Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform

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NOTES

Abbreviations

Preface

1. Mike Stobbe, “Ugly Past of U.S. Human Experiments Uncovered,” Associated Press, 27 Feb. 2011; Irving Gordon, Hollis S. Ingraham, and Robert F. Korns, “Transmission of Epidemic Gastroenteritis to Human Volunteers By Oral Administration of Fecal Filtrates,” Journal of Experimental Medicine 86 (1947): 409–22. For a provocative historical study focusing on medical experimentation behind bars, see Allen M. Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison (London: Routledge, 1999).

Introduction • The Ashes of Reform

1. “Prison Kidnapers Hope Effort Yields Changes,” Plattsburgh Press-Republican, 6 Dec. 1977, 7.

2. In 1975, corrections commissioner Benjamin Ward fired a prison teacher at Eastern for being a Grand Dragon of the New York State Klan and ordered others to quit the Klan or leave their jobs. There is ample evidence for Klan activity at Eastern. See Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Gender, Ethnicity, and the State: Latina and Latino Prison Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), notes on 123–24. Not long before the hostage incident, Eastern inmates had formed the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and released a press packet naming thirty-five officers as Klan members or sympathizers. Persistent stories arose of officers engaged in “night riding” at Eastern, wearing white sheets and hoods late at night as a means of intimidation. See Tom Wicker, “Catch-22 Behind Bars,” Times-News, 1 June 1979, 2.

3. “Prison Kidnapers Hope,” 7.

4. Frederic U. Dicker, “Ward Answers His Critics on Coxsackie Security,” Albany Times-Union, 11 Jan. 1978, n. p.

5. Annabar Jensis, “Legislators Grill Ward at Committee Hearings,” Greene County News, 16 Feb. 1978, 1.

6. Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).

7. Tracy Huling (producer), Yes, in My Backyard (Galloping Girls Productions and WSKG Public Broadcasting in association with the Independent Television Service and Eastern Educational Network, 1998). Tracy Huling, “Building a Prison Economy in Rural America,” in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, ed. Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: New Press, 2002).

8. Unlike Coxsackie, the House of Refuge has been well chronicled. See Robert S. Pickett, House of Refuge: Origins of Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815–1857 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1969).

9. Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833).

10. Alexander W. Pisciotta, “Treatment on Trial: The Rhetoric and Reality of the New York House of Refuge, 1857–1935,” American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985); Alexander W. Pisciotta, “The Theory and Practice of the New York House of Refuge, 1857–1935” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1979).

11. Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, One Hundred and First Annual Report of the House of Refuge (New York: House of Refuge Printing Class, 1925).

12. Steven Schlossman and Alexander Pisciotta, “Identifying and Treating Serious Juvenile Offenders: The View From California and New York in the 1920s,” in Intervention Strategies for Chronic Juvenile Offenders: Some New Perspectives, ed. Peter Greenwood (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 34.

13. See Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, One Hundred and Seventh Annual Report (New York: House of Refuge Printing Class, 1932); Schlossman and Pisciotta, “Identifying and Treating Serious Juvenile Offenders,” offer an interesting comparative perspective. Only 7% of new commitments at the Whittier State School in California were 16 or 17 years of age; well over half (56%) of all new commitments to the House of Refuge were in that age group.

14. Harry M. Shulman, From Truancy to Crime—A Study of 251 Adolescents: A Report of the Sub-Commission on Causes and Effects of Crime (Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1928).

15. Frank Tannenbaum, Crime and the Community (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1938), 74–75.

16. Howard Mingos, “East River Islands Viewed As Possible Parks,” New York Times, 15 June 1924, xx-3.

17. “Wants City Islands Made Playgrounds,” New York Times, 25 Sept. 1926, 16. The park idea was revived by Parks Commissioner Moses, who announced in 1934 his intention to convert Randall’s Island into a public park and to demolish the old House of Refuge complex. “Huge Island Park Planned For City,” New York Times, 15 May 1934, 23.

18. “Tri-Borough Bridge to Cost $24,625,000,” New York Times, 25 March 1927, 23.

19. “Asks State to Drop House of Refuge,” New York Times, 19 Nov. 1928, 21. The author of the report was state budget director Joseph H. Wilson. The next month, the Prison Association of New York authored a resolution urging the closure of the House of Refuge.

20. Randall’s Island today generally reflects Moses’s plan, or at least some aspects of it. The Triborough Bridge complex has its critical hub on the island, which is also home to many public parks. On the site of the House of Refuge, or at least very nearby, was Downing Stadium, a track and field stadium opened in 1936 in time for the Olympic trials.

21. Funds for Warwick’s construction were designated from the annual public improvement bond issue for 1930. See “Metropolitan Area To Get $35,000,000,” New York Times, 16 Jan. 1930, 17; on the Coxsackie site, see “Roosevelt Approves Site For Reformatory,” New York Times, 16 July 1932, 2.

22. “45 Boys Break Jail in Uprising,” New York Times, 2 Sept. 1934, 1.

23. “Inquiry Begun In Riot At Randall’s Island,” New York Times, 4 Sept. 1934. One member of the House of Refuge board blamed the disciplinary environment and urged the Commission of Correction not to import the old disciplinary staff to the new institution. The transcript of Helbing’s interview is in Philip Klein and Leonard W. Mayo, Recommendations for the Administration of the New York State Vocational Institution (22 March 1935), box 1, series 1, Leonard Mayo Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

24. For a comprehensive text written from this perspective, see Blake McKelvey’s tellingly sub-titled American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1977).

25. David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America, revised ed. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002); David J. Rothman and Sheila M. Rothman, The Willowbrook Wars: Bringing the Mentally Disabled into the Community, revised ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2005).

26. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961). Reviewers failed to connect Conscience and Convenience with its most obvious intellectual inspiration, in part because (oddly) Goffman’s work is never mentioned in the original edition of Conscience and Convenience. But the connections between the two are considerable. Both served on the Committee for the Study of Incarceration, and a number of Rothman’s earlier publications had explicitly credited the influence of Goffman’s concept of the total institution, embracing the functionalist position that all such institutions, regardless of apparent differences in mission or program, were possessed of the same internal structure and dynamic. Rothman observed that Goffman made a convincing case that brutalization and humiliation were “inherent in institutions, which by their nature are infantilizing or corrupting.” David J. Rothman, “Of Prisons, Asylums, and Other Decaying Institutions,” Public Interest 26 (1972): 13. Through this extension of Goffman’s work, Rothman sought to demonstrate “the inherent and unalterable defects of reform through incarceration.” David J. Rothman, “Prisons: The Failure Model,” Nation, 21 Dec. 1974, 657.

27. Andrew Scull, “The Lives of the Cell,” Nation, 14 June 1980, 795.

28. For a comprehensive treatment more recent than Rothman’s, see Andrew J. Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

29. Of these threads, the question of decency and compassion is largely forgotten today, in part because reform efforts so often ended up producing conditions (such as they did at Coxsackie) that were far from decent or compassionate. Still, progressive sensibilities squared up against the rhetoric of harshness and toughness that would deny citizenship to criminal offenders. Michael Tonry, “Unthought Thoughts: The Influence of Changing Sensibilities on Penal Policies,” Punishment & Society 3 (Jan. 2001): 167–81, offers one of the few extended reconsiderations of this thread. See also, Michael Tonry, Thinking about Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

30. This approximates David Garland’s concept of “penal-welfarism,” first explored in Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot, Hants, UK; Brook-field, Vt.: Gower, 1985), an account of its development in the early twentieth-century.

31. Recent work has begun to draw a clearer picture of the significance of punitive politics during the “liberal” era of crime and punishment. Most notable among recent works is Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). An extraordinarily rich account of the battle between reformers and punitive interests can be found in Estelle B. Freedman’s Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

32. Rebecca McLennan has drawn the most complete picture to date of what she calls “penal managerialism,” and usefully distinguishes it from punitive traditionalism. McLennan makes the case that it effectively replaced the older, progressive vision of “New Penology.” Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). I argue that the older vision continued to find active political expression during and well beyond the 1930s.

33. The variability of prison governance within single-state systems is a theme I developed earlier in William R. Wilkinson, John C. Burnham, and Joseph F. Spillane, Prison Work: A Tale of Thirty Years in the California Department of Corrections (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005).

34. Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 16. Zinoman’s pioneering study has been joined by a wealth of excellent works on the colonial prison. The best of these include Daniel V. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), and the essays collected in Florence Bernault, ed., A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003).

35. See, for example, Mary Gibson, “Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison,” American Historical Review 116 (Oct. 2011): 1040–63.

36. Rebecca McLennan, “Punishment’s ‘Square Deal’: Prisoners and Their Keepers in 1920s New York, Journal of Urban History 29 (July 2003): 597–619; Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

37. McLennan’s fruitful focus on labor has echoes in the more recent work of Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California,” Journal of American History 96 (Dec. 2009): 702–26, and Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 (Dec. 2010), 703–716. Thompson’s work, like McLennan’s, is highly attuned to the complex politics of imprisonment, both inside and outside the prison itself. On racism, crime, and punishment beyond the southern experience, the literature has been rapidly growing, though it tends to focus more on scale and organization than on the details of penal governance. Most notable among recent works is Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

38. Mary Ellen Curtin, “State of the Art: The New Prison History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 8 (fall 2011), 97–111.

39. McLennan, “Punishment’s ‘Square Deal,’ ” 599. Steven Schlossman was among the first historians to show the complexities and contradictions of criminal justice operations, and that “social reform is always contested and negotiated, and that, at the least, it is a two way street.” Steven L. Schlossman, Transforming Juvenile Justice: Reform Ideals and Institutional Realities, 1825–1920 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), xxv. Along the same lines, Frank Dikötter observed, “Many historians have written about the prison in society, but we also need a history of society in the prison,” particularly one that goes beyond a simple dichotomy of resistance and accommodation. Frank Dikötter, “Introduction,” in Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (New York: Cornell University Press, 2007), 11.

40. For another perspective, see David W. Wolcott and Steven L. Schlossman, “In the Voices of Delinquents: Social Science, The Chicago Area Project, and a Children’s Culture of Casual Crime and Violence,” in Science in the Service of Children: Perspectives on Education, Parenting, and Child Welfare, ed. Emily Cahan, Barbara Beatty, and Julia Grant (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).

41. Ann Chih Lin, Reform in the Making: The Implementation of Social Policy in Prison (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Lin makes a powerful case that, “whether specific policies are effective at reintegrating prisoners into society is an important question. But no answer to it can be found if the policies in question are never implemented, do not function as designed, or are changed beyond recognition. Before it is possible to test ‘what works?,’ one must ensure that the conditions for a fair test exist” (p. 10–11).

42. The Woodbourne quotation echoes words posted at an eighteenth-century Dutch workhouse, recorded by John Howard: “Fear not: I mean not vengeance, but your reformation. Severe is my hand, but benevolent my intention.” Quoted in John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (London: J. Johnson, D. Dilly, and T. Cadell, 1791), 73.

43. On the question of torture behind bars in a contemporary context, see Anne-Marie Cusac, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

Chapter 1 • The Reformer’s Mural

1. Arthur Bartlett, Profiles, “The Four-Eyed Kid,” New Yorker, 26 May 1934, 26. A sample of the national press coverage of the raid can be seen in the Associated Press reporting, such as the front page coverage in “World’s Worst Prison,” Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald and Times-Journal, 25 Jan. 25, 1934, 1. MacCormick’s raid on the Welfare Island Penitentiary proved to be a remarkably durable story, particularly his role in exposing the influence of politically connected inmates like Joseph Rao. A version of this story was featured in Seymour J. Ettman, “Hell in Mid-Channel,” Headquarters Detective (Oct. 1940), which itself followed up the Hollywood film version of the story, Blackwell’s Island (starring John Garfield) in 1939.

