering from contagious diseases would be held separately from prisoners in the general wards. Those suffering from infectious diseases other than STDs would be labeled “normal,” while “psychopaths” and STD patients should be held in a ward for “special” cases. The investigators further recommended that a psychiatric study of prisoners be undertaken in which all new admissions to the prison would be thoroughly studied according to a case method, with special attention paid to those with mental and nervous disorders, “sexual perversions,” suicidal tendencies, and records of multiple convictions. The 1915 plans for a psychomedical facility at Sing Sing proposed a double innovation of the established prison system: The psychic lives of prisoners would be added to the fields of scrutiny, and the past and present sexual practices (and desires) of convicts would be read as signs of a peculiar psychic type (the psychopath), who, in turn, would be incarcerated in separate facilities.

The following year at Sing Sing, Dr. Thomas W. Salmon, of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, and Dr. Bernard Glueck, a psychiatrist who had recently instituted nonverbal intelligence testing of immigrants at Ellis Island, set up the country’s first penal psychiatric clinic. Funded by a sizable grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the clinic proceeded under Dr. Glueck’s directorship to examine virtually all of the 683 prisoners committed to Sing Sing between August 1916 and April 1917. Glueck’s dense, seventy-page report on his findings was published to much acclaim in 1917; it was the first comprehensive psychiatric case study of adult convicts in the United States. Like the Health Department investigators, Glueck conceived of his studies as just one element in the much larger effort to develop “rational administration” in imprisonment. He and his clinicians proceeded to interview every incoming convict about his family background, sexual practices, health, education, and employment history; they then conducted a series of psychological tests for “mental age” and dexterity, and administered psychiatric tests of the prisoner’s emotional state. On the basis of this information Glueck divided all the incoming prisoners into three groups: the intellectually defective (those with low “mental ages”); the mentally diseased (those who suffered from hallucinations and delusions); and the psychopathic, whom he described as the most difficult to define and the most baffling. He concluded that almost six out of every ten of the incoming convicts were either intellectually defective, mentally diseased, or psychopathic.

Glueck’s study of Sing Sing convicts was one of the first to theorize the existence of “psychopath criminals,” and his work became foundational both in studies of criminality and homosexuality. According to Glueck, approximately one in five of the incoming prisoners was a psychopath. It was to this category that those prisoners with a history of homosexual relations were most commonly consigned. As Glueck put it, the classification of psychopathic was a judgment of the prisoner’s entire way of life, not just the crime he had committed; sexual habits were one of four determining fields of enquiry (the others were the family’s medical history and the convict’s employment and education history). From the beginning, then, scrutiny of prisoners’ sexual relations – and homosexual relations in particular – was critical in the study of psychopathology among prisoners. He wrote that, “in contemplating the life histories of these (native-born psychopaths), one is struck very forcibly with the unusual lack of all conception of sex morality.” A wide range of sexual activities, and not simply sex between men, was read as psychopathological. He described one in three psychopathic prisoners to be “markedly promiscuous,” and nine percent as polymorphously perverse: He was perplexed to find that many individuals who had had “repeated” sexual relations with other men had been equally sexually active with women, and concluded simply that these convicts were not “biologically sexually inverted.” They were, however, as psychopathological as “biological inverts.”

....

