Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform

• Chapter One. The Reformer’s Mural: The Liberal Penal Imagination
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 15-36
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CHAPTER ONE

The Reformer’s Mural

The Liberal Penal Imagination

Building the New York State Vocational Institution would have been impossible without an underlying reform vision that led the state to embrace educationally oriented prisons as the centerpiece of a correctional strategy aimed at the young male offender. The ideas that informed Coxsackie’s construction in 1935 were deeply rooted in progressive-era critiques of the industrial prison, embraced New Deal-era visions of adult education and social citizenship, and rejected punitive and moralistic approaches to crime and punishment. This bold, comprehensive vision has largely been forgotten today, remembered only in the most general terms, as a commitment to the rehabilitation of the criminal offender.

Reconstructing the vision begins with Austin H. MacCormick, for no one meant more to prison reform in New York. His published work provided the intellectual basis for Coxsackie and the entire network of institutions for young male offenders in New York, and he was instrumental in helping reformers navigate their way through the state’s complicated political landscape. Little remembered in correctional circles today, MacCormick was among the best-known prison reformers in the United States by the time Coxsackie opened in 1935. Appointed New York City commissioner of corrections by the newly elected mayor Fiorello LaGuardia at the start of 1934, MacCormick received nationwide publicity for his efforts to clean up corruption and prisoner mistreatment in the city’s prisons and jails. The epicenter was Welfare Island, site of the city’s jail, hospital, reformatory, and other facilities—most notoriously, the Welfare Island Penitentiary. On January 24, 1934, MacCormick led a sensational raid on his own penitentiary, revealing lavish treatment for well-connected gangsters and repellent conditions for the less fortunate. A wave of positive press coverage, including an admiring New Yorker profile (“The Four-Eyed Kid”) by Arthur Bartlett, gave MacCormick an enviable platform to promote his vision for prisons.¹

Bringing that vision to life led MacCormick, in the spring of 1934, to meet with muralist Ben Shahn at the still-under-construction Rikers Island Penitentiary. Construction of Rikers under the previous mayoral administration had ground to a halt, and with weeds growing up through the unfinished buildings, MacCormick recognized the chance to use Shahn’s work to publicize his reform efforts and speed up the completion of this planned replacement for the decrepit Welfare Island facility.² He and Mayor LaGuardia gave Shahn, who just the previous year had played a critical part in the creation of Diego Rivera’s ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural, and artist Lou Block permission to produce a mural for Rikers Island, to be funded by the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA).

If the MacCormick and Shahn made an odd pairing—the slight, stiff prison administrator, son of a Congregational minister from “wholesome but sterile” Maine, and the theatrical social realist, brought to New York City as a child by Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants—they shared a boldness in outlook and action, and a shared commitment to the left-liberal reform program.³ For Ben Shahn, the project was his most ambitious personal public work to date. Beyond his work with Rivera, Shahn was already well known for his series of twenty-three paintings, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Created during 1931 and 1932, the series blended a powerful indictment of the system that condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to their deaths with a compelling portrait of the two men’s humanity.⁴ For the Rikers project, Shahn hoped to extend this vision of social justice, conscious as ever of the need to work within a conventional liberal framework. He and Lou Block wrote to Mayor LaGuardia, using language they hoped would appeal to the new city administration: “What we would like to suggest is the possibility of a full realization of reform direction as it affects a convict both in prison and after his release, reacceptance without stigma by society, the opportunity for employment, and a general readjustment calculated to prevent a return to crime.”⁵ And, indeed, over the course of several meetings between MacCormick and Shahn, the mural became an expression of the reformist vision of prison, present and future.⁶

Once Shahn’s proposal was accepted, and funded by TERA, MacCormick gave the artist the freedom to move about the soon-to-be-closed jail complex at Blackwell’s Island, taking photographs of inmates and the facility that would be inspiration for the mural to come. For more than a year—from May 1934 to June 1935—Shahn and Block worked on the project plans.⁷ Block focused on a series of images to be installed at the new Rikers chapel, while Shahn developed the massive murals that would run along both sides of a 100-foot corridor leading to the chapel. One side of the corridor would feature scenes of “traditional” degradation and violence in punishment, while the other side would employ images highlighting the promise of reform.

Shahn’s mural is a roadmap to the liberal penal imagination, with four central themes predominating. The first was an emphasis on social citizenship as the pathway to individual reform and self-improvement, a vision deeply rooted in a progressive-era vision of promoting social citizenship through education.⁸ The second was a focus on the idea of adult education, aiding the intellectual, social, and vocational development of the prisoner. A third theme was the problems of youth—particularly the young men ages 16 to 21, caught in a liminal state between the worlds of school and industrial employment. The final element, too often forgotten today, highlighted the powerful reformist critique of punitive punishment. Even as Shahn and MacCormick advanced their own vision for the future of the prison, they were keenly conscious of the competing “get tough” approach to the criminal offender. Taken together, these four threads of the liberal reform vision would inspire substantial programmatic changes in years to come.

Thomas Mott Osborne and Social Citizenship

On the wall above the entrance to the Rikers chapel, in between the two long hallway murals, Shahn proposed to place a large image of the only real person depicted in the project: the late prison reformer Thomas Mott Osborne. Osborne would literally point the way, in the words of Shahn and Block, “toward proper prison methods” that went down one side of the corridor. The choice of Osborne is unsurprising, for he had been an early mentor of, and active collaborator with, Austin MacCormick. Before his death in 1926, Osborne inspired an entire network of younger reformers and prison administrators with his strongly held views regarding the potential for social citizenship to transform the lives of prisoners.