2. Rikers was finally completed in 1935. The Welfare Island Penitentiary was torn down a year later.

3. The Maine quote is MacCormick’s, from his 1956 Bowdoin Institute Lectures, lecture 2, page 11, Austin MacCormick Collection, Newton Gresham Library, Sam Houston State University (hereafter AMC).

4. See Alejandro Anreus, ed., Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001). The series brought him to the attention of Diego Rivera, who took Shahn on as one of several assistants for his work on the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center.

5. Memorandum to Mayor LaGuardia from Ben Shahn and Lou Block, in Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman, and Jenna Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 2000). See also, Howard Green-feld, Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life (New York: Random House, 1998).

6. For more on Ben Shahn, see Frances Kathryn Pohl, Ben Shahn (San Francisco, Calif.: Pomegranate, 1993); Susan Chevlove, Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). A comprehensive and outstanding review of Shahn’s New York work, including the Rikers mural, can be found in Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York.

7. Lou Block was an important muralist in his own right. Details of his contributions to the Rikers project are to be found in the Lou Block (1895–1969) manuscript collection at University of Louisville Special Collections and Libraries.

8. Clarke A. Chambers offered any early and influential argument for continuity between the progressive moment and the New Deal era in A Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918–1933 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963).

9. The most comprehensive study of the George Junior Republic is still Jack M. Holl, Juvenile Reform in the Progressive Era: William R. George and the Junior Republic Movement (New York: Cornell University Press, 1971). The George Junior Republic inspired the work of Homer Lane at the Little Commonwealth for 13- to 19-year-old delinquents in Dorset, England. See Judith Stinton, A Dorset Utopia: The Little Commonwealth and Homer Lane (Norwich, UK: Black Dog Books, 2005).

10. Donald Lowrie, My Life in Prison (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912).

11. Ibid., 3.

12. See Donald Lowrie, My Life Out of Prison (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915), 333. Winthrop D. Lane, writing in “Thomas Mott Osborne,” Nation, 10 Nov. 1926, 478, captured the idea well: “To Mr. Osborne self-government was a means of making prisoners better; it was a therapeutic agent. It was not a concession to imagined rights of prisoners, as some people thought … to him self-government was a means of training people in the art of living in concert.”

13. The story of Osborne, the Mutual Welfare League, and Sing Sing has been told many times, and it is not my intent to fully recapitulate it here. It was the basis for two admiring books: Rudolph W. Chamberlain, There is No Truce: A Life of Thomas Mott Osborne (New York: Ayer Publishing, 1935) and Frank Tannenbaum, Osborne of Sing Sing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933). More recently, the episode plays an important role in McLennan’s Crisis of Imprisonment, which is a most thorough account.

14. McLennan, Crisis of Imprisonment, 441. Robert Perkinson, in Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Macmillan, 2009), 196, makes essentially the same case, that “penological visionaries in the mold of Davis and Osborne gained little traction in the so-called lawless decade.”

15. McLennan, Crisis of Imprisonment, 443. McLennan correctly observes that while Osborne’s work helped lay the foundation for the managerial prison, such a system of governance was anathema to Osborne himself. One need only observe that Osborne was no fan of Warden Lawes, or vice versa. An entertaining account of Lawes’s views on Osborne, one mostly sympathetic to Lawes, is in Ralph Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America’s Most Dangerous Prisoners (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004). Interestingly, Shahn and Block interviewed Lawes for their mural project as well, and they shared Osborne and MacCormick’s disregard for the self-publicizing Sing Sing warden, calling him “as phony as a twelve-dollar bill.” Greenfeld, Ben Shahn, 106.

16. Those who worked with Osborne felt that, even in his lifetime, few fully understood the breadth of his work. As MacCormick’s collaborator put it, “Let us record our protest against a too narrow view of Mr. Osborne’s interest in prisons.” The “League Idea” was constantly an issue, but Garrett observed that Osborne was interested in “every other phase of prison activity as anyone must be who has seen the problem both as an inmate and as an administrator.” Paul W. Garrett, “Report to the Board of Directors,” 1926, folder 1, box 11, AMC.

17. The newest and most insightful reading of Osborne’s work is Kevin P. Murphy, Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

18. Austin H. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Prevention and Control,” Bow-doin Lecture Series, lecture 2, 8, AMC.

19. Ibid., 8.

20. MacCormick was apparently unaware that Osborne’s Auburn self-commitment had not been done anonymously. The inmates at Auburn were largely aware of who Os-borne was, which Osborne believed (and MacCormick would later ruefully agree) was a more effective way for getting information about prison conditions.

21. On the relationship between Roosevelt and Osborne, see Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning (New York: Putnam, 1971), 277–83.

22. Thomas Mott Osborne to Austin H. MacCormick, 20 Dec. 1916, box 132, Os-borne Family Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library [hereafter OFP].

23. Thomas Mott Osborne to C. W. Carroll, 18 Oct. 1919, box 143, OFP.

24. Frank Tannenbaum, Wall Shadows: A Study in American Prisons (New York: Putnam, 1922), 149.

25. Thomas Mott Osborne, Within Prison Walls (London; New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1914), 16. It is worth noting that Shahn’s photographs of inmates consistently showed them to be merely the “wayward sons and brothers” of society, rather than exaggerating their features. Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York.

26. Osborne, Within Prison Walls, 10, 296.

27. This notion of self-government as self-discipline remained a potent one in the interwar years. In 1934, Federal Bureau of Prisons chief Sanford Bates praised the Soviet Union’s Bolshevo Commune: “A large proportion had no desire to leave the colony. They earn standard wages, work every day, and bring up their families, and are free from restraint. Why should they want to go out? … You would not believe it unless you went there that the place could exist without a club or brass button in the outfit. You can say that it was a show place. But I had a hard time getting them to show it to me. There is food for thought in that experiment.” Osborne Association, annual report, 1935, 20, AMC. The Bolshevo Commune was one of the largest of the so-called Makarenko colonies. See Thorsten Eriksson, The Reformers: A Historical Survey of Pioneer Experiments in the Treatment of Criminals (New York: Elsevier, 1976). MacCormick echoed his mentor in a letter to Osborne, relaying a visit to San Quentin Prison: “The more I see of men in confinement, the more I am committed to self-government as the saving principle.” Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, April 23, 1919, box 147, OFP.

28. Paul W. Garrett and Austin H. MacCormick, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories, 1929 (New York: National Society of Penal Information, 1929).

29. Austin H. MacCormick, untitled manuscript, n. d., 17a, AMC.

30. See Thomas Mott Osborne to Josephus Daniels, 2 July 1917, OFP.

31. See the reconstructed mural in Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York, 230–41.

32. Ben Shahn exhibition catalog, Kennedy Galleries, 1969, plate 10.

33. See, for example, Diana L. Linden, “Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene,” in Chevlove, Common Man, Mythic Vision, 37–66.

34. Austin H. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners: A Survey and a Program (New York: National Society of Penal Information, 1931), 11.

35. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Causation,” Bowdoin Lectures, lecture 1, 37, AMC.

36. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 33, 404–405.

37. Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 81–86.

38. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners. See also Tannenbaum, Crime and Community, and John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Holt, 1922).

39. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916); Angela Cross-Durant, “John Dewey and Lifelong Education,” in Twentieth Century Thinkers in Adult and Continuing Education, ed. Peter Jarvis (London: Routledge, 1991).

40. Notable books followed Dewey’s Democracy and Education, including James Harvey Robinson’s The Mind in the Making (New York: Harper, 1921), the British Institute of Adult Education’s The Way Out: Essays on the Meaning and Purpose of Adult Education (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1923), Eduard Lindeman’s The Meaning of Adult Education (New York: New Republic, 1926), and Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Why Stop Learning? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).

41. See Richard J. Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle: The American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

42. For further discussion of Smith and the Bryn Mawr School, see Joyce L. Kornbluh, A New Deal for Workers’ Education: The Workers’ Service Program, 1933–1942 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 16–17.

43. To understand these efforts in a larger context, see Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); his treatment of South Carolina educational reformer Wil Lou Gray offers a generally sympathetic account, though Fink sees a retreat from the more radical social-restructuring goals over the course of the 1920s.

44. Harold W. Stubblefield and Patrick Keane, Adult Education in the American Experience: From the Colonial Period to the Present (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1994).

45. Within the field of education history, the legacy of Carnegie and the AAAE is vigorously debated. See, for example, Stubblefield and Keane, Adult Education in the American Experience, 194. See also E. C. Lagemann, “The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation and the Formulation of Public Policy,” History of Education Quarterly 27 (summer 1987): 205–220.

46. See, for example, Benjamin C. Gruenberg, Science and the Public Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935); Ira De A. Reid, Adult Education Among Negroes (Washington, D.C.: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936); and Benson Y. Landis and John D. Willard, Rural Adult Education (New York: Macmillan, 1933). The AAAE also played a role in cultivating the careers of important women in the field of adult education, including Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary L. Ely, and Lucy Wilcox Adams.

47. His first, informal, report went to Morse Cartwright in October 1928. See Austin H. MacCormick to Morse A. Cartwright, 2 Oct. 1928, box 2, AMC.

48. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 41.

49. Ibid., 44. MacCormick notes that the federal Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, while providing a great deal of financial support for worker education and training, was by statute not available to institutions for delinquent, dependent, or defective youth and adults.

50. Ibid., 21.

51. Ibid., 202.

52. Ibid., 190. For more on the extent to which the Danish folk schools had captured the progressive imagination, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

53. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 49. MacCormick opposed Snedden’s argument that vocational training should be narrowly cast. He did support the vocational high school concept, though he argued that it should not be “an inferior grade of education” and should have just as varied a program as any high school. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Prevention and Control.”

54. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 12.

55. Alain Locke made the same argument in 1933 about adult education: “The mind of the adult must be met in terms of its living, even if parochial and one-sided interests, and then gradually led out into a broader, wider and even deeper point of view.” For Locke and the question of African American adult education, this meant fully engaging, not ignoring, “racial problems and interests.” See Eunice Barnard, “The New Thirst for Adult Education Is Being Discovered by High-Pressure Sales Organizations, Association Head Warns,” New York Times, 28 May 1933, E7.

56. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 4.

57. New York State Prison Survey Committee, Report of the Prison Survey Committee (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1920); New York State Legislative Committee on Prison Industries, Report of Committee on Industries (1913).

58. Walter M. Wallack, Glenn M. Kendall, and Howard L. Briggs, Education within Prison Walls (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1939), 29–30.

59. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 204.

60. Ibid., 215.

61. MacCormick allowed a similar role for religion in rehabilitation: “Religion of the true sincere type that becomes part of one’s being and is not a matter of dogma, not a matter of outward conformity [sets] up one of the strongest bulwarks against delinquency and crime or indeed human maladjustment.” MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Prevention and Control.”

62. Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories, 1926 (New York: National Society of Penal Information, 1926), 55.

63. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 182.

64. MacCormick placed two conditions on the photographs: first, that Shahn secure permission of inmate subjects before taking their photos and, second, that Shahn not publish the photos themselves.