As well as striving to discover, prevent, and punish sexual relations between convicts in the model progressive prison, the new penologists attempted to change relations between black prisoners and white prisoners. Unlike the matter of sex, neither the “race question” nor the prison’s small minority of black prisoners were objects of sustained discourse among Sing Sing’s reformers at this time. Nonetheless, race ideology deeply influenced and was, in turn, influenced by, the new penological program of reform. At Sing Sing (and at Auburn) the new penologists set about classifying and more formally segregating prisoners on the basis of the “one-drop” criterion of American race ideology. The new penologists conceived of their task primarily as one of assimilating prisoners born in Europe and native-born Americans classified as “white” to an ideal, manly citizenship. Programs that were designed to socialize prisoners as citizens were implicitly aimed at white native-born Americans and European immigrants; certainly, no resources were specifically earmarked for the education or postrelease employment of black prisoners. Many of the educational programs were specifically aimed at Italian, Polish, and German immigrants, with the objective of socializing them to be good Americans. Classes were started in English literacy and civics (the one at Auburn was known as the “Americanization” class) for white prisoners, and on at least one occasion, a large business enterprise sent an Italian-speaking agent to Sing Sing to train and recruit Italian convicts for postrelease employment. Besides crafting a prison program that took for granted that white convicts were the proper object of reform, the new penologists took steps to formalize and rigorously enforce the physical separation of white from black prisoners. Black prisoners were concentrated in the unskilled work companies, and white prisoners in the semi- and skilledlabor companies by day. By night, under Osborne’s direct orders, black convicts were segregated from white convicts. Early on in his wardenship, Osborne’s expressly prohibited white and black convicts to share cells with each other.

Black prisoners did not miss out entirely on the privileges and activities established under the new penologists. As a rule, privileges that were extended to white prisoners (such as membership in the leagues, participation in sports, etc.) were generally extended to black prisoners, too, suggesting that the new penologists considered black prisoners capable of participating in democracy and civil society. But, as had been the case at Auburn, these privileges were always extended in such a way that they would not undermine the segregation of white from black, nor, more critically, raise a black prisoner above a white prisoner. Indeed, new penological reform in general seems to have formalized race segregation and, not incidentally, widened racial inequality, at Sing Sing.

- Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941. Cambridge University Press, 2008. McCormick, p. 397-402, 404.

Image is Warden T. M. Osborne, Sing Sing, centre, surrounded by Sing Sing prisoners. c. 1915-1916. Bain News Service glass negative. Library of Congress. LC-B2- 3310-7.

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outofeverythingthisnamewasleft · 11 months

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#ruth brown snyder #sing sing prison #electric chair #1928

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midnights-wish · 10 months

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"His son, Joseph, an organic chemist, had once announced that he'd decided early on against forensic toxicology: he could never have so many lives and deaths on his conscience. His father understood him. Because sometimes the dead did walk in Alexander Gettler's sleep, sometimes they rattled in the black chair of Sing Sing, and always, as he admitted in that last vulnerable interview, 'I keep asking myself, have I done everything right?"

Deborah Blum, 'The Poisoner's Handbook'.

#booklr #book blog #deborah blum #the poisoners handbook #joseph gettler #alexander gettler #gettler #forensic toxicology #sing sing prison #book quotes #quotes

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meetmeinmontana · 1 year

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BB King At Sing Sing Prison. The Movie? BB Sings Blues To The Inmates & ...

#youtube #sing sing prison #bb king #the blues

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kentk42 · 1 year

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Sing Sing prison tower

#b&w #original photographers #photography #art #black and white #photografy #photooftheday #hudson #hudsonriver #singsing #prison #new york #train #sing sing prison

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kiryuing · 24 days

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#and so milgram was born #milgram #meme #Jackalope #hope no one has done this already #this post broke containment. if you're here for tma this is about a music project called milgram where prisoners in a panopticon sing song #about their crimes . anyway . the warden is a talking jackalope .#which was edited into this post. so uh. he is on your blog now #i thought it was very obvious that this was an edited icon and display name but apparently some people think Twitter op was a milgram fan #I'm sorry to disappoint

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muffinlance · 1 month

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Read "Suki, Alone". Liked it in general. But can they please, please hire someone who knows both the show's actual events and how to follow through on a character arc? Because guys. Guys. That comic is not implying about Suki what they meant it to be implying, and all because of literally one line.

So like. From a writer's standpoint:

What they meant to do: show Suki as a community-oriented person who cares for her people, and believes in everyone succeeding together.