Osborne is best known for his early efforts to promote his vision through the establishment of an inmate self-government organization, the Mutual Welfare League. As a young man, Osborne had become involved in the work of the George Junior Republic, an innovative new private reform school for younger delinquent children, operating on the principle of self-governance. As a trustee of the fledgling institution in 1896, Osborne saw and was deeply impressed by young men (and women) working as an independent community, exercising the self-control he deemed essential to productive citizenship.⁹

In summer 1912, ill and confined to bed, Osborne picked up and read Donald Lowrie’s newly published memoir of life behind bars at San Quentin Prison.¹⁰The opening of Lowrie’s indictment of the prison experience posed a troubling question: “As I look back I wonder what has been accomplished by my imprisonment. Perhaps before this series of sketches is done some of you may discover what has been accomplished in my individual case. But what is being accomplished in the thousands of other and more unconscionable cases?”¹¹ The answer, it seemed, was a good deal—but nearly all negative.

Osborne’s encounter with Lowrie’s text set him on the path of full-time prison reformer, on which he would continue until the end of his life. The object of his interest was the one closest at hand, Auburn Prison—the oldest of New York’s trio of ancient prisons, which also included Sing Sing and Clinton—in his hometown of Auburn, New York. His opening came with the election of Democrat William Sulzer to the governorship in 1912. In 1913, Osborne first pressed Sulzer to appoint one of his own close political associates, Charles Rattigan, as the warden of Auburn Prison, and then secured an appointment for himself to the State Commission on Prison Reform.

In this role, Osborne famously had himself committed to Auburn Prison as inmate Tom Brown, an account of which was quickly published as Within Prison Walls: Being a Narrative of Personal Experience During a Week of Voluntary Confinement in the State Prison at Auburn, New York. Not long after the work’s publication, Osborne accepted the wardenship at Auburn for himself. The next year, 1915, he assumed the warden’s position at Sing Sing Prison. In both institutions he established a Mutual Welfare League, a program of inmate self-governance based to some extent on the old George Junior Republic model. A master of promotion, Osborne brought Donald Lowrie (who addressed a meeting of the guards and officers) and other reformers to both Auburn and Sing Sing, to review and praise the work he was doing.¹²

Osborne, long an enemy of Tammany Hall, quickly became the target of a campaign to discredit and remove him (Governor Sulzer himself had been impeached by a Tammany-influenced state legislature in 1913, after too many appointments along the lines of Osborne). With a personal style that even his closest allies would have characterized as blunt and impolitic, Osborne also made enemies of local politicians near Sing Sing, who lost their influence over institutional matters, the state prison superintendent in Albany, and certain well-connected Sing Sing inmates. All of this conflict inevitably spilled over, first into the newspapers, where Osborne’s experimental regime was constantly being challenged, and then into the courts, where political opponents secured a grand jury investigation in Westchester County. Osborne took leave of the warden’s office to wage a legal fight that he ultimately won, but though he professed to relish the battles (“When I’m in a very small minority then I know I’m right”), he resigned the Sing Sing wardenship not long after returning to the job, having served only eighteen months.¹³

The story of Osborne at Sing Sing has been seen as the high-water mark for progressive prison reform, with prisons post-Osborne era featuring the “severing of progressive disciplinary techniques from their higher, moral purpose (of reform)”; by the 1920s, “the goal of social justice would be more or less fully eclipsed by that of institutional stability.”¹⁴ Osborne’s best-known successor at Sing Sing, Warden Lewis Lawes, has been exhibit A for the emergence of postprogressive prison administration. Lawes’s twenty-one year tenure (1920–1941) was predicated on the managerial notion that reform was merely a helpful instrument of control (and that, consequently, “the best prison was one in which the prisoners were well-fed, well-exercised, and frequently entertained”).¹⁵

Osborne’s career in prison reform, however, continued for another decade after he departed Sing Sing.¹⁶ During this time, he continued both active work as a prison administrator and typically aggressive efforts to create nationwide organizations that could sustain the campaign for genuine prison reform. In the course of this decade, Osborne would inspire and mentor an impressive network of younger reformers.¹⁷ One so inspired was a Bowdoin undergraduate, Austin MacCormick. MacCormick recalled reading everything that Osborne had written as well as all the newspaper and magazine publicity surrounding his work. This was work, he would later recall, that “aroused my humanitarian impulses.” Reflecting on that moment, MacCormick had felt “a desire to crusade—I suppose being small and so on—and I was captivated by this great man and what he was doing.”¹⁸ He was moved to write his senior thesis on Osborne’s famous work at Sing Sing and his penological ideas, and delivered his commencement address on the same subject.¹⁹ In the audience for the Bowdoin commencement speech was future senator Paul Douglas, himself a Bowdoin graduate, who was then conducting an extensive survey of Maine civic and public institutions. Douglas asked MacCormick to make a survey of Maine jails and the state prison. Consciously emulating Osborne, MacCormick had himself committed anonymously to a Maine prison in order to understand the inmate’s predicament firsthand.²⁰ This led to a well-received report on prison conditions, a report that brought MacCormick to the attention of Osborne himself.

In 1917, Osborne and MacCormick began a period of intense collaboration that would last until Osborne’s death in 1926. With the support of his old partner in anti-Tammany politics, assistant secretary of the navy Franklin Roosevelt, Osborne secured from Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels an invitation to investigate conditions prevailing in the U.S. Naval Prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.²¹ Osborne wrote to “My dear Fellow-criminal” MacCormick and invited him to do “as I did in Auburn and you did in Thomastown … The Secretary of the Navy has given me carte blanche; and I should like to have you join me in what I think may turn out to be a very important work.”²² “Tom Brown” and “John Austin” went back to prison (this time posing as navy deserters). They recreated the Mutual Welfare League as the Naval Welfare League at Portsmouth and attempted to introduce it onto several ships (including the USS North Dakota, on which MacCormick spent three months in early 1920, under Executive Officer Harold Stark, later chief of naval operations).²³ When Osborne left Portsmouth and the navy in 1920, MacCormick followed shortly thereafter. In 1922, the two men founded the National Society of Penal Information, which, after Osborne’s death in 1926, became the Osborne Association.