65. Deborah Martin Kao, “Ben Shahn and the Public Use of Art,” in Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York, 62.

66. Osborne Association, annual report (1936), 24.

67. David L. Angus and Jeffrey Mirel, The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890–1995 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 63.

68. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Prevention and Control.” The gap issue spurred the creation of vocational high schools as a bridge between skilled trades and the departure from school. See a discussion of the vocational guidance movement in Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Grace Palladino observes: “The Great Depression had finally pushed teenage youth out of the workplace and into the classroom … In the process, adolescents had become an age group and not just a wealthy social class, a shift that helped to create the idea of a separate, teenage generation.” Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 5.

69. Ilma was a strong proponent of encouraging the expansion of CCC forestry camps to include vagrant and delinquent youth. She wrote: “The very nucleus that the nation depends upon for the future must starve or develop into criminality … Camps would give them a chance to rebuild themselves, get a mental rest, let their confidence return with their health.” Viola Ilma, And Now, Youth! (New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1934), 23–24. Ilma’s work is a fascinating, earnestly pro-Roosevelt pamphlet. See also MacCormick, “Youth and Crime,” Osborne Association, Report for Year 1936, 21–22. Ilma later became director of the Young Men’s Vocational Foundation, with Eleanor Roosevelt as a board member.

70. MacCormick, “Youth and Crime,” 18–29.

71. Max Grunhut, Penal Reform: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 228.

72. Austin H. MacCormick, “Existing Provisions for the Correction of Youthful Offenders,” Law and Contemporary Problems 9 (autumn 1942), 594.

73. Franklin E. Zimring, The Changing Legal World of Adolescence (New York: Free Press, 1985).

74. Shulman, From Truancy to Crime, 81.

75. MacCormick, “Existing Provisions for the Correction of Youthful Offenders,” 591.

76. Ibid.

77. Memorandum from Ben Shahn and Lou Block to Fiorello LaGuardia, in Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York. The memo indicated that, over the course of their conversations with Austin MacCormick, Dean George Kirchwey, William B. Cox of the Osborne Association, and Warden Lewis Lawes, “we abandoned the idea of dealing with the history of penology. We felt that the murals would have more force if they treated only with prisons of our own time, both of an unenlightened nature and those which have been administered by individuals who believe in the need for penal reform.”

78. See Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York.

79. Laura Katzman, “ ‘Mechanical Vision’: Photography and Mass Media Appropriation in Ben Shahn’s Sacco and Vanzetti Series,” in Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 58.

80. See the mural reconstruction in Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York.

81. Ben Shahn exhibition catalog, Kennedy Galleries, 1969.

82. Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York, 240.

83. Austin H. MacCormick, untitled manuscript, folder 1, box 8, AMC.

84. Burt M. McConnell, “Barbarism to Convicts,” Nation, 10 Nov. 1926, 479–80.

85. Tannenbaum, Wall Shadows, 154–55.

86. For a more general description of the NSPI’s activities, see Paul W. Garrett, “Report to the Board of Directors,” 1926, folder 1, box 11, AMC.

87. Ibid., 3.

88. Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York: Putnam, 1924), 86.

89. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Correctional Training and Treatment,” Bowdoin Lecture Series, lecture 3, 5, AMC.

90. Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South, 113.

91. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement [Wickersham Commission], Report on Penal Institutions, Probation, and Parole (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931).

92. Austin MacCormick, report to the 1934 annual meeting, Osborne Association, AMC.

93. Lowrie, My Life in Prison, 51, 69.

94. Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South, 74.

95. Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, 23 April 1919, box 147, OFP.

96. MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, xxxv.

97. Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, 1 Feb. 1920, box 152, OFP.

98. Garrett and MacCormick, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories (1929), xxxviii; Walter Wallack, The Training of Prison Guards in the State of New York (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1938). One consequence of this view was a general tendency to recoil against indictments of the prison system that were seen as overbroad or too generalized. Sinclair Lewis presented a graphic version of prison life in Ann Vickers (1933), in which the title heroine is a bold reforming pioneer in women’s correctional vocational education, whose book Vocational Training in Women’s Reformatories becomes a widely read success. E. R. Cass, of the Prison Association of New York, reviewed the novel in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology [!] and complained that Lewis had done reformers a disservice by painting the prison picture with too broad a brush. He wrote: “More good would have been served if the author had departed even slightly from his iconoclastic style and given more credit where credit is due.” E. R. Cass, “Ann Vickers” [Review], Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 24 (Nov.-Dec. 1933): 814–17.

99. Austin H. MacCormick, “There is No Truce” [Review], Columbia Law Review 35 (June 1935): 958–60.

100. Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, 23 Jan. 1920, box 152, OFP.

101. Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, 22 Feb. 1920, box 152, OFP. “We have bucked up against a blanker wall than the bigotry of the civil population with regard to state prisons … We tried to chew solid stone and only a rock-crusher can do that.” Not long thereafter, Osborne wrote to MacCormick (March 1, 1920, box 152, OFP): “The way things are turning out, I advise you very strongly to send in your resignation at once. I am getting out of here just as soon as I can and things are looking pretty black for the future. You and I will both want to be able to speak the truth about the Navy.”

102. The Naval Welfare League at Portsmouth was dismantled, as were shipboard versions of the same. Captain Clark Stearns, who had toured naval facilities with MacCormick, was removed from his command of the USS Michigan. Navy Secretary Edwin Denby blasted the system as “soviet” and called for a return to the firm disciplinary regime.

103. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Correctional Training and Treatment,” 8–9.

104. Thomas Mott Osborne to Austin H. MacCormick, 2 Nov. 1923, box 2, AMC.

105. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Correctional Training and Treatment,” 9a, 9b.

106. Ibid.

107. Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, 29 Dec. 1924. A brief exchange of telegrams in the first week of January 1925 indicate that Osborne was willing to consider coming out to Colorado as deputy warden. In the end, no offer was forthcoming. The exchanges are in box 2, AMC.

108. Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, 19 Jan. 1925, box 2, AMC.

109. “M’Cormick Assails Hoover on Parole,” New York Times, 15 Oct. 1937, 13.

110. “Head G-Man ‘No Cream Puff,’ ” Christian Science Monitor, 9 Nov. 1937, 7. The Hoover-MacCormick exchange should be read in light of Murphy, Political Manhood.

111. “M’Cormick Assails Hoover on Parole.”

112. Lowrie, My Life Out of Prison, 149.

113. Chamberlain, There Is No Truce, 341–42.

114. MacCormick, “There is No Truce.”

115. The rejection was big news in the art world. See Philippa Gerry Whiting, “Speaking About Art: Rikers Island,” American Magazine of Art, 28 Aug. 1935.

116. “Anti-Social Move Seen in Relief Art,” New York Times, 9 May 1935, 13.

117. Ibid.

118. Ibid.

119. Edward Alden Jewell, “Sketches Stress New Prison Policy,” New York Times, 10 May 1935, 19.

120. Greenfeld, Ben Shahn, 110–11.

121. Ibid., 109.

122. Ibid.

123. Shahn and Block, as well as Audrey McMahon, corresponded with Walter Thayer, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections, in the summer of 1935. See Kao, Katzman, and Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York, 135.

124. Austin H. MacCormick to Thomas Mott Osborne, Jan. 26, 1925, box 2, AMC.

125. Austin H. MacCormick, “Planning for Tomorrow and Thereafter,” Prison World (Sept.-Oct. 1944): 8–9, 27.

Chapter 2 • A New Deal for Prisons

1. Austin H. MacCormick, “Crime and Delinquency, Correctional Treatment and Training.” His Bowdoin lecture contains an interesting reflection on the 1929 riots at Leavenworth Penitentiary, and the extent to which the riots were a kind of focusing event that pushed federal reform spending through Congress. The Leavenworth riot “in a sense cleared the air, it scared the living daylights out of Congress; we had the backing of the president and an excellent attorney general by this time and we were able by talking about the riot and using it as a thing to scare them, to get appropriations such as nobody had ever got before … we were able in one year virtually to transform the whole federal prison system, at least to begin its transformation.” Likewise, William Cox (executive secretary of the Osborne Association), wrote in the association’s 1932 annual report that these riots “although disastrous in themselves … served to call attention to the futility of administering prisons on a purely custodial and punitive level.”

2. The term “rehabilitative regime” is used in Pamela L. Griset, Determinate Sentencing: The Promise and the Reality of Retributive Justice (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). See also Vanessa Barker, The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

3. Clinton Prison, annual report (1928), in Clinton Prison Annual Reports, 19221953, New York State Library.

4. “3 Convicts Killed, 20 Hurt, 1,300 Riot at Dannemora, Set Fire and Storm Walls,” New York Times, 23 July 1929, 1.

5. “2 Die as Convicts Burn Auburn Prison,” Rochester Evening Journal, 29 July 1929, 1.

6. McLennan, Crisis of Imprisonment, 196.

7. Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing, praises Lawes’s efforts as warden. See also Lewis E. Lawes, “Are We Coddling Our Prisoners at Sing Sing?” Prison Journal (April 1922): 12–16. The manner in which Lawes continued Thomas Mott Osborne’s Mutual Welfare League was especially objectionable to MacCormick, who concluded in 1929 that the league’s importance “as a strong moral force in the prison … has practically disappeared.” Garrett and MacCormick, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories (1929), 715.

8. “Baumes Board Asks 84 Curbs on Crime,” New York Times, 2 March 1927, 1.

9. “The Baumes Law,” Prison Journal (Oct. 1927): 17–19.

10. “Pictures Prisons Filled With ‘Lifers,’ ” New York Times, 17 Feb. 1928.

11. Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing, 95.

12. Al Smith was deeply committed to the idea of prison reform. David R. Colburn persuasively makes this case in “Governor Alfred E. Smith and Penal Reform,” Po liti cal Science Quarterly 91 (1976): 315–27. Still, Smith’s efforts to stamp his imprint on the prison system failed to match his enthusiasm. Perhaps the most lasting of Smith’s contributions to New York’s prison reform program was his recommendation to rely on bond issues, rather than current revenues, to finance new prison construction. The long reluctance to do this had resulted in the massively overcrowded conditions in the twenties, and the embrace of long-term financing created the conditions for the state’s prison construction boom in the thirties, without which the reform regime could not have sustained itself.

13. Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing-Sing, 99.

14. E. R. Cass, “Penal Legislation in New York, 1921,” Prison Journal (July 1921): 11.

15. Garrett and MacCormick, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories, 671.

16. See Wallack, Training of Prison Guards, 10.

17. Ibid., 15; Garrett and MacCormick, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories, 683–94. See also MacCormick, The Education of Adult Prisoners, 288–89.

18. Chamberlain, There is No Truce, 8.

19. “Mutiny at Auburn Put Down by State Police; Fatalities Placed at 9,” Schenectady Gazette, 12 Dec. 1929, 1.

20. Herbert H. Lehman to Allan Nevins, memorandum, 4 Jan. 1962, and Herbert H. Lehman to Allan Nevins, letter, 16 March 1961, Herbert H. Lehman Papers, Special Correspondence Files, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library [hereafter HLP].

21. F. Raymond Daniell, “Hold Warden Hostage,” New York Times, 12 Dec. 1929, 1; “Prison Riot Broken; 9 Dead,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 Dec. 1929, 1.

