The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires

3. The Prison, the Governor, and the Warden

31 CHAPTER THREE The Prison, the Governor, and the Warden Prison has everything the free world has. There’s commerce in prison. There’s sex in prison. There’s love in prison. And there’s art. —Steve Earle The Tennessee State Penitentiary, the state’s first prison, opened in Nashville in 1831. Previously, offenders had been housed in county jails, and although the idea of a state prison system seemed like a good idea, it wasn’t long before the facility had outlived its usefulness. In 1898 the new Main Prison opened in Cockrill Bend in West Nashville. An imposing gothic fortress constructed of Pikeville sandstone and white brick, the new state penitentiary had eight hundred single-occupancy cells measuring six by six by eight feet and latticed doors that maximized light and ventilation. There was no wood in the construction, and, as reported in the newspapers at the time, “It is absolutely impossible for the building to burn.” Hailed as one of the nation’s first modern prisons, it served the state of Tennessee (although perhaps not its inmates) well until it closed in 1992.1 From its earliest days the penitentiary employed, as noted earlier, the reformist Auburn system, a new approach to penology that by the midto late nineteenth century was a common form of prison management. The Auburn system, named after the Auburn Penitentiary in upstate New York, where the system was first implemented, was part of the goal ofpostrevolutionaryAmericaofreplacingtheharshjusticeofBritishtyranny —the stock, whipping posts, and branding irons—with institutions 32 / CHAPTER THREE that would punish and reform criminals more humanely. As a system of prison management the Auburn model “was a clear reference to a monastic model; a reference, too, to the discipline of the workshop.”2 The fundamental brilliance of the system, according to its architects and supporters, was that it was in fact a duplication of society, a society whose moral parameters were rigidly defined by the system’s creators. As a result, the system was designed as a microcosm wherein “individuals are isolated in their moral existence, but in which they come together in a strict hierarchical framework, with no lateral relation, communication being possible only in a vertical direction.”3 Under the Auburn system of incarceration, prisoners shared space only during work time and meal hours, and then in absolute silence. Prisoners could speak only to guards in a low voice and only if they received permission. Those violating the code of silence were punished quickly and cruelly. Inmates were flogged for talking and flogged again if they denied it, punishment that led to the development of an elaborate form of sign language among the inmates that, if discovered by the guards, also resulted in a flogging.4 The imposition and strict enforcement of the code of silence was to keep prisoners from fomenting insurrection or planning an escape and, in an effort to reform the inmate population, prevented convicts from passing on their crime techniques . Ultimately, the code of silence was an effort to break their spirits, “bringing about a readiness to accept correction . . . [and] force them . . . to reflect on their sins, to repent and resolve ever after and obey the commandments of God.”5 The use of labor as a means of rehabilitation through moral inculcation was as important to the success of the Auburn system as its implementation of a monastic hierarchy. Penal labor was the vehicle by which violent prisoners, in theory, learned habit, order, and obedience, and in doing so generated enough income for the prison’s ultimate goal of economic self-sufficiency. Most nineteenth-century penal theorists agreed that the application of one’s physical and mental capacities in a routinized, structured fashion reduced violent tendencies and had an overall calming effect on prisoners. Leon Faucher, writing in 1838, emphatically cut to the heart of the Auburn system, noting that “work is the The Prison, the Governor, and the Warden / 33 providence of modern peoples; it replaces morality . . . work must then be the religion of prisons.”6 Auburn prisons set up factories, leased out convict labor to the highest bidder, and for years produced a wide array of products that included nails, shoes, furniture, clocks, wagons, even rifles. Auburn proponents agreed that these new works skills, combined with a reformed attitude, meant paroled convicts would be better able to cope in an increasingly industrialized marketplace. Louis Dwight, a Yale-educated ordained minister, used the...