MacCormick’s collaboration with Osborne profoundly shaped his views on prisoners and prisons. The two shared a reform vision predicated on several critical assumptions. First, they consistently argued against any bright-line method of differentiating between the prison population and the adult population more generally. In this respect, Osborne and MacCormick were challenging two distinct perspectives: the popular moralism that we can distinguish between the decent and the depraved individual, and the quasi-medical approach believed to explain criminality by reference to physical and psychological defect. Indeed, they detected that these two points of view had more in common than most suspected, as Frank Tannenbaum had also suggested: “ ‘Good’ may have been translated into ‘normal.’ And ‘evil’ may have come to be described as ‘abnormal’ … but the contrast in absolutes still pervades the air of criminological discussion.”²⁴ In place of moral and criminological absolutism, Osborne and MacCormick offered a view that the criminal was “just like us” and “differs less than the layman thinks from the ordinary run of humanity.”²⁵

The second element of Osborne and MacCormick’s shared vision was a strong but tempered faith in individual capacity for self-transformation, aided by education for social citizenship and community membership. Their faith, in other words, drove them to seek out the power of internal transformation over external discipline. The less said about criminal past, about the causes of crime, the better. Instead, inmates were regarded as “hungry and eager” for the good to drive out the bad, and to respond to the “right condition and the right appeal.”²⁶ The Mutual Welfare League and the Naval Welfare League were both understood by Osborne less as forms of institutional democracy and more as exercises in (and training for) self-government in the most fundamental sense— self-awareness, self-control, and self-discipline.²⁷

In the Osborne-MacCormick worldview, self-mastery had to involve meaningful integration into a larger system of social relations. Of the Mutual Welfare League idea, MacCormick would later write (after Osborne’s death), “The primary aim and result of this method of prison organization is to transmute the ‘gang’ spirit, whose essence is loyalty to the local group, into a spirit of loyalty to the larger group which constitutes the prison community.”²⁸ In this respect, Osborne and MacCormick’s work was something of a precursor to later and more comprehensive studies of inmate social systems. Unlike those studies, which tended to describe a fixed and inherent quality to social life within “total institutions,” the Osborne-MacCormick view of prison social organization was far more dynamic and socially contingent. Properly organized, the social world of the prison could be a force for positive change.

This element of the Osborne-MacCormick program extended to include social adjustment after release, and the preparation for re-entry into the community. At Portsmouth, they restored an unprecedented number of men to duty. “Men who had been discarded” were able to complete their service and were “saved from the disgrace of a dishonorable discharge.”²⁹ Osborne put it succinctly: “The prison must be made primarily—not a gate of exit, but a gate of re-entrance.”³⁰

The Education of Adult Prisoners

A trip down the “reform” side of Ben Shahn’s Rikers mural revealed many scenes focused on the education of prisoners. A multiracial group of adult inmates were shown in a classroom, seated at traditional school desks, while an instructor and an inmate-student stood at a blackboard. Just beyond the classroom, a pair of inmates laid bricks, while next door other inmates engaged in auto repair work. The auto shop is clearly a vocational training experience, with an instructor and three inmates gathered around a large diagram of an automobile; the instructor, in coat and tie, uses a pointer to explain certain features of the motor.³¹ Further down, inmates worked an institutional farm; an early Shahn study for the mural, “Prisoners Milking Cows,” presents industrious inmates, alert and upright, focused on various dimensions of industrial milk production, from milking to bottling.³² There is a sense of productivity and pride in the working figures, a theme played out in most of Shahn’s New Deal-era mural projects.³³

Education was central to MacCormick’s conception of the prison; it was both the essential need of every inmate and the highest purpose of the institution. As he famously wrote, society must regard “the prisoner as primarily an adult in need of education and only secondarily as a criminal in need of reform.”³⁴ MacCormick’s formal training in the field of education began with the ideas he encountered as a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University. There, he came under the dual influences of the two titans of “scientific” educational reform in early twentieth-century America, Edward Thorndike and John Dewey.

From the educational psychologist Edward Thorndike, MacCormick internalized a lifelong commitment to the principle of “individualization,” translated into the prison setting as an effort to “diagnose” inmates’ needs, desires, and innate capacities in order to provide them with finely calibrated opportunities for learning and rehabilitation. Psychological instruments were a component of diagnosis, though MacCormick’s attraction to environmentalist and learning theories limited his full embrace of Thorndike’s emphasis on formal testing.³⁵ Resisting reductionist assessment tools, MacCormick explained that testing results should be seen as indicating something that was “probably true” but should not be understood as indicating anything about the prospects for growth and development. Cultivating human potential, he argued, was “a more complex problem than that of merely determining intelligence and achievement levels by scientific tests.”³⁶

The other lesson of Thorndike’s work was the need to focus educational energies on the things that mattered to students. Thorndike questioned the value of the traditional academic curriculum and was an influential voice in encouraging a vocational orientation to school training. This focus on the practical and the relevant was among the most hotly debated questions at Teachers College. One of the foremost advocates of this practical approach—social efficiency— was David Snedden, who joined the Teachers College faculty the same year that MacCormick arrived as a student.³⁷ There are some echoes of Thorndike and Snedden in MacCormick’s admonition that educators should be on guard for wasting students’ time with “useless” or irrelevant subjects, and in his advice to modify educational programs based on the social situation of the student.

From John Dewey, MacCormick absorbed the essentials of the early twentieth-century “progressive education” movement. Two articles of faith in that movement were especially important to MacCormick: first, the pedagogical principle of “learning by doing,” and second, the democratic view that “culture,” rather than an elite preserve, could and should be made accessible to all because of its inherently life-enhancing, morally uplifting qualities (the Deweyan notion of popularization without vulgarization). Dewey’s argument in Human Nature and Conduct that a positive line of interest or action was the key to changing behavior—in contrast to one that focused on the bad behavior itself—was entirely consistent with the line of thought that Thomas Mott Osborne had already been encouraging. For MacCormick, as for both Dewey and Osborne, the key to improvement was to find a way of responding or reacting to circumstances and situations that would draw on a person’s better instincts.³⁸

It may have also been at Teachers College that MacCormick began to think of himself not simply as a professional educator, but as an adult educator. This was a distinction with considerable meaning. When MacCormick arrived at Teachers College in 1916, adult education was on the verge of achieving success and recognition as a distinct field. In that year Dewey published Democracy and Education, which focused on learning as a process that continued throughout life— the human potential for growth was neither fixed nor finite.³⁹

World War I proved a critical turning point for the adult education field. Mass intelligence testing carried out through the army Alpha and Beta IQ tests, devised by Robert Yerkes, electrified the world of adult education. Less well known, but equally important, the military undertook a massive training and education program for its recruits. In just over two years, more than one hundred thousand soldiers went through programs that trained in basic academics and literacy as well as vocational and social subjects. Simultaneously, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act, providing funds for vocational training in agriculture that could be used for adult as well as school-age learners.