22. “Three Found Guilty of Auburn Murder; 3 Others Acquitted,” New York Times, 16 Feb. 1930, 1. Four inmates in all were charged with murder and acquitted; the various trials gave extensive public airing of the many complaints prisoners had with how Auburn Prison was run.

23. In The Big House (1930), prisoners were involved in a prison break whose details were clearly based on the Auburn riot. The film received an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and screenwriter Frances Marion won an Oscar for her work. See Robert L. Hilliard, Hollywood Speaks Out: Pictures That Dared to Protest Real World Issues (Chichester, UK; Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 63–81.

24. “A Dramatic Talkie; Ruth St. Clair Pleads to be Saved from Her Life Sentence,” New York Times, 24 Feb. 1930.

25. Women’s clubs sent a large number of letters and petitions to Governor Roosevelt. See, for example, “Rochester Club Women Protect Life Term for Shoplifter,” Rochester Evening Journal, 10 Feb. 1930, 1.

26. Spencer Miller was head of the Workers Education Bureau, and an active figure in adult education reform. Thomas S. Rice was a Brooklyn lawyer who made something of a career out of promoting conservative crime control.

27. “Sees Baumes Laws as State Liability,” New York Times, 25 March 1930, 20; Rice’s performance also included a discussion of the first fourth-strike sentence handed down under the Baumes Laws, given to a “Negro” whose offenses consisted in getting intoxicated, stealing cars, and speeding through town with them. Rice contended that he was “more of a danger to us than ten professional gunmen.”

28. “Prison Riots May Be Caused By Baumes Law,” Pittsburgh Press, 30 July 1929, 13.

29. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Office of the Governor to Editor, Lexington Leader, 10 Aug. 1929, “Herbert H. Lehman,” series 1: correspondence, box 48, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Papers as Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library [hereafter FDR].

30. “Louis Howe,” series 1, box 41, FDR.

31. Felix Frankfurter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 25 July 1929, folder 5, box 7, Sanford Bates Papers, Newton Gresham Library, San Houston State University [hereafter SBP]; Adolph Lewisohn wrote a long memo along the same lines to Lieutenant Governor Lehman. Adolph Lewisohn to Herbert H. Lehman, 11 Sept. 1929, HLP.

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Felix Frankfurter, 5 Aug. 1929, in Roose velt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928–1945, ed. Max Freedman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), ^42–43.

33. “Osborne Paid High Tribute by Roosevelt,” Washington Post, 13 Nov. 1933, 3. Os-borne’s sons remained political supporters of Roosevelt. See Lithgow Osborne to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 15 April 1930, series 1, box 60, FDR.

34. See Adolph Lewisohn to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 8 Nov. 1929, and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Adolph Lewisohn, 14 Jan. 1930, series 1, box 49, FDR. See also, from the same correspondence, Adolph Lewisohn to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 18 March 1930.

35. Sam Lewisohn to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 15 Jan. 1931, series 1, box 49, FDR.

36. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Adolph Lewisohn, 9 Dec. 1929, series 1, box 49, FDR.

37. See Alfred Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (New York: Knopf, 1962), 273–74, and Frank Freidel, The Triumph (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 95–97.

38. “Says Crowding Led to Prison Revolts,” New York Times, 20 Sept. 1929.

39. “Dr. Thayer on the Job,” New York Telegram, newspaper clipping sent by Walter Thayer to Franklin D. Roosevelt, series 1, box 78, FDR.

40. “Dr. W. N. Thayer Jr., Penologist, Dies,” New York Times, 7 Jan. 1936, 21.

41. Roosevelt’s initial search for committee members focused on well-known corporate figures. See E. R. Cass to Louis McHenry Howe, 27 Feb. 1930, box 20, Louis Howe Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library [hereafter LHP].

42. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Marshall Field, 14 March 1930, box 20, LHP.

43. Freidel, The Triumph, 126–28.

44. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Sam Lewisohn, 19 Feb. 1931, series 1, box 49, FDR.

45. “Humanization of Prisons Vital to Crime Cure, Says Lewisohn,” Rochester Evening Journal, 16 Feb. 1931, 25.

46. “College Lectures Held Prison Need,” New York Times, 11 Jan. 1932, 23.

47. Reducing the size of prisons was a key component of reformist thought during this period. See, for example, John Callender, “Planning the Fall of the Bastille,” Survey, June 15, 1931: “Designed functionally the prison of the future will bear little resemblance to the Bastille of the last hundred years. It will probably suggest a hospital or school or small community rather than a fortress … 500 is about the ideal size.” A clipping of the article was sent to Roosevelt by George Gordon Battle, president of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, series 1, box 58, FDR.

48. “Elmira Reforms Education System,” New York Times, 27 Feb. 1933; New York State Commission of Correction, Sixth Annual Report (1932).

49. Walter M. Wallack, A Preliminary Report on an Educational Project at Elmira Reformatory, Special Report by the Commission to Investigate Prison Administration and Construction (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1933), 6; See also Howard L. Briggs, A Handbook of Methods for Vocational Teachers (New York: New York State Department of Correction, Division of Education, 1938).

50. Wallack, Preliminary Report on an Educational Project, 17–22.

51. Austin H. MacCormick, untitled manuscript, n. d., 24a, AMC.

52. Commission for the Study of the Educational Problems of Penal Institutions for Youth, Preliminary Report to His Excellency Governor Herbert H. Lehman (New York: Commission, 1934), 3.

53. Sam Lewisohn to F. P. Keppel, 25 June 1934, series 3: grants, folder 32, box 153, Carnegie Corporation Papers [hereafter CCP]; N. L. Engelhardt to Sam A. Lewisohn, 25 May 1934, CCP. The Carnegie grant was renewed in 1935, based on a recommendation from Morse Cartwright at the AAAE. See Cartwright to F. P. Keppel, 24 Oct. 1935, CCP.

54. An additional $7,000 came from the New York Foundation, and then a large contribution of $100,000 came from the Works Progress Administration as part of funds provided to New York State for adult education programs. “WPA to Help Prisoners,” New York Times, 5 Feb. 1936, 10.

55. Susan Sheehan, A Prison and A Prisoner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 83. Hopkins spelled out his vision in Prisons and Prison Building (New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1930).

56. Walter M. Wallack, “Wallkill, A Medium Security Prison,” Prison World (May-June, 1940): 29–30.

57. Sheehan, A Prison and a Prisoner, 190.

58. Glenn M. Kendall, Organization and Teaching of Social and Economic Studies in Correctional Institutions (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1939), 68–83.

59. Minutes of the meeting of the Commission for the Study of Educational Problems of Penal Institutions for Youth, 26 June 1935, New York State Library. See also New York State Commission for the Study of the Educational Problems of Penal Institutions for Youth, Progress Report Number 2 of the Educational Project at Wallkill State Prison Covering the Period May 10 to June 20, 1935.

60. In 1947, Woodbourne was redesignated as an institution for 16- to 21-year-olds of “borderline” intelligence (defined as IQ scores in the 71 to 85 range).

61. F. C. Helbing, “Proper Guard Attitudes and Relations Toward Young Offenders,” in Wallack, Training of Prison Guards, 316.

62. When Walter Wallack went on to a position as superintendent of Wallkill in 1940, he was replaced as director of education by former assistant director Glenn Kendall, and Kendall in turn was replaced by Price Chenault (who had started as director of education at Coxsackie). All three men were nationally known prison educators, founders of the American Prison Association’s Committee on Education and later the Correctional Education Association. Between Wallack, Kendall, and Chenault, the pioneer reform group ran the Division of Education from its establishment in 1935 to its effective dissolution in 1970.

63. Wallack, Kendall, and Briggs, Education within Prison Walls, 34.

64. Ibid.

65. Paul D. Meunier and Howard D. Schwartz, “Beyond Attica: Prison Reform in New York State, 1971–1973,” Cornell Law Review 58 (1972–1973): 938.

66. “Ray Corsini: A Life that Spans an Era,” Psychologist 37 (fall/winter 2002): 68–77.

67. New York State Department of Corrections Division of Education, Progress Report 1942–1943 (New York: Department of Corrections, 1943).

68. New York State Department of Corrections, Annual Report (Fiscal Year 19371938) (New York: Department of Corrections, 1938), 29.

69. Ibid., 35, 43.

70. See Walter M. Wallack, “The Service Unit,” in Contemporary Correction, ed. Paul W. Tappan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 141–53. See also Walter M. Wallack and John J. Sheehy, “The Service Unit as Part of the Prison Program—Part I,” Prison World (Nov.-Dec. 1948): 6–7, 23–24.

71. Minutes of the meeting of the Commission for the Study of Educational Problems of Penal Institutions for Youth, June 26, 1935, New York State Library.

72. Wallack, Training of Prison Guards, 38.

73. “Big Albany Bills Sped to Passage,” New York Times, 18 April 1935, 2.

74. “Assails Long Hours for State Workers,” New York Times, 26 Jan. 1932, 14; Harry L. Bowlby, “Prison Guards’ Long Hours,” New York Times, 12 April 1935, 22.

75. “Prison Guards to Be Graduated,” New York Times, 21 June 1937, 21.

76. Wallack, Training of Prison Guards, 41–43, 57–59.

77. Austin H. MacCormick, “Trends in Correctional Treatment,” in Wallack, Training of Prison Guards, 219, 223; Frank L. Christian, “What Can the Guard Contribute to the Treatment Program of the Institution?” in Wallack, Training of Prison Guards, 262.

78. Glenn M. Kendall, “Guard Training—A Continuous Project,” Prison World (Sept.-Oct. 1941): 6.

79. Ibid., 6; Wallack, in “Wallkill, A Medium Security Prison,” says that 682 recruits passed though the Central Guard School between 1936 and 1940; by late 1941, more than 1,100 recruits and in-service trainees had passed through the Central Guard School.

80. New York State Department of Corrections, Division of Education, Report of Progress in Educational Programs, 1942–1943 (New York: Department of Corrections, 1943), 1–4. For more on the revised program, see “Personnel Training,” Correction 15 (July 1948): 12–14.

81. Leonard V. Harrison and Pryor McNeill Grant, Youth in the Toils (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 137. See also New York Law Society, The Forgotten Adolescent: A Study of the Pre-Trial Treatment of Boys Charged with Crime in New York City (New York: New York Law Society, 1940).

82. “Dewey Eases Lot of Wayward Boys,” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1940, 14; “Curran Denies Dewey Set Court Precedent,” New York Times, 17 Nov. 1940, 2. Dewey and Chief Magistrate Henry H. Curran fought for some time over who would take leadership of the youthful offender issue; this political contest informed much of the state-level handling of the youthful offender legislation. See also “New Group to Aid Young Offenders,” New York Times, 1 March 1941, 13, in which Curran complained to reporters, “I don’t understand where Dewey gets off appointing a committee to solve what he calls a ‘problem’ … This isn’t Dewey’s problem—it’s the Legislature’s responsibility.” Paul Blanshard called the issue the “knottiest and most vital” issue for the 1942 legislative session. Paul Blanshard, “Adolescents Pose Problem,” New York Times, 17 Nov. 1941, C18.

83. “Dewey Seeks To Aid Young Lawbreakers,” Christian Science Monitor, 11 Dec. 1940, 7.