As opposed to (spoilers): the thief girl they set her up in contrast with, who's pretty upfront and consistent on primarily looking out for herself. She betrays Suki for one (1) corn chip to improve her own life at the prison, no surprise.

But the problem is: they give Suki an inspirational line to the effect of "we're all working together and we'll all break out together"

You know

The thing she does not do in the show

So if both the show and this comic are canon, then instead of setting up a compare/contrast with the thief girl, they've just set up a comparison. One were Suki is arguably worse, because she's been leading a significant number of prisoners on with her "we'll all fight and win our freedom together!" business, only to straight up cut them out of the escape loop and abandon them, whereas the thief is only leading Suki on in the sense that Suki keeps telling her what it's morally correct to think and confuses snide replies with agreement

My dudes. My fellow writers. You people actually being paid for this. There were so many ways to fix those awful implications against our girl's character, the simplest of which would be to not include that line. Or they could have, you know, made it canon compliant with what actually happens in the show, so that this comic doesn't set Suki up as a betrayer instead of a community builder. Like... just send all her good prison buddies off to other prisons in the wake of the warden finding out they're colluding. Have it timed to be right before the next new prisoners arrive, thus setting it immediately before the Boiling Rock episodes, so Suki didn't have anyone left in the prison she'd want to take with her on a breakout. For bonus points, include a page or two of her and her Kyoshi warriors opening up the cell of one of her prison friends post-war, thus implying she's tracking down and actually fulfilling her promises. Maybe even show her doing the same with thief girl, who was established as being imprisoned on false charges anyway, and also showing that Suki is A) the bigger person, and B) willing to acknowledge her own role in mistakes (because I cannot emphasize enough how much thief girl was not hiding her own priorities, and it was Suki who approached HER with all this, not the girl ever doing anything special to weasel her way in) (this would also open up an opportunity for paralleling Suki's earlier in-comic mistake of not listening to one of her friend's very valid thoughts and feeling, which lead to the girl leaving their island alone pre-canon; a "seeing people as they are, not what you want them to be" moment)

Anyway yeah enjoyable enough for a quick read but another one for the "this can't be canon or the characters are So Much Worse than they were in the actual show" pile

At least Aang didn't promise to murder anyone in this one

#I also have minor critiques like #Why are all the guards drawn as short and noodly-armed as Sokka pretending to be a guard #Why are the guards the only ones allowed to have funny lines #Did anyone consider using a lack of dialogue in some panels to establish mood and let the visuals speak for themselves (no they did not)#Why is Azula villain monologuing for so long at the start #She does like her villain lines but in the show they're short #And generally aimed at fresh opponents #Not last week's old news #I kept wondering why Azula was even there instead of generic lackeys especially since she had to have been dealing with the conquest of #Ba Sing Se around then. big This Could Have Been An Email vibes #Also as a gardener #HOW FAST WERE THOSE PRISON PLANTS GOING TO SEED AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME #Apparently they needed minimal (almost no?) light and tiny cracks of space and were nutritious and tasted good raw and grew so fast they #Could substantially affect the diets of multiple prisoners within a short time span?#I WANT THEM IN MY INDOOR SETUP ASAP #Screw lettuce I want Suki's Magic Beans #avatar the last airbender #atla #Suki #There continue to be no comics in Ba Sing Se but this was a better attempt than some #Suki Alone

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timetravellingkitty · 3 months

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Indian resistance is so fucking funny cause we're such an unserious people. Never stop

#me personally i'd sing hindi nursery rhymes in prison #farmer's protests #india

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genderqueer-miharu · 9 months

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Oh yeah i haven't seen anyone mentioning this but all the guilty prisoners' songs this trial ended with a spoken line instead of a sung one like the inno prisoners. Fuuta with "FIRE", Mahiru with "DIE!", and Amane with "...that i said to you?" were all spoken lines.