The twenties were a fertile and exciting period for adult education.⁴⁰ The many hundreds of practical experiments included service organizations for labor, like the Workers Education Bureau, and “labor colleges,” like the Bryn Mawr Summer School of Women Workers. The former was organized in 1921 to work for social reform and citizenship education.⁴¹ The latter, founded by Hilda Worthington Smith in 1921, was an important innovator in workers’ education. The eight-week residential program brought women factory workers to the campus each year for intensive classes. (Smith self-consciously borrowed Osborne’s ideas regarding self-governance for the school as part of teaching the skills of democratic participation.)⁴² These and similar programs coupled a goal of personal transformation with an ambition that students become agents of broader social change.⁴³

The Carnegie Corporation emerged as the center for funding and support of adult education research. In 1923, Frederick Keppel began serving as president of the corporation and brought with him an eager interest in expanding the foundation’s work in adult education. He was acquainted with the Workers Education Bureau (for which the Carnegie Corporation would come to provide substantial support) and had some association with the World War I army education programs as third assistant secretary of war.⁴⁴ Carnegie money helped start the American Association for Adult Education (AAAE).⁴⁵ Its executive secretary, Morse Cartwright, had been Keppel’s administrative assistant at the Carnegie Corporation. Cartwright was a firm supporter of what he called the “live and learn” model of education, in which educational programming was linked in a direct way to the lives of students. The substantive goal was to assist adults in various settings to adjust themselves to life in a modern democracy.

Carnegie/AAAE investments supported a wave of empirical research and investigation. Perhaps the best-known fruit of that effort was Edward Thorndike’s Adult Learning (1928), which utterly demolished the popular notion that adults could not be taught as effectively as children. Some of Thorndike’s research had been conducted with inmates at Sing Sing prison, and the study deeply impressed MacCormick. “It is safe to consider,” MacCormick wrote, “the older prisoner, as well as the younger, a prospective student.” The Carnegie/AAAE modus operandi was to fund experimental programs in a wide range of settings and demonstration projects, and this support produced a series of important studies.⁴⁶

Along these lines, the AAAE recommended to the Carnegie Corporation that a grant be made to Austin MacCormick, so that he might conduct a survey of educational and library programs in the nation’s prisons and reformatories. The AAAE intended that MacCormick’s survey generate not merely descriptive detail, but practical and specific recommendations for institutional administrators. The grant sent MacCormick on a grueling ten-month tour of the United States, from November 1927 to August 1928, during which time he visited approximately 110 penal institutions. He submitted his final report to Carnegie/AAAE in 1929 and eventually published the study as The Education of Adult Prisoners.⁴⁷

The first conclusion of the book was that there was little, if anything, that qualified as decent educational programming in U.S. prisons. In the spatial and social geography of the prison, education was an entirely marginal activity. Few prisons had adequate space for it, and many had none at all. Educational materials were outdated, of poor quality, or inappropriate for adult learners. As for staff: “The teacher is the chaplain, an underpaid guard, a city school-teacher who has already done a hard day’s work in his own school, or an inmate who got the job because he has somewhat more education than his fellows.”⁴⁸ Educational programs bore the “stamp of unimportance and mediocrity.”⁴⁹ And these were the average practices. The worst situations MacCormick encountered, he found almost tragically bad for prisoners.

The Education of Adult Prisoners took a broad view of the potential pool of educable prisoners. In general, the book spent little time on the causes of crime. MacCormick allowed that there was “a direct correlation between vocational incompetence and crime,” but he contended that this incompetence was only one dimension in a larger environment of poverty.⁵⁰ Whatever deficits prisoners had were common to the communities from which they came. MacCormick acknowledged that inmates were an “especially unpromising” group of potential students, but he felt certain that the prison experience could open inmates up to the possibilities of education and self-improvement. Giving students some knowledge of “what lies beyond the horizon” was fundamental education, MacCormick argued, and practicable for educated prisoners as well as those “of very limited education.”⁵¹

The book gave MacCormick the opportunity to integrate the diverse strands of educational thought into his own coherent vision of what education should be. He straddled the theoretical divide between those who wanted adult education to be purely practical and vocational (the social efficiency model) and those who embraced the less tangible values of classical education and personal enrichment. Toward the latter, MacCormick argued that adult education should eschew a narrowly utilitarian approach. He cited with approval the Danish folk schools’ orientation away from pursuing narrow technical competencies: “The Danish farmer reads the literature of his country and studies philosophy with no idea that they will increase the productivity of his farm.”⁵² In any event, MacCormick pointed out, a strictly utilitarian approach would fail prisoners, since so few of them had a specific direction (vocational or otherwise).⁵³ The larger and more fundamental project was to extend educational opportunity to prisoners, “that they may thereby be fitted to live more competently, satisfyingly and cooperatively as members of society.”⁵⁴

But The Education of Adult Prisoners also championed the practical and the relevant for prisoner education: “The curriculum of fundamentals must be cut down until everything that remains has real significance for the prisoner.” The inmate “has the right not to be interested” in the parts of speech or the number of soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg. Instead, basic education should be linked in every instance to the inmate’s interests.⁵⁵ The same pragmatism informed MacCormick’s approach to vocational education, which, he argued, should not be about skills alone, but should address the larger questions of “steady jobs, regular pay, homes, families, and economic stability.”⁵⁶ The Education of Adult Prisoners displayed an aversion to external discipline and habit. These had been hallmarks of New York State policy: one committee praised the “moral advantage of the machine” and urged that the task itself become the boss, while another pronounced of the prisoner that “it seems obvious that the best way to fit him for hard work outside is to give him hard work inside.”⁵⁷