84. William Draper Lewis, “Treatment of Youth Convicted of Crime,” Federal Probation 4 (May 1940): 20–23. John R. Ellington, “The Youth Authority Plan: Its Development and Prospects,” in Tappan, Contemporary Correction, 124–39. The committee was formed in 1938 and submitted its model Youth Correction Authority Act that same year. For more on the ALI, see Alex Elson, “The Case for an In-Depth Study of the American Law Institute,” Law and Social Inquiry 23 (July 1998): 625–40.

85. Glenn Kendall, “Reception Centers,” in Tappan, Contemporary Correction, 107–123.

86. In 1940 the ALI also helped in the production of a radio series, Youth in the Toils. Episodes included “Boys Beyond the Law” (a young boy as he turns into a hardened criminal), “Girls Beyond the Law” (a young woman who starts as a shoplifter, enters a life of crime, and becomes pregnant), “A New Guy Joins the Club” (youth lured into a life with the gangs), and “Classrooms of Crime” (in jail for six months on suspicion). This thirteen-part series aired over the Blue Network of NBC, on Mon. evenings from 7:15 to 7:30. MacCormick himself presented one of the episodes.

87. “Albany Bill Backs Court for Youths,” New York Times, 28 Jan. 1942, 20.

88. “Call Youth Court A Plan to ‘Coddle,’ ” New York Times, 25 March 1942, 24.

89. “Dewey Signs Bills to Cut Youth Crime,” New York Times, 18 April 1943, 7. Arlene Wolf, “New York’s Youthful Offender Law Can Clear Characters,” Reading Eagle, 16 July 1946, 19; W. Charles Barber, “Youthful Offender Law Misunderstood,” Newburgh News, 24 April 1956, 4.

90. An ambitious earlier attempt to extend this principle of indeterminacy to most adult offenders failed in 1934, vetoed by Governor Lehman in the face of extensive police, judicial, and prosecutorial opposition. See “Fowler Praises Lehman For Parole Veto,” Rochester Evening Journal, 16 May 1934, 102; “They’re Not Ready For It,” Rochester Evening Journal, 17 May 1934, 8; “The Parole Bill,” New York Times, 12 April 1934, 22; “Corrigan Urges Parole Bill Veto,” New York Times, 6 May 1934, 20; “Governor Vetoes Quick Parole Bill,” New York Times, 16 May 1934, 1.

91. The quote comes from the January 12, 1957, draft of the ALI report on “Sentencing and Treatment of Young Adult Offenders,” SBP.

92. Austin H. MacCormick to O. B. Ellis, 4 March 1958, folder 4, box 10, AMC.

93. Division of Education, Progress Report 1942–1943.

94. Robert W. Potter, “Dewey Aides Urge reforms in Attack on Juvenile Crime,” New York Times, 11 March 1945, 1.

95. Richard N. Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

96. Glenn Kendall, “The Elmira Reception Center,” Prison World (March-April 1946): 8–9, 27.

97. Ibid.

98. Kendall, “Reception Centers,” 107–123.

99. “Elmira Reception Center,” American Journal of Correction 23 (1961): 38.

100. Kendall, “Reception Centers.”

101. Ibid., 123.

Chapter 3 • Adolescents Adrift

1. Case file A, box 270, Coxsackie Case Files, New York State Archives [hereafter CCF]. The case files are drawn from a 5% sample of the entire run of Coxsackie case files held at the state archives. The names associated with each case file are pseudonyms, used to protect the identity of the young men at Coxsackie. The reference to the Coxsackie Case Files includes the box number, but not the specific file number. Since the file number is the inmate’s prisoner number, this would also potentially compromise the identity of a prisoner. The sampled files from each box are lettered in sequence, lettering that corresponds to a list of prisoner numbers in my possession. When references to Coxsackie prisoners come from published sources, such as newspaper articles or court cases, I have used their real and full names. Pseudonyms are identifiable by the use of first name and last initial.

2. Evan Hunter, Blackboard Jungle, 50th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 34–35.

3. Glenn M. Kendall, “Some Characteristics of Reception Center Youths (With Special Reference to the Field of Recreation),” Journal of Correctional Education 3 (July 1955): 43.

4. Ibid.

5. Case A, box 270, CCF.

6. Isidor Chein, Donald L. Gerard, Robert S. Lee, and Eva Rosenfeld, The Road to H: Narcotics, Delinquency, and Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 120.

7. Chein et al., Road to H, 121. Young men in the drug-using groups had family members with police records in 25% and 30% of the cases. The study also compared the extent of family alcoholism. The control group (12%) and the drug-using groups (8% and 20%) were both well below the 27% of Coxsackie inmates with alcoholic family members.

8. Case I, box 100, CCF.

9. Case F, box 210, CCF.

10. Frank S., case C, box 220; Walter B., case A, box 260; Walter M., case D, box 250, all in CCF.

11. Case E, box 160, CCF.

12. Case I, box 160, CCF.

13. Case H, box 90, CCF.

14. Case J, box 140, CCF.

15. Case J, box 140, CCF.

16. The quoted phrases come from, in order, case M, box 80; case A, box 110; case B, box 110; case E, box 110; case I, box 110; case J, box 170; case O, box 120; case H, box 140; case L, box 140; and case C, box 200, all CCF.

17. Case A, box 100, CCF.

18. Case G, box 110, CCF.

19. The achievement test scores for reading averaged 8.5 grade. Leonard S. Black, “An Inmate’s-Eye View of Himself and the Public School,” Journal of Correctional Education 9 (Jan. 1957): 9–12.

20. Rocky Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me: The Story of My Life Until Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 25.

21. Black, “An Inmate’s-Eye View,” 9–12.

22. Mwlina Imiri Abubadika, The Education of Sonny Carson (New York: Norton, 1972), 16; Bertram M. Beck, Youth within Walls: A Study of the Correctional Treatment of the 16- to 21-Year Old Male Offender in New York State Institutions With Recommendations for Future Development (New York: Community Service Society, 1950), 21.

23. Case A, box 260, CCF.

24. John Modell, Into One’s Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 19201975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 125. See also Ruth E. Eckert and Thomas O. Marshall, When Youth Leave School (London; New York: Regents’ Inquiry, McGraw-Hill, 1938) and Donald E. Super and Robert D. Wright, “From School to Work in the Depression Years,” School Review 49 (Jan. 1941): 17–26.

25. Bonnie Stepenoff, The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010), 109.

26. New York State Commission of Corrections, Annual Report for 1939–1940 (New York: New York State Commission of Corrections, 1940), 37.

27. Ernest N., a non-sampled case file from box 30, CCF.

28. Eric Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 193.

29. New York Law Society, The Forgotten Adolescent: A Study of the Pre-Trial Treatment of Boys Charged With Crime in New York City (New York: New York Law Society, 1940), 58.

30. Case G, box 110, CCF.

31. “Slight Increase in State’s Arrests for Major Crimes in 1950 Accounted for by Increased Narcotics Arrests,” Correction 16 (Jan. 1951): 14–15.

32. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 37.

33. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 40.

34. “Stabber Wins Suspension of Prison Term,” Schenectady Gazette, 15 Feb. 1938, 4; “Police Squad Closes in and Seizes a Prowler,” Auburn (NY) Citizen-Advertiser, 15 Nov. 1937, 5; “Youth Seized on Mail Box Charge, Sentenced,” Binghamton Press, 11 Feb. 1935, 5.

35. Chein et al., Road to H, 139.

36. Case A, box 80, CCF.

37. For a provocative contemporary version of this idea, see Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

38. Irwin August Berg, “Comparative Study of Car Thieves,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 34 (1943–1944): 392–396. Leonard D. Savitz, “Automobile Theft,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 50 (July-Aug. 1959): 132–43.

39. “Slight Increase in State’s Arrests for Major Crimes in 1950 Accounted for by Increased Narcotics Arrests,” Correction 16 (Jan. 1951): 14–15.

40 Savitz, “Automobile Theft.”

41. James E. Bulger, “Automobile Thefts,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 23 (Jan.-Feb. 1933): 806–810.

42. Non-sampled case file, box 240, CCF; David Wolcott, Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 180. As John Modell observes, “When families had to cut back, the realms in which they were most able to economize were precisely those areas that had become in the last decade so important to the new adolescent styles of life: recreation, automobiles, and clothing.” Modell, Into One’s Own, 129.

43. This is consistent with the observation made by Richard Wedekind in “Automobile Theft, The Thirteen Million Dollar Parasite,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 48 (1957–1958): 443–46: “Most authorities agree that a majority of automobile thefts are perpetrated by juveniles with no intention of selling the stolen cars or converting them to their own use permanently.”

44. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 29.

45. William J. Davis, “Stolen Automobile Investigations,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 28 (Jan.-Feb. 1938): 720–38. It is worth noting that joyriding was defined as larceny in the New York State penal laws. Superintendent Helbing was no fan of joyriding prosecutions. He argued that “the real evil” of joyriding was the conviction of young men on grand larceny charges; he urged the state to pass a law mandating the locking of car doors. See “Locked Auto Seen Curb on Delinquency,” Rochester Democrat Chronicle, 6 Dec. 1939, 1.

46. See, generally, Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, on the development and nature of postwar youth gangs in New York City.

47. Case I, box 170, CCF.

48. Case H, box 270, CCF, and case A, box 330, CCF.

49. Tamara Myers, “Embodying Delinquency: Boys’ Bodies, Sexuality, and Juvenile Justice History in Early-Twentieth Century Quebec,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (Oct. 2005): 383–414.

50. The growing concern over adolescent sex offenses should be balanced against Stephen Robertson’s argument in Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) that mid-century America began to normalize adolescent sexual activity, moving toward what he calls a “new leniency” (p. 199). Robertson (p. 182) explicitly links New York’s youthful offender legislation to this trend. One might consider that both could be true—an increased level of policing might well have gone hand in hand with a system that treated defendants as less mature and culpable than in the past.

51. Case A, box 200, CCF, and case L, box 70, CCF.

52. Case C, box 270, CCF.

53. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 134–135, also found that New York City gang members “assaulted male homosexuals, and some gang members engaged in same-sex relations, usually with [an] older male in exchange for cash or drugs.”

54. Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 85.

55. Cases B and C, box 230, CCF.

56. Case E, box 320, CCF.

57. Glenn M. Kendall, “Correctional Institutions and the Youthful Drug Addict,” Journal of Correctional Education 8 (April 1956): 52; 1951 was the peak year in this first heroin epidemic, and the ERC percentage of heroin users gradually declined to about 10% in the 1955–1956 fiscal year. Austin MacCormick downplayed the narcotics problem, calling it a “temporary phenomenon,” “Narcotics Addiction Called Exaggerated,” New York Times, 26 May 1951, 19. Still, the 1951 case files show many of these heroin admissions. See, for example, cases A and B, box 300, CCF.

58. Case D, box 250, CCF.

59. Chein et al., Road to H, chapter 2 (“Neighborhood Distribution of Drug Use”) offers reasonably definitive evidence that 1951 was the peak year for new cases of adolescent heroin use in this first postwar epidemic.

60. Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 122.

61. New York Law Society, Forgotten Adolescent, 6; Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 55.

62. See T. J. English, The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 61: “Youth officers from the NYPD were liable to give an ass-whupping to any gang kid they caught—black, white, or Latino—but Negro gangs presented a special problem”; see also Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 205: “Instead of enforcing the peace, nightstick justice reinforced resentment and ethnic hostility.”

63. New York v. Valletutti, 78 N.E. 2d 485 (1948).

64. Dominic J. Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977) covers this territory well. See also Wendell E. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

65. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 21.

66. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 90–92. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 70, confirms that police beatings were routine.

67. The denial of legitimate access to family by the police emerges in Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me; Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson; and in the cases discussed in Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils.

68. Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull: My Story (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 30.

69. New York Law Society, Forgotten Adolescent, 8.

70. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 36.

71. Ibid., 67.

72. Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 124.

73. New York Law Society, Forgotten Adolescent, 14–15, 46.

74. Ibid., 50.

75. Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 111; Sheehan, A Prison and a Prisoner, 179.

76. New York v. Losacco, 173 NYS 2d 920 (1958). See also New York v. Jardine, NYS 2d 454 (1960), also involving a Coxsackie prisoner, in which a New York court ruled: “The mere physical absence of a defendant’s lawyer at the time of entry of a guilty plea does not vitiate the conviction.”

77. Case A, box 80, CCF.

78. State v. Giaccio and Panzella, 96 NYS 2d 912 (1950).

79. Ibid.

80. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 95.

81. Gayes v. State of New York, 332 U.S. 145 (1947).

82. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 43.

83. Case G, box 160, CCF.

84. “Boy is Morally Ill, Judge Tells Brooklyn Court,” New York Amsterdam News, 4 Nov. 1944, 4B.

85. “Mercy is Refused Trio Who Confess Many Burglaries,” Utica Observer Dispatch, 20 Feb. 1936, 17.

86. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 36.

87. Case F, box 100, CCF.

88. Case A, box 140, CCF.

89. Case B, box 200, CCF.

90. Case M, box 100, CCF.

91. Case G, box 100, CCF.

92. Jacob Miller, Untouchable (Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris, 2011), 190–91.

93. New York State Commission of Correction, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report (New York: Commission on Correction, 1955).

94. “State Study Asked on Sex Offenders,” New York Times, 7 March 1948, 46.

95. New York State Department of Corrections, Bureau of Research, Characteristics of Inmates Under Custody (New York: New York State Department of Corrections, 1962), 11.

96. Case I, box 200, CCF.

97. Case H, box 260, CCF.

98. Case G, box 200, CCF.

Chapter 4 • Against the Wall

1. Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 121.

2. Ibid., 118–19.

3. The phrase comes from pseudonymous Frankie Moreno, who took the big train ride in the early 1960s. See Miller, Untouchable, 189.

4. The idea that prison life could be transformative (and not in a positive way) and produce prison-specific social relations has a long intellectual genealogy, going back at least to progressive era commentators such as Kate Richards O’Hare and Thomas Mott Osborne. Donald Clemmer was among the first to embed this thought in a more sophisticated social-scientific theoretical framework when he adapted social learning theory to explain what he called “prisonization.” Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (Boston: Christopher, 1940). Clemmer’s prewar model was further developed in Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), and still further in Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Doubleday, 1961). Not long after Goffman’s work appeared, a counter-trend of work stressing the importation of preprison values, attitudes, and cultures appeared. Notable among these early works was Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women: A Study of a Women’s Prison (New York: Wiley, 1966). By the 1970s, these two literatures were each sufficiently well developed that they were cast as competing models. See Charles W. Thomas, “Theoretical Perspectives on Prisonization: A Comparison of the Importation and Deprivation Models,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 68 (March 1977): 35–45. Curiously, the era of mass incarceration has not been kind to research in this area. There has been less work than the subject deserves, and too much devoted to relatively narrow (though measurable) questions about prison discipline. See Matt DeLisi, Chad R. Trulson, James W. Marquart, Alan J. Drury, and Anna E. Kosloski, “Inside the Prison Black Box,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 56 (June 2012): 1186–1207.

5. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson.

6. Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 121.

7. Miller, Untouchable, 196–97.

8. Case J, box 40, CCF.

9. T. J. English, Savage City, 141.

10. Miller, Untouchable, 196–97.

11. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 109.

12. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 45.

13. A secure outdoor athletic field was finally completed in 1952. See “Around the DOC,” Correction 17 (Aug. 1952): 16.

14. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 50.

15. Ronald Casanova and Stephen Blackburn, Each One, Teach One: Up and Out of Poverty: Memoirs of a Street Activist (Austin, Tex.: Curbstone Press, 1996), 43.

16. Gail W. Sullivan, Tears and Tiers: The Life and Times of Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan (New York: Felon Entertainment, 2006), 24.

17. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 87.

18. Philip Klein and Leonard Mayo quizzed Superintendent Helbing before the opening of Coxsackie on the matter of racial segregation, and he assured them that inmates would not be segregated behind bars. The nature of the question clearly implied that racial segregation had been the norm at the House of Refuge. See Leonard Mayo and Philip Klein, Recommendations for the Administration of the New York State Vocational Institution (22 March 1935), appendix, 13, box 1, series 1, Leonard Mayo Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries. There is some evidence that racial segregation in cell and dormitory assignments continued at Coxsackie and ample evidence of informal racial rules concerning many institutional assignments. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 104: “The Negroes have their own dining hall, a separate section in the auditorium, and separate tiers of cells.”

19. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 63.

20. Ben H. Bagdikian, Caged: Eight Prisoners and Their Keepers (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 249.

21. Carl Weiss and David James Friar, Terror in the Prisons: Homosexual Rape and Why Society Condones It (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 220.

22. Casanova and Blackburn, Each One, Teach One, 53.

23. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 105.

24. Charles McGregor and Sharon Sopher, Up From the Walking Dead: The Charles McGregor Story (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 303.

25. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 117.

26. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 41.

27. New York State Commission of Correction, Twenty-ninth Annual Report (New York: New York State Commission of Correction), 445.

28. Diaz- Cotto, Gender, Ethnicity, and the State, 67.

29. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 43.

30. Richard Jacoby, Conversations with the Capeman: The Untold Story of Salvador Agron (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 148.

31. Case L, box 160, CCF.

32. Case P, box 160, CCF.

33. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 59.

34. Well-known professional fighters, such as Joe Louis, were held in great esteem. Former heavyweight champion James Braddock even visited Coxsackie to give an exhibition. Paul Grondahl, “Boxing ‘Cinderella’ Remembered on Film and in Real Life,” Albany Times Union, 3 March 2005, n. p. Earl W. was disciplined for cutting out a picture of Ezzard Charles knocking out Sam Baroudi, in the bout where Baroudi had been killed. Case H, box 200, CCF.

35. According to one ex-Coxsackie inmate, each of the reformatories developed their own particular fighting style: “They were prison martial arts, not traditional styles.” The styles included the “Woodbourne shuffle,” which involved getting close to an opponent; the “Comstock style,” which involved “the use of dirty fighting techniques”; and the “Coxsackie style,” a kind of close-quarters wall fighting. Legend had it that Floyd Patterson’s famous “peekaboo” boxing style came from Coxsackie, though Patterson took up the sport during a stay at the Wiltwyck School for juvenile delinquents and was never a prisoner at Coxsackie. See Anne Darling and James Perryman, “Karate Behind Bars: Menace, Or Means of Spiritual Survival,” Black Belt (July 1974): 16–21.

36. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 105, 109.

37. Piri Thomas, Seven Long Times (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), 80.

38. Case A, box 260, CCF.

39. Miller, Untouchable, 198, 200.

40. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 104–106.

41. Sullivan, Tiers and Tears, 25.

42. Sullivan, Tiers and Tears, 24: “The Gees were supposedly the elite of the white fighting force, though probably almost half either knew someone from the street or paid five or ten cartons of cigarettes for the distinguished honor of standing with the Gees. There were really only a handful of dudes who could really thump (fight). The rest were phonies and were getting a free ride through the joint on their reputation.”

43. Lucky’s story is told in Bagdikian, Caged, 242–67.

44. Rodriguez v. New York, 2 NYS 2d 167 (1938).

45. Case A, box 380, CCF.

46. Regina Kunzel, “Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8 (2002): 253–70, and, more recently, Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

47. Case J, box 120, CCF.

48. There are occasional observations regarding prison guards propositioning adolescent inmates, though these do not appear systematically. See, for example, Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 53.

49. Case A, box 340, CCF; case L, box, 120, CCF.

50. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 63.

51. It should be noted that by the 1950s, the Elmira Reformatory had established a distinct special training unit for “passive homosexuals”—that is, those prisoners actively and willingly serving the passive role in sexual encounters.

52. Case F, box 370, CCF.

53. Non-sampled case, box 310, CCF.

54. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 100.

55. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 80.

56. Case F, box 350, CCF.

57. Case F, box 170, CCF.

58. For an example of the argument that institutions for youth created the punk role, see Albert J. Reiss, “Sex Offenses: The Marginal Status of the Adolescent,” Law and Contemporary Problems 25 (Spring 1960): 309–333, 321.

59. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 52; case K, box 160, CCF.

60. Weiss and Friar, Terror in the Prisons, 220.

61. McGregor and Sopher, Up From the Walking Dead, 303.

62. Felipe Luciano, “Part 2,” Lords of East Harlem, Aug. 12, 2009, http://felipeluciano.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/part-2/

63. Case A, box 80, CCF.

64. Case E, box 200, CCF. Likewise, Cornelius N. wrote, “I am being bulldozed and picked on … my life is being made miserable here … now a place like Sing Sing I would be more guarded there … I’m not asking you, I’m begging you on my knees to please send me to a different Institution.” Case D, box 20, CCF.

65. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 75.

66. Weiss and Friar, Terror in the Prisons, 172.

67. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 139.

68. Case G, box 20, CCF.

69. Case B, box 350, CCF.

70. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 113–115.

71. Miller, Untouchable, 192.

72. Case L, box 120, CCF.

73. Case L, box 120, CCF. Leonard P.’s case is hardly singular. Joseph M., according to his case file, “was given to aggressive homosexual behavior” and was sent to solitary indefinitely for allowing two other inmates to sodomize him in the tool room. Joseph slashed his wrists on several occasions, before being transferred to Napanoch as a “borderline mental defective.” Case M, box 140, CCF.

74. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 41.

75. “Helbing Outlines Value of Scouting at Annual Session,” Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman, 23 Jan. 1941, 1.

76. “Helbing’s Farewell Message Bears Guidance for All Youth and Parents; Reveals ‘Goal,’ ” Greene County Examiner-Recorder, 7 Aug. 1941, 1.

77. Principal keeper was the title for the chief custodial officer in New York prisons. Philip Klein and Leonard Mayo, authors of the report, hoped as well that the principal keeper position would be downgraded below the level of assistant superintendent in the Coxsackie administrative organization. This did not happen, either, and the head of custody remained the effective number-two figure in the reformatory. See Klein and Mayo, Recommendations for the Administration of the New York State Vocational Institution.

78. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 51–52. See also, “George Cochran Retires from Post at Institution,” Greene County Examiner-Recorder, 24 Feb. 1949, 1.

79. Eugene W. Morrell, “Rehabilitation through Custody,” Correction 17 (Sept. 1952): 3–4.

80. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 100.

81. LaMotta, Raging Bull, 53.

82. Gertrude Samuels, “A New Lobby—Ex-Cons,” New York Times, 19 Oct. 1969, SM36.

83. Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 141.

84. Any undercounting results from one of two factors. First, in the case file sample are inmates who case records are incomplete, often because they were transferred to another institution, or because part of their file was passed along to another prison when they were re-incarcerated. In such cases, it is reasonable to speculate that at least some had been assigned to disciplinary cells while at Coxsackie. Second, the reporting of disciplinary cell assignment cannot be assumed to have been complete. Most of the time, a notation of such an assignment appears in the disciplinary record, but there is no reason to believe that every disciplinary action was properly recorded.

85. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 55–56.

86. Miller, Untouchable, 200.

87. Weiss and Friar, Terror in the Prisons, 172.

88. John Mack, “An Open Letter to the Parole Board,” Village Voice, 9 Aug. 1976, 8.

89. Case P, box 160, CCF.

90. Bagdikian, Caged, tells Lucky’s story of going to the hole for fighting a white inmate: “He was stripped of all his clothes and put naked into the barren cage. There was no mattress and no blanket on the slab bed. After three days he was given clothes, a mattress and a blanket. He considered himself fortunate. It was warm weather, so he did not get the ‘cold shoulder’—a custom that forced the naked prisoner to open the window in winter on pain of being beaten” (p. 250). It is worth noting that the elements in these inmate narratives from Coxsackie echo those in similar narratives from the old-line, big house prisons in New York. See, particularly, Wright v. McMann, 387 F.2d 519 (1967), a case from Clinton Prison that helped open the federal courts to New York State prisoners.

91. Sullivan, Tiers and Tears, 25–26. Joseph Sullivan, by the 1970s, was working as a mob hitman. Convicted of three murders in 1982, he remains in a New York prison, serving a life term. What makes Sullivan’s account of Coxsackie brutality particularly interesting is that he named names: Captain Follette, Captain LaVallee, and Sergeant Fritz, all of whom, he stated, went on to become wardens in the New York State prison system. Captain Follette refers to Harold W. Follette, who did become warden of Green Haven Prison, having been promoted first to principal keeper at Clinton Prison in 1960, following five years as a captain at Coxsackie. See “Prison Warden Named,” Watertown Daily Times, 18 Sept. 1965, n. p. According to Stephen Chinlund, Follette “had a reputation for being vicious,” and when he arrived at Green Haven, the prisoners initiated a hunger strike, in the hopes that “they might somehow make him go away.” Chinlund’s account of how that strike was broken featured the same crawling and animal noises as in Sullivan’s account. See Stephen Chinlund, Prison Transformations: The System, the Prisoners, and Me (Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris, 2009). Captain LaVallee refers to Joseph Edwin LaVallee, who later became warden of Clinton Prison. It was LaVallee who brought Follette to Clinton Prison as the principal keeper. With LaVallee as warden, Clinton became a center of conflict with the Black Muslims. See, for example, “Prisoner Group Held Anti-White,” New York Times, 31 Oct. 1959. According to a 1975 Jack Anderson column, LaVallee was known as “the godfather” in Clinton, and inmates complained of being “beaten, hosed down, harassed and subjected to degrading regulations such as repetitive rectal searchers.” Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, “Inhuman Conditions Reported in Prison,” St. Petersburg Times, 21 Nov. 1975, 18. Sergeant Fritz refers to Harry Fritz, who became warden of Auburn Prison at the start of the 1970s, and who later became warden of Coxsackie (see chapter 8). He was known in both places as a traditional, pro-discipline prison administrator.

92. Mack, “An Open Letter to the Parole Board,” 8.

93. Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan; Toronto: Collier Macmillan, 1965), 239.

94. English, Savage City, 65. Dhoruba Bin Wahad became a Muslim while in prison for the first time, undergoing an awakening of political consciousness that was occurring throughout the reformatory system in the 1950s and 1960s, and which would find full expression still later in the adult prisons.

95. Sullivan, Tiers and Tears, 24; Case A, box 80, CCF.

96. Case I and case K, box 120, CCF.

97. Case H, box 110, CCF.

Chapter 5 • Reform at Work

1. Wallack, Kendall, and Briggs, Education within Prison Walls, iii.

2. Price Chenault, “Areas of Agreement and Disagreement between Correctional Educators and Wardens,” Journal of Correctional Education 5 (Jan. 1953): 7.

3. Lin, Reform in the Making, 12.

4. Wallack, Kendall, and Briggs, Education within Prison Walls, 165.

5. Ibid., 173–74.

6. Ibid., 128–33.

7. New York State Vocational Institution, Third Annual Report (New York: New York State Vocational Institution, 1938), 4–5; Frederick Helbing, Donald D. Scarborough, and Ray P. Grabo, A Preliminary Report of Educational Activities at the New York State Vocational Institution, Sept. 1–1935-Jan. 31, 1936 (New York: New York State Department of Corrections, 1936).

8. New York State Department of Corrections, Division of Education, Annual Report for Fiscal Year 1938–1939 (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1939), 34. This classification disparity was finally adjusted in the 1940–1941 fiscal year; see Division of Education, Annual Report for Fiscal Year 1940–1941 (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1941), 34. Still, the 1942–1943 report recounted an appeal by the Division of Education to the Division of the Budget for higher salaries, with current salary levels “not at all commensurate with the duties and working conditions inherent in institutional teaching.” New York State Department of Corrections, Report of Progress in Educational Programs, 1942–1943 (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1943), 31.

9. Wallack, Kendall, and Briggs, Education within Prison Walls, 166.

10. The economy program reduced state contributions to local public school systems as well; see “N.Y. School Budget Is Slashed; Cut in Aid from State Blamed,” New York Times, 26 July 1939, 1.

11. Division of Education, Annual Report for Fiscal Year 1938–1939, 32–33. See also Wallack, Kendall, and Briggs, Education within Prison Walls, 68.

12. Future Plans and Costs for Education in Institutions in the New York State Department of Corrections (Ossining, N.Y.: Sing Sing Printing Class, 1941).

13. New York State Department of Corrections, Division of Education, Report on Progress in Educational Programs, 1942–1943 (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1943), 31.

14. See “Record of Interview,” March 22, 1939, CCP.

15. Division of Education, Report on Progress in Educational Programs, 1942–1943, 32.

16. Bertram Beck, Youth within Walls, 21.

17. Division of Education, Report on Progress in Educational Programs, 1942–1943, 7.

18. Untitled manuscript, folder 2, box 3, AMC.

19. “Lack of Teachers Closes Coxsackie Shops and Classes,” Civil Service Leader, 10 Oct. 1961, 20. For the assessments of the Commission of Correction, see the Twenty-Seventh Annual Report (pp. 152–53), the Twenty-Ninth Annual Report (pp. 172–73), the Thirty-First Annual Report (pp. 160–61), and the Thirty-Second Annual Report (p. 160).

20. The Commission for the Study of the Educational Problems of Penal Institutions for Youth [Engelhardt Commission], Report to His Excellency Governor Herbert H. Lehman (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1937), 17.

21. Helbing, Scarborough, and Grabo, A Preliminary Report of Educational Activities, 11.

22. Kendall, Organization and Teaching of Social and Economic Studies, 128.

23. Ibid., 50.

24. Beck, Youth within Walls, 25.

25. The impetus for the course had been a working committee’s conclusion that “the present generation of youth” had been greatly influenced by the “low state” of public and private morality. “Department of Correction Launches Intensified Program of Training in Morals and Ethics throughout Its Institutions,” Correction 17 (Oct. 1952): 3–4.

26. On the Cold War-era character guidance program, see Lori Lyn Bogle, The Pentagon’s Battle for the American Mind (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

27. New York State Commission of Correction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Report (New York: Commission of Correction, 1953), 152–54; Glenn Kendall, “Some Trends in Correctional Education,” Journal of Correctional Education 6 (July 1954): 39–41.

28. Chenault, “Areas of Agreement and Disagreement,” 8.

29. Price Chenault, “New Developments in Social Education in Correctional Educations,” Journal of Correctional Education 6 (Oct. 1954): 69. Price Chenault, “Developing Education in a Correctional Setting,” Journal of Correctional Education 15 (Oct. 1962): 16.

30. Price Chenault, “Treatment Techniques,” Prison World (Nov.-Dec. 1947): 13–14.

31. Division of Education, Report on Progress in Educational Programs, 1942–1943; Black, “An Inmate’s-Eye View,” 9–12; and Kendall, Organization and Teaching of Social and Economic Studies, 73.

32. Kendall, “Some Trends in Correctional Education,” 40.

33. Chenault, “New Developments in Social Education,” 70; John Severance, “The General Education Department of the Elmira Reception Center,” Journal of Correctional Education 8 (April 1956): 33–35.

34. P. E. Hagen, “Some Problems of an Educational Worker in an Institution,” Journal of Correctional Education 9 (Oct. 1957): 88–92.

35. Kendall, “Some Characteristics of Reception Center Youths,” 43.

36. Case D, box 10; case H, box 10; case J, box 10; case C, box 120; case H, box 200, all CCF.

37. Helbing, Scarborough, and Grabo, A Preliminary Report of Educational Activities, 17; see also New York State Vocational Institution, Fourth Annual Report, 46–47; and Division of Education, Annual Report 1938–1939, 50.

38. Case K, box 280; case D, box 350; case D, box 300, all CCF.

39. Felipe Luciano, “The Song of Joe B,” New York Magazine, 25 Oct. 1971, 49.

40. “Joe Bataan: The Boogaloo Godfather Tells of His Transition from Street Thug to Cherished Icon of Latin Music,” Red Bull Music Academy (2006), www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/joe-bataan—extraordinary-joe.

41. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 52–53.

42. Margaret C. Hannigan and William T. Henderson, “Narcotic Addicts Take Up Reading,” in Bibliotherapy Sourcebook, ed. Rhea Joyce Rubin (Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 1978), 281–86.

43. Wallack, Kendall, and Briggs, Education within Prison Walls, 29.

44. Howard L. Briggs, “Selecting Vocational Education Material,” Journal of Correctional Education (Jan. 1949): 16–24, 20.

45. New York State Commission of Correction, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 172–73, indicates that the carpenter shop was about 40% maintenance work, upholstery 8090%, and the paint shop 90%. The tailor shop, in 1955, set a production record of 10,775 pieces of clothing, pillowcases, sheets, and towels.

46. Not until 1955 did the State Commission of Correction recommend paying Coxsackie inmates, “in view of the production character of some of the vocational shop activities.” Commission of Correction, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 175. Starting the following year, Coxsackie prisoners finally began to receive five cents a day in wages.

47. Case I, box 100, CCF.

48. Non-sampled case file, box 30, CCF.

49. Case A, box 100; case A, box 310; case B, box 110; case A, box 150, all CCF.

50. Case J, box 180, CCF.

51. Raymond Corsini, “Vocational Interests of Juvenile Delinquents,” Journal of Correctional Education 3 (Jan. 1951): 11–16.

52. “Correctional Institution Farms,” Correction 16 (Aug. 1951): 14–15.

53. Beck, Youth within Walls, 24. Case H, box 210, includes an explicit statement of reformatory policy in this regard.

54. New York State Commission of Correction, Thirtieth Annual Report (New York: Commission of Correction, 1956), 176.

55. Case I, box 150, CCF; case L, box 150, CCF.

56. Case D, box 250, CCF.

57. Non-sampled case file, box 360, CCF. Coxsackie introduced the “Waiting on Table” program in 1952. The content of the course included “the qualifications of a waiter, getting ready for work, taking and filling orders, service during the meal, meeting emergencies, and employer-employee relationships.” “N.Y.S.V.I. Offers Course on ‘Waiting on Table,’ ” Correction 17 (Oct. 1952): 13.