#the only one of the inno prisoners who gets close to this is haruka but he's still singing. just very low #milgram

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 1 year

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"Nevertheless, the system persisted, and without basic changes. For all the public clamor and widespread dissatisfaction, parole survived relatively unscathed. How could failure and unpopularity have had so little impact on the continuity and structure of policy? The answer is to be found, first, in the functions that the program did fulfill for several types of officials within criminal justice. The day-to-day advantages that they gained from administering the system far outweighed (for them) its apparent defects.

The most vigorous champions of parole, those who gained the most from its operation, were the prison wardens. Their support was critical to the survival of the system and it was unwavering, despite some gradual diminution of their authority over parole decisions. Before 1925, wardens dominated the parole boards. They usually served as one of the three members; the meetings were held on their grounds, at the prison; and at least at the start, the inmate’s record of institutional conduct probably counted for most, if for no other reason than as a carry-over from the time when parole was defined as a reward for the good inmate. After the mid-1920’s, however, the parole system built up its own bureaucracy. It became more independent of the department of corrections and moved away from the warden’s direct control. He no longer served on the committee, the final decisions were more frequently made in the state capital, and institutional behavior ranked well behind an inmate’s prior record in importance as a release consideration.

As Warden Lewis Lawes of Sing Sing told a New York investigatory committee:

‘I have never attended a meeting of the Parole Board. I have never been requested to. . . . I did attempt at first to make a good warden’s report and recommendation; but when I found they didn’t read it or pay any attention to it I will admit my efforts became very perfunctory.’

The Wilcox study in Pennsylvania found that “good conduct in prison does not inevitably lead to parole, nor do minor disciplinary infringements always prevent release. Eighty percent of those paroled at the minimum had perfect prison records. But it is also noteworthy that 80 percent of those refused parole had maintained good conduct in prison.” And the Attorney General’s survey cautioned that

Parole should not be used as a device for solving some of the problems of prison administrators. Prison administrators . . . are liable to employ it as a good time regulation or reward rather than as a correctional device.

Nevertheless, wardens had good reasons to continue to support the program and to resolve in their national meetings that parole was “an essential element in protective penology.” Some of them did manage to keep the boards under their sway: in such states as New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New Jersey, the warden still had the most to say about who went out on parole. In many cases, too, a warden could persuade a board to take into account his own prejudices in any one particular instance. Hence, the following dialogue in the Montana parole board meeting:

Case of Fred Albo, a Mexican, was considered. The Clerk read the history. Governor: Hold him I think. Secretary of State: Go to it. Attorney General: It makes no difference if he is a Mexican. Clerk: The Warden hates Mexicans and recommends him. He must be a good man. Governor: All right, don’t hold him.

(One cannot be certain, of course, whether the warden was very impressed by this inmate or whether he simply wanted to get rid of a noxious Mexican.)

More important, whatever the boards assumptions about the significance of the prior record, the warden could thwart the opportunity for release for any especially troublesome inmate. Boards would not pay attention to minor infractions or necessarily release someone who minded his own business inside. However, the inmate who was far out of line would suffer, and wardens as well as convicts understood this. Wardens, or their principal keepers, were very often present throughout board deliberations; but at any rate it was they who made up the dockets and so they had ample opportunity to tell the board about the bad cases. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the inmate who “carried coffee from the mess hall, cursed an officer, refused to enter his cell, and stole and drank shellac,” did not win release at the minimum. In effect, wardens had a veto power, and their ability to blackball was sufficient to serve their own disciplinary ends well.

“Complex and difficult as is prison management under the best conditions,” insisted one Indiana official, “it would be immediately more difficult without the parole law. The prisoner looks upon the parole as the reward for good conduct and steady industry and does his best to earn it.” Or, as Pennsylvania’s Wilcox concluded: “The power possessed by the state under parole laws . . . provides penal administrators with a club which is even more effective than the old ‘good time’ laws in inducing internal discipline. Prison managers generally favor parole for this reasons.