MacCormick condemned the “social losses” that came from the quest for productive prison industries. These, he argued, utterly failed to “fit men for free life.” His criticisms were consistent with the conclusions (if not the reasoning) of the broad-based movement away from profit-making prison industry and agriculture. In place of prison factories and farms and their rigid systems of habitual labor, he hoped would emerge a broadly educational approach to work.⁵⁸ “Only when the individual knows what his proper relation to the social order is and wishes to assume it,” wrote MacCormick, would the prisoner become fully socialized and achieve “conformity with understanding.” Linking the inmate mentally and morally to the body politic was essential to counteract attitudes that most prisoners had internalized since childhood. MacCormick observed that most prisoners were non-social rather than anti-social, rarely aggressive and plotting when it came to criminality.⁵⁹ Social education could replace mechanical obedience with self-help and community engagement.⁶⁰

At the intersection of MacCormick’s educational philosophy and his work with Osborne, we find the essence of his vision of rehabilitation—willing conformity, based not on subordination in a power relation, but on an understanding of self and society.⁶¹ The importance of this vision helps explain why MacCormick (and Osborne) opposed Lewis Lawes’ managerial prison at Sing Sing, for there, they felt, “the general emphasis is on making good prisoners, rather than good citizens.”⁶² Rehabilitation of prisoners took place in the largely hidden world of motivation and inspiration—where the critical question was not whether, but how and why a man would be moved to change the conduct of his life, “to feel dissatisfaction with his former mode of living.”⁶³

And Now, Youth!

Ben’s Shahn was given permission to roam about the old penitentiary at Welfare Island, as well as the newer New York City Reformatory in New Hampton, to take photographs of prisoners for use in developing the studies for his mu-ral.⁶⁴ Shahn’s photographs highlighted the difference between the older Welfare Island institution and the apparently more promising reformatory; photos from the latter institution feature a clear visual emphasis on the vitality and promise of youth. Shahn scholar Deborah Martin Kao observes that the photos show him “sympathetically allied” with the young men in these photographs—young men “not to be feared but regarded as rebellious adolescents.”⁶⁵ Shahn’s focus on youth was consistent with MacCormick’s own observation, that “the problem of the prison, as of crime in general, is a problem of youth.”⁶⁶

Of course, the problem of the younger prisoner was hardly a discovery of New Deal-era New Yorkers. The reformatory movement of the nineteenth century had first brought attention to the problems of the young first-time offender, and the juvenile court movement had focused attention on the judicial handling of delinquent and incorrigible children. But a newer element in the reformist language of the 1930s was the growing focus on “youth” or “adolescence” as a formally defined period of transition between childhood and adulthood, and to use this period as a meaningful concept in criminal justice practice. The problem of the adolescent in the thirties was largely defined by the growing gap between the end of formal schooling and the start of full-time productive labor, a concern made more pressing with each passing year of the Great Depression. Efforts to bridge this period of enforced idleness gave rise to two significant New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the National Youth Administration (NYA), both of which focused on the problem of employment for adolescents after they left public schooling. The American Youth Commission, organized by the American Council on Education in 1935 to consider the needs of youth (defined as between the ages of 16 and 24), concluded, “All aspects of a healthy transition from youth to adult life depended” on successful employment and work experiences following school.⁶⁷

MacCormick would come to embrace the CCC model and the transformative power of work experiences. He observed that CCC youth “didn’t want to go at first, they were pretty pale when they went, they didn’t look much like workers, but when they came back they had esprit de corps, their muscles had begun to develop, they stood up straight, they were brown and a great many of them weathered some terrible years in which they would have otherwise got into trouble.” For MacCormick, the CCC was one model of what the state could do to fill the gap between youth and adulthood.⁶⁸

In 1936, MacCormick partnered with the Osborne Association in developing a vocational demonstration project, for the purpose of placing young prisoners “in worth-while jobs, preferably on the basis of their interests and their train-ing.”⁶⁹ He recruited Viola Ilma, former head of the American Youth Congress and author of And Now, Youth!, to direct the demonstration.⁷⁰ But the problem of enforced idleness was not simply a concern after release, but a condition of confinement as well. Here, the problem of youth idleness was linked to the more general problems of prisoner idleness related to the long campaign against for-profit prison industries. For the reformers, the lack of productive labor produced a throwback to retrograde conditions.⁷¹ MacCormick seconded the criticism, writing that “nothing has been more harmful and shameful in our recent penal history than the idleness in our prisons for all age groups … the young prisoner, particularly, needs to have his day full to the brim with work and training, balanced by recreation and a variety of character-building activities that use up his energies to the limit.”⁷²

The push for engaging the energies of the delinquent adolescent was coupled with an important, though little-remembered, effort to extend the concept of the juvenile court upward into the realm of the adolescent offender.⁷³ Harry M. Shulman’s 1931 study of the sixteen-to-twenty-year-old offender in New York City bluntly stated that it was “without logical or scientific foundation” to handle young men in this age range in the same fashion as adult offenders.⁷⁴ MacCormick summarized the argument in favor of such an arrangement:

Too many youths who should be given probation are committed to an institution for punitive reasons, while youths who require institutional training are put on probation as an act of misguided leniency … The surest way to reduce the margin of error is by a thorough presentence investigation. This should not only include complete information on the current offense and the offender’s previous criminal record, but also his family history, his personal history and community background, pertinent data from medical, psychiatric and psychological examinations, and so forth. The judge should give careful consideration to all this material before passing sentence.⁷⁵

Without a coherent process, MacCormick argued, “the hapless delinquent is passed from one to another like lumber through various processing plants. Almost inevitably the mass-produced end result proves a perverse failure, for unfortunately the delinquent boy is not lumber.”⁷⁶ The cure for mass processing was to embrace the individualized model of the juvenile court and dispense with the patterns of routine characteristic of the criminal courts.