58. Non-sampled case file, box 360, CCF.

59. Non-sampled case file, box 390, CCF.

60. New York State Commission of Correction, Twenty-First Annual Report (New York: Commission of Correction, 1947), 74; John B. Costello, “Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents,” in Tappan, Contemporary Correction, 352; New York State Commission of Correction, Twenty-Eighth Annual Report (New York: Commission of Correction, 1954), 167.

61. Glenn Kendall, “Application of Basic Principles of Administration and Supervision to the Conduct of a Correctional Institution Educational Program,” Journal of Correctional Education 10 (Oct. 1958): 104–107.

62. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 93–94.

63. Ibid., 94.

64. Case I, box 140, CCF.

65. Case F, box 40, CCF.

66. Case D, box 300, CCF.

67. Case D, box 340, CCF.

68. Heather Ann Thompson, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 8 (Fall 2011): 15–45.

69. See Price Chenault, “Psychiatry in the New York State Department of Correction,” Correction 13 (July 1948): 3, 5, 7, 11. See also Paul Wegner, “Social Rehabilitation from the Psychiatric Point of View,” Prison World (July-Aug. 1944): 11, 26. V. C. Bran-ham, “The Psychopathic Delinquent,” Prison World (Sept.-Oct. 1940): 21–22, 84, calls for a separate institution for psychopathic inmates in New York.

70. Alexander W. Pisciotta, “The Theory and Practice of the New York House of Refuge, 1857–1935” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1979), 184.

71. Hyman Goldstein, “Vocational Guidance of the Underprivileged,” Industrial Arts and Vocational Education 30 (1941): 45–46.

72. William Argento viewed Coxsackie’s immigrant and minority prisoners as having a lower native intelligence, while Howard Gondree published work expressing deep skepticism over what “adolescent training schools” like Coxsackie could successfully accomplish. On Argento, see Nicole Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 19. On Gondree, see Howard E. Gondree, “Institutional Training Should Prepare for Parole,” Federal Probation 31 (1951): 31–34.

73. Raymond J. Corsini and Gregory A. Miller, “Psychology in Prisons, 1952,” American Psychologist 9 (May 1954): 184–85; “Ray Corsini: A Life That Spans an Era,” Psychologist 37 (fall/winter 2002): 68–77. See also Walter B. Martin, “Common Sense Psychiatry,” Prison World (Jan.-Feb. 1942): 9–10, and Bertram Pollens, “The Plain English of Psychology,” Jail Association Journal (July-Aug. 1939): 7. Guard responses to disturbed inmates employed far less complex language than that of the mental health professionals— “inmate is either a complete jerk or else passing himself off as one” with lots of “screwball behavior” (Ronald M., case C, box 240, CCF); speaking of Edward Z., a 17-year-old from Rochester, who eventually received fifteen formal disciplinary reports, for disobedience, insolence, refusing to work, idleness, contraband, failure to obey orders, smoking, gambling, and leaving his work assignment: “Putz is no good. Putz knows that he is no good. Putz knows that I know he is no good.” Case E, box 300, CCF.

74. See Louis N. Robinson, “Institutions for Defective Delinquents,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 24 (July-Aug. 1933): 352–99.

75. Prior to becoming an institution for defective delinquents, Napanoch was known as the Eastern New York Reformatory. For more on the early history of Napanoch, see Alexander W. Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the American Reformatory-Prison Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

76. Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 216.

77. IQ testing was universal at Coxsackie from the day it opened in 1935; in February 1938, the New York State prison commissioner ordered that psychologists in all institutions immediately conduct IQ tests on all fourteen thousand inmates in their institutions. See New York State Department of Corrections, Second Annual Report of the New York State Vocational Institution (New York: Department of Corrections, 1937), 51, and Third Annual Report of the New York State Vocational Institution (New York: Department of Corrections, 1938), 39.

78. Case J, box 160, CCF.

79. Glenn M. Kendall, “The Mental Defective in Correctional Institutions: From the Standpoint of Classification,” Journal of Correctional Education (Jan. 1949): 11–15, quotation on 15.

80. Case I, box 30, CCF.

81. Case H, box 10; case H, box 50; and case M, box 140, all CCF.

82. Cases I and J, box 20, CCF.

83. McCartney intended every transfer to Napanoch to be held for the rest of their lives under supervision, recommended more cases for transfer than were ever actually undertaken, and even attempted to have inmates at the expiration of their sentences sent to Napanoch (see, for example, the case of Richard F., case H, box 10, CCF). McCartney, in Understanding Human Behavior (New York: Vantage Press, 1956), placed a heavy emphasis on heredity, observing, “intelligence is fixed at conception” (p. 19). His view was highly racialized—“This has nothing to do with training. It is a question of breeding” (pp. 20–21). McCartney also concluded that true educational success required at least an IQ of 120. No inmate tested that high.

84. Sullivan, Tears and Tiers, 26.

85. Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 220. Courts never challenged the authority of prison officials to transfer inmates for disciplinary reasons. Indeed, in New York v. Glowacki (1940), the court argued that transfer offered “the superintendent an opportunity to clear out the rotten apples, leaving the sound ones in the barrel.” See John S. Broude, “Use of Involuntary Inter-Prison Transfer as a Sanction,” American Journal of Criminal Law 3 (fall 1974): 117–64.

86. This concept was subjected to an early and devastating attack by Michael Hakeem, “A Critique of the Psychiatric Approach to Crime and Correction,” Law and Contemporary Problems 23 (1958): 650–82.

87. James L. McCartney, “Classification of Prisoners,” Psychiatric Quarterly 7 (1933): 369–77; “Psychiatrists in Correctional Institutions,” American Journal of Psychiatry 117 (Feb. 1961): 754; and “The Evaluation of Classification in Prisons,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 4 (April 1934): 225–32.

88. Case D, box 180, CCF.

89. Case C, box 20, CCF.

90. Joseph P. Scott v. New York, 322 NYS 2d 247 (1971).

91. See “Freeing Madman Scored,” New York Times, 10 Sept. 1952, 26; “Record of Killer in Asylum Opened,” New York Times, 6 Sept. 1952, 12; the state was sued over Jones’s release, and the court found Matteawan to be in “a deplorable condition of overcrowding and understaffing.” Yula P. St. George, as Administratrix of the Estate of Frank St. George, Deceased, Claimant, v State of New York, 118 NYS 2d 596 (1953). The case attracted national attention within the psychiatric profession. See Winfred Overholser, “The Present Status of the Problems of Release of Patients from Mental Hospitals,” Psychiatric Quarterly 29 (Jan. 1955): 372–80.

92. “Dr. Charles Cuccio,” Schenectady (NY) Daily Gazette, 3 Oct. 2001, 13. Elmira had established an early group therapy program the previous year. Paul E. Plowitz, “Psychiatric Service and Group Therapy in the Rehabilitation of Offenders,” Journal of Correctional Education 2 (1950): 78–80.

93. Cases D, F, and J, box 280, CCF.

Chapter 6 • A Conspiracy of Frustration

1. Gertrude Samuels, “A New Lobby—Ex-Cons,” New York Times, 19 Oct. 1969, SM46.

2. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 56.

3. English, Savage City, 179–80.

4. Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land, 237.

5. Case E, box 200, CCF.

6. Harrison and Grant, Youth in the Toils, 123–27.

7. Never-paroled inmates generally included the most serious disciplinary problems at the institution. Earl W., warned before his first hearing that “your actions will govern what our decision at that time will be,” and before his next that “if you work for a break, you don’t have to ask for one,” accumulated twenty-seven disciplinary reports (the third highest of any prisoner in the case file sample) and was never paroled. Within a year of his release, Earl was headed to Sing Sing after pleading guilty to a new burglary charge. Case H, box 200, CCF.

8. New York v. Glowacki, 174 Misc. 415; 22 NYS 2d 22 (1940).

9. Case D, box 170, CCF.

10. Case F, box 170, CCF.

11. Cases A and B, box 180, CCF.

12. Case H, box 200; cases F and H, box 210, all CCF.

13. Case A, box 160, CCF.

14. Indeed, he was held—the program committee held him for three more months before a successful parole hearing. Case F, box 230, CCF.

15. Case A, box 300, CCF.

16. English, Savage City, 117.

17. Mack, “An Open Letter to the Parole Board,” 8. See also Lumumba Shakur’s account of facing the parole board at Great Meadow in 1963. Asked if he was sorry for his original offense, and if he would “disavow and renounce the Black Muslims and black nationalism,” Shakur refused and had his parole denied. Kuwasi Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21 (New York: Random House, 1971), 243.

18. Case G, box 30, CCF.

19. Case D, box 20, CCF.

20. Case A, box 320, CCF.

21. Case D, box 60, CCF.

22. Case F, box 200, CCF.

23. Case F, box 20, CCF.

24. Case E, box 50, CCF.

25. Case A, box 360.

26. Case E, box 360, CCF; case F, box 90, CCF.

27. Case D, box 150, CCF.

28. Cases D and E, box 40, CCF.

29. Case J, box 100, CCF.

30. Case G, box 10, CCF.

31. Case B, box 20, CCF.

32. Case F, box 100, CCF.

33. Case A, box 10, CCF.

34. See cases D and E, box 270, and case B, box 20, all CCF.

35. Case H, box 300, CCF.

36. Wallace Gillpatrick, “The Outmate,” Proceedings of the Annual Congress of Correction of the American Prison Association (New York: American Prison Association, 1917), 259.

37. Case C, box 10, CCF.

38. Case I, box 200, CCF.

39. Case B, box 30, CCF.

40. Case J, box 140, and case J, box 80, CCF.

41. Case C, box 100, CCF.

42. Case C, box 60, CCF.

43. Case A, box 10, CCF.

44. Case E, box 10, CCF.

45. Case C, box 30, CCF.

46. New York State Department of Corrections, First Annual Report of the New York State Vocational Institution (New York: Department of Corrections, 1936), 27.

47. Case F, box 30, and cases C and H, box 50, CCF.

48. Case E, box 60, CCF.

49. Case files include prisoners sent to camps in Oregon (case E, box 60, CCF) and Nevada (case L, box 90, CCF). There were some exceptions. Mario A. was expelled from a CCC camp for encouraging the men in the camp to go on strike. See case I, box 70, CCF). Jack W. (case B, box 60, CCF) was stabbed to death on the day he left a CCC camp in Utica.

50. As a consequence, parolees from Coxsackie continued to go into the CCC through early 1941. For more on the issue of parolees in the CCC, see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 120.

51. This inmate was inducted into the army a year after finding work as a printer and was killed in action in July 1944.

52. Case A, box 100, CCF.

53. Case F, box 280, CCF.

54. Case C, box 300, CCF.

55. Case F, box 320; case N, box 100; case C, box 180; all CCF. This policy doesn’t seem to have been followed consistently. Near the end of his term as superintendent of Coxsackie, Glenn Kendall cheerfully supplied former prisoner Gordon M. with a certificate of accomplishment in electrical work, noting, “I hope this certificate will be of help to you. Good luck!” Case A, box 240, CCF.

56. See the reports of the Osborne Association for the years 1933, 1934, 1936, and 1939, all presented at the annual meetings of the Osborne Association, in AMC; Cox quote comes from the 1934 report, page 8; “Elmira Reformatory, Elmira,” Prison World (Jan.-Feb. 1942), 26.

57. Robert Hannum, “Report of Robert Hannum, Director of Vocational Placement, for the Year Ending December 31, 1944