Moreover, wardens found themselves locked into the system once it was in operation. They were compelled to favor its perpetuation for the critical reason that any talk of a diminution in the availability of parole (let alone its outright abolition) provoked substantial inmate hostility - and wardens did not enjoy suppressing riots. Under indeterminate sentences, any effort to restrict parole had to mean significant increases in time served. Almost invariably, then, wardens were eager to see more and more paroles granted to keep peace among the inmates. Joseph Moore, chairman of the New York State Board of Parole, complained that wardens were directing inmates’ anger at parole boards and away from themselves. “The Parole Board finds it advisable to hold a large percentage of prisoners beyond their eligibility for release and we have abundant evidence that prison officials disapprove of this. Unfortunately, this feeling whether purposely or not is conveyed to the prisoners and it is permitted to be a general idea among them that so far as the prisons are concerned they would be glad to release them but the hard-boiled Parole Board holds them up.”

In much the same way, the warden of the penitentiary in Washington State kept up a running battle with parole board members. Because they were (in his view) too strict about release, his own job of preserving good order was more difficult. In fact, the warden “usually placed about five or ten men on the Docket who had served a long time, but who had no present chance for release. Why? Because when a ‘con’ has put in a lot of time and is denied any chance for a hearing before the Board, resentment occurs, and if there is enough of that, trouble occurs inside.” That same warden resisted all efforts to abolish parole for three-time losers: “Such prisoners could not be controlled . . . [and prison administration would be impossible.” The warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Stateville, to choose one case from many, knew the truth of that argument first-hand: in 1937, responding to a newspaper crusade, the parole board cut back on releases (granting only 3 from 274 applications), and in short order the warden had to contend with a hunger strike. Or, to turn the point around, the warden at Charlestown, Massachusetts, consistently recommended parole “because he expected it to improve discipline. He proved correct in his anticipation as there has not been a riot or outbreak in State Prison since parole went into effect.” In sum, the wardens were parole’s warmest friends. They supported the system and were eager to keep the numbers granted parole as high as possible - always excepting that cult case which had to be made into an object lesson.

Legislative committees investigating parole found the wardens’ conclusions not only well-taken but almost unanswerable. No matter how critical they were of one or another part of the system, they were reluctant to restrict release procedures for fear of undercutting prison officials’ power. The New York Crime Commission, a tough group with little good to say for parole, moved very cautiously for fear of disturbing the wardens’ authority. Not only the wardens but representatives of the state parole board took pains to inform the Commission just how critical parole was to discipline. “It is your opinion,” Senator Caleb Baumes, the chairman of the Commission, asked the head of the parole board, “that you create and maintain a better morale, if you please, amongst the prisoners generally, if they know that system is in vogue?” To which the chairman replied: “Absolutely.” The Commission accepted the argument, and as eager as some of its members were to abrogate the board’s right to release inmates immediately at the minimum, they did not dare do so. “If you tell 3,000 men in the prison,” concluded one of the most law-and-order-minded members of the Commission,

that they are likely to be held from months to five or six years more, you will make a hell on earth of every prison in the State. . . .3000 men expect . . . from all the years of practice by the Parole Board . . . that they will be released at the end of the minimum, and if you tell them that now it is likely or probable that their time will be extended beyond the minimum . . . they are going to insurge and feel vicious, and you can not blame them, no matter how heinous was their original offense.

His conclusion was clear: “If we are to go ahead on any rough and ready method of extending sentences and taking that definite hope away from them, the consequences will be extreme.” True, public opinion (and his own instincts as well) would prefer to “make them serve indefinitely.” But “we cannot do it without smashing prison discipline.” It was this kind of reasoning that helped to preserve parole, no matter how poor its reputation or inadequate its practice.

- David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Revised Edition. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002 (1980), p. 183-187.

Image is from the Handbook of the New York Reformatory at Elmira, showing the parole board finishing a meeting and releasing an inmate - on the left hand side. c. 1916.

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