Against Cruelty: Machine-Gun Criminology and the Conditions of Confinement

Not long after Ben Shahn and Austin MacCormick began discussing the Rikers Island mural, Shahn abandoned the original concept for the mural, which would have emphasized more broadly historical developments in the history of penology. Instead, the focus became quite contemporary. Shahn and Block argued to LaGuardia, “The murals would have more force” if they examined only “prisons of our own time.” As a consequence, the “archaic” side of the Rikers mural, the one featuring scenes of retrograde punishment and inhumanity, was drawn not from scenes of ancient ritual or obviously bygone moments, but from present-day conditions.⁷⁷ Shahn gave a sharply political edge to these observations, consistent with his previous explorations at the intersections of social injustice and the criminal justice system (in the Sacco and Vanzetti series, and his series on imprisoned labor leader Tom Mooney). His notes on the Rikers project show him deeply immersed in contemporary criticism of criminal justice, including John Spivak’s devastating 1932 account of the Georgia chain gangs, Georgia Nigger; the 1932 Warner Brothers film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; and the memoir of the same year, on which it was based, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Shahn also maintained a file of images related to the notorious Scottsboro case, for which retrials were still ongoing.⁷⁸

The final rendering of the mural reflects Shahn’s immersion in the causes of social justice. In the center of the north end of the mural, between the two long hallways, two prisoners appear in a lineup. Standing somberly in front of an institutional setting, bundled up in overcoats and visibly handcuffed together, they appear to have been taken directly from similar images of Sacco and Vanzetti that Shahn had prepared a few years earlier.⁷⁹ Just outside the lineup scene, homeless men sleep on newspapers with screaming crime-related headlines partially visible, and a line of unemployed men confront a “No Help Wanted” sign—all ironically juxtaposed against the Centre Street courthouse and the words along its façade, “The True Administration of Justice is the Firmest Pillar

of Good.”⁸⁰

The mural echoed the manner in which reformers defined the harms of punishment in terms of both body and mind. There were scenes focused on the mistreatment of the body: images of southern chain gangs (in front of what sharp-eyed observers would have recognized as the Morgan County Circuit Courthouse in Alabama, site of the ongoing Scottsboro trials), poor prison conditions, and even Delaware’s whipping post (known as Red Hannah, a potent symbol of the forms of corporal punishment still extant). Scenes of mental suffering appeared throughout—images of hopelessness, overcrowding, and idleness. In a preliminary sketch, “Prisoners in Bed,” Shahn showed an endless row of inmates packed together in dormitory bunks, restless, disturbed, their individual differences washed out by the setting.⁸¹ The program for his final sketches listed the scenes: “idleness and the milling about of prisoners,” “dreary, unproductive labor,” and “overcrowded dormitories.”⁸² All scenes seem to consciously echo what MacCormick called “Paregoric Penology”: “As long as these institutions were kept nice and quiet, with the prisoners drifting in half or total idleness through the day and locked snugly in their cells at 5:00 p.m. for 14 hours, their wardens were perfectly willing that the prisoners deteriorated like vegetables rotting in a bin.”⁸³ The wall ended with a strong intimation of a revolving-door criminal justice system, with lines of released inmates queuing first at an employment station, then into jail.

Shahn’s mural perfectly captured the prevailing sense within reform circles in 1934 that tremendous abuses and cruelties remained within the American prison system.⁸⁴ Frank Tannenbaum put it most forcefully: “Imprisonment is negative. It takes all. It gives nothing. It takes from the prisoners every interest, every ambition, every hope; it cuts away, with a coarse disregard for personality, all that a man did or loved, all his work and his contacts, and gives nothing in return.”⁸⁵ And few reformers had seen more than Austin MacCormick. Since the early 1920s, MacCormick had traveled throughout the United States making prison inspections under the auspices of the National Society of Penal Information (NSPI), the organization Osborne has founded in 1922, following a nationwide speaking tour on which he raised funds for the new enterprise. The purpose behind the NSPI was to conduct systematic surveys of prisons and prison conditions, much like other privately funded surveys were doing with other dimensions of the criminal justice system.⁸⁶ These surveys would, in turn, provide a basis for pressuring states to reform prisons where reforms were needed, and to give an accounting of best practices and standards to follow.⁸⁷

The NSPI surveys (eventually organized and published as the Handbook of American Prisons, the first edition of which appeared in 1926) exposed horrific conditions. Frank Tannenbaum made some of the first NSPI-sponsored visits to southern prisons, prison farms, and road camps. He incorporated some of these experiences into Darker Phases of the South (1924), where he asked the reader to “believe the unbelievable” regarding the conditions of confinement.⁸⁸ MacCormick reported from Mississippi that conditions were “very primitive” and that the dormitories were “like the holds of slaveships … what goes on in there better not come out in the light of day.” In addition to ghastly conditions of confinement, NSPI surveys helped demonstrate that torture continued to be commonplace in southern prison systems, including the use of the strap (“fastened to a short handle so that some of the clever boys can make it come down edgewise”), stocks, sweatboxes, and similar instruments of abuse.⁸⁹

Even as the NSPI exposed the brutality of punishment in the South, the surveyors cautioned readers against “the delusion that the rest of the country is so much better.”⁹⁰ Throughout much of the United States, the same conditions of confinement that had inspired progressive-era indictments by Donald Lowrie, Kate Richards O’Hare, and others remained stubbornly resistant to change by the early 1930s. The Wickersham Commission’s investigation of prison conditions, published in 1931, revealed many appalling practices.⁹¹ To his colleagues in 1933, MacCormick observed that many “rotten old penitentiaries” deserved to be “turned over.”⁹²

MacCormick and fellow reformers tried to explain the consequences of brutality and torture. Their writings harkened back to Donald Lowrie’s progressive-era declaration: “You cannot make a saint out of a man by confining him in a church, but you can make a devil out of him by treating him like hell … fear has no legitimate place in the training of men.”⁹³ The mechanisms of imprisonment generated cruelty, even evil, all in the name of virtue and under sanction of the state. The personal transformations it produced were damaging for both the keeper and the kept, “the sufferer and the perpetrator both being unfortunate souls caught in a vortex of passion and hate that drives them to madness and brutality.”⁹⁴

In Portsmouth, MacCormick had encountered a prison overcrowded with wartime inmates, forced to house more than half of its men in wooden barracks, guarded largely by other inmates. Touring confinement facilities at California’s Mare Island Naval Shipyard with Captain Clark Stearns (an ally of Osborne’s), MacCormick observed the men being treated “like dogs” in isolation cells called “coke-ovens.”⁹⁵ Locking up a man for twenty hours a day, MacCormick would later write, “puts an intolerable strain on the physical and mental health of every man so confined.”⁹⁶ The “vicious phases of Naval discipline,” disgusted MacCormick, who wrote to Osborne from Guantanamo Bay, describing a scene in which a boatswain’s mate had been convicted of breaking and entering and was being led off the ship: “We were all kept aft while he marched across the deck under guard and went into the boat which started him on his way to prison. It was all very dramatic and very stupid and very ineffectual and unspeakably cruel.”⁹⁷

Even as MacCormick and others attacked the cruelty and waste of punitive imprisonment, they firmly believed that these conditions derived not from any universal quality of the prison, but from case-by-case decision making. By implication, the mitigation of cruelty was also a matter for case-by-case intervention and control. There was no inherent defect in prisons, nor any inevitably positive quality. The 1929 NSPI survey put it this way: “It is too sweeping a statement to say that American penal institutions are steadily getting better … Waves of public opinion, caused by general excitement over crime or by some bit of local scandal or maladministration, cause temporary changes for better or worse.” It was therefore true, MacCormick argued, that “an institution might be a fine place in 1930 and a bad place in 1935; or it may be a bad place in 1932 and a good one in 1937.”⁹⁸

Conditions could not be changed by good intentions alone, but good intentions backed with political influence could defeat punitive interests. The critics of reform presented a formidable obstacle to changing prisons, as they had for Thomas Mott Osborne. MacCormick reflected on his mentor, “The prison field does not … attract his like, except in rare instances. When it does, it often crucifies them.”⁹⁹ The navy had been MacCormick’s most personal lesson in the politics of punishment. Although he and Osborne enjoyed the patronage of Navy Secretary Daniels and Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, they suffered from officers’ resentment of the “soft” treatment being meted out at Portsmouth. Near the end of their navy work, MacCormick warned Osborne of the animosity he and Daniels would face: “I can’t impress upon you too strongly how great and widespread the hostility to you is among officers. It is partly because of the way in which they despise the Secretary. There is no other way of describing their attitude toward him. He is accorded the same respect that Emma Goldman and Berkman get when their names come into a consideration—no more.”¹⁰⁰ Captain Joseph K. Taussig, former navy director of personnel, unleashed a series of violent attacks on Osborne and MacCormick in the Army and Navy Journal, precipitating a lengthy and public battle pitting Daniels and Roosevelt against the navy brass and the Republican press.¹⁰¹ Under pressure, Osborne and MacCormick resigned in early 1920; the next year President Warren G. Harding’s newly appointed navy secretary systematically purged the remaining elements of Osborne’s reforms.¹⁰²

MacCormick spent much of 1924 helping Osborne and Colorado governor William Sweet remove Warden Thomas J. “Golden Rule” Tynan, in what MacCormick later recalled as “one of the most exciting and dangerous experiences I ever had in my life.”¹⁰³ Replying to Osborne’s invitation to survey Colorado, MacCormick replied: “You bet I will go. Thrilled to pieces.”¹⁰⁴ “Hopelessly rusty on prison work,” MacCormick saw Colorado as “a great chance to get back in the traces.” The initial survey found Tynan’s prison to be in bad shape, a mix of equal parts torture and corruption.¹⁰⁵

The battle engaged, Osborne warned Governor Sweet that those who fought “crooked politics” confronted two essential problems: “the utter unscrupulousness of his opponents, and second, the ignorance and indifference of right-minded people.” When the State Board of Corrections failed to act on the survey, Sweet brought charges before the Civil Service Commission (for which MacCormick returned to testify). At one point, Governor Sweet (strongly anti-Klan in a state where Ku Klux Klan activity was near a peak in 1924) arranged a secret meeting between himself, Osborne, MacCormick, and the prison chaplain (who also happened to be the local Klan leader).¹⁰⁶ They persuaded the chaplain to permit Klan members (virtually the entire guard force) to testify at the hearing against Tynan.

The weakness of the reform position in the state meant that neither Osborne nor MacCormick was willing to take an administrative position and “serve under a bunch of low-down trimmers like that prison commission.” MacCormick wrote to Osborne: “I am not a combined Napoleon and Caesar. I would be badly handicapped, as you would, in a state where we could not use a lot of people whom we know and trust. Out there we would have to go it blind.”¹⁰⁷ Still, MacCormick observed to Osborne, “We certainly kicked over the milk pail. If Tynan has time enough he will prove every charge we made against him.” In the end, Tynan outlasted Sweet, but not for long—he was ousted in 1927 (though not until attracting national attention by barricading himself behind machine guns to prevent legal papers being served).¹⁰⁸

Reformers like MacCormick took an expansive view of prison politics, understanding that it included national, state, and local politics as well as prison administration and staff. Reform politics could not afford to stop at the prison gate. While MacCormick was at the Bureau of Prisons, the bureau established the United States Training School for Prison Officers, based at the Federal Detention Headquarters in New York City; according to its director, “The School is not only informative in the essentials of prison management, but is also a test period to weed out inferior characters whose service in an institution would be hazardous to the organization.” The school eliminated one of every six would-be officers who arrived during its first two years.

Reformers were also forced to confront their opponents’ powerful rhetoric in public debates over punishment—what MacCormick once referred to as the “machine-gun school of criminology.”¹⁰⁹ One of the foremost proponents of that school, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, assailed the advocates of parole and rehabilitation as the “cream puff” school of criminology, whose views “daily turn loose upon us the robber, the burglar, the arsonist, the killer, and the sex degen-erate.”¹¹⁰ MacCormick was in attendance for a speech in which Hoover assailed “sob sister wardens, country club prisons, and convict coddlers”; MacCormick later lamented to a meeting of the American Prison Association that he “had to sit within six feet of the speaker and didn’t have a gun on me.”¹¹¹

Years earlier, Donald Lowrie had observed that, as soon as he began making his public criticisms of the prison, he had been accused of “sentimental twaddle,” “maudlin hysteria,” and “lackadaisical neurasthenia”—all suggesting a lack of true manhood.¹¹² Prison reformers were often attacked on the basis of their supposed homosexuality or sexual practices. This had certainly been true of Osborne, at whose 1916 trial Assistant District Attorney William Fallon proclaimed: “We have numberless affidavits, testimony that we have not introduced, that shows this man to be the worst kind of degenerate.”¹¹³ MacCormick knew that these charges had “hurt his [Osborne’s] work immeasurably” and “could never have been given color if it were not for his decent and effective way of handling perverts as he encountered them in prison. He did not side-step the issue and paid for his honesty and courage with his reputation.”¹¹⁴

The fate of the Rikers mural gave Austin MacCormick and Ben Shahn one more powerful example of prison politics. By early 1935, Shahn had completed his sketches and presented them to MacCormick and LaGuardia. By all accounts, the two men were well pleased with what they saw; both stopped by Shahn’s Bethune Street studio to offer their personal congratulations on a job well done. As publicly funded art, however, the mural sketches still required the approval of the Municipal Art Commission, and here they ran into serious trouble. The commission, which had the previous year rejected a series of public murals from Shahn on the subject of Prohibition, now attacked the Rikers reform mural. They rejected the design, with its review of harsh punishments, as too disconcerting to prisoner sensibilities.¹¹⁵ Among art historians, the commission’s decision has been cast as an act of aesthetic conservatism against challenging modern public art (“lugubrious and unpleasant to look upon”), which it certainly was, but the rejection of Shahn’s mural was also explicitly about the politics of prison reform. The commission branded the proposed mural as “antisocial propaganda.”¹¹⁶ Jonas Lie, painter and member of the commission, argued that it would “incite prison inmates to further an anti-social attitude” and to “increase their opposition to law and order.”¹¹⁷

The art world bitterly protested the actions of the Municipal Art Commission. Audrey McMahon defended the mural sketches as “works of high artistic merit.”¹¹⁸ New York Times art writer Edward Alden Jewell praised the mural’s depiction of a “New Deal in prison life.”¹¹⁹ Stuart Davis, in Art Front magazine, famously attacked commission member Jonas Lie: “We suggest that while the Commission was thinking along the lines of ‘psychological unfitness,’ it might have done well to look at its own painter member. For, wherever particularly stupid and reactionary acts are committed in regard to art matters, one seldom has to look far to find the person of [Lie] … Jonas Lie has proved himself unfit to hold a seat on the Municipal Art Commission, or to hold any public office, for that matter, outside that of a Fascist Censor.”¹²⁰

MacCormick and LaGuardia tried to help Shahn fight back against the Municipal Art Commission. Following the commission’s preliminary rejection of the plans, in February, MacCormick went to so far as to persuade his friend and colleague, the psychologist Harry Shulman, to conduct a remarkable study of inmate reactions to the proposed mural. Forty inmates were selected and shown some of Shahn’s drawings. They were then given a questionnaire that began: “Here is a set of pictures showing the good and bad sides of prison life. The small ones are sketches and the large ones will give you an idea of how it will look on the wall. This is planned for a mural in one of the halls of a brand-new and modern prison building. The artist would like to know what you think of these pictures.” Inmates were also asked how they felt about having a mural on the walls of a prison, what they thought other prisoners might think of such a mural, and whether visitors to the prison would have any interest in them. The four questions for the forty inmates produced a total of 160 question responses. Shulman reported to MacCormick that out of a possible 160 answers, 97 were favorable, 10 unfavorable, 22 indifferent, and 31 left blank. The positive responses were encouraging: “They will certainly brighten the place up a bit and also give the inmates something to concentrate on besides the walls.”¹²¹

LaGuardia and MacCormick offered the survey results to the Municipal Art Commission as evidence that the murals would not be overly disturbing to the inmates, but the commission remained unmoved. In its formal decision in May, the murals were definitely and finally rejected. At this point, LaGuardia and MacCormick gave in to the commission, formally abandoning the project. Theirs was a shocking decision for Shahn and his supporters, and there is no clear explanation for this reversal of course. MacCormick gave a statement to the press in which he lamely attempted to explain his new reasoning: “Although a number of prisoners submitted written opinions that were favorable to the sketches, we found afterwards that many of them expressed approval because they thought they were expected to do so.”¹²²

Disgusted at the politics of public art in New York, Ben Shahn left both the city and the prison project behind. It was never carried out. Shahn and Block briefly attempted to resurrect the mural by bringing it to one of the state prisons, but this seems not to have progressed very far.¹²³ The panels that composed the mural study were sold by weight as scrap—not until they were reconstructed for a 1999 exhibition would the full vision of the project be presented to the public. As for MacCormick, he had once confided to Osborne that he was sometimes “disgusted” with the “infernal muddle into which prison affairs seem to work themselves if anyone tries to do anything to change the status quo.”¹²⁴ The killing of the Rikers Island mural had proved this yet again. Still, he remained firmly convinced that reformers needed to be ready to seize political opportunities when they presented themselves.¹²⁵

Despite the failure to realize the mural, Shahn’s collaboration with MacCormick produced a powerful distillation of the liberal reform vision. Rooted in educational theory, it deeply affirmed the citizenship of the offender in custody, strongly condemned physical and mental cruelty, and linked prison reform to political action. The mural’s ultimate fate, of course, was a cautionary tale, reminding would-be reformers that regressive politics still had much to say about the manner in which prisoners would be kept. While MacCormick had engaged these political skirmishes in New York City, he had been aiding the opening of another front in the battle for reform, this one in the prison system of New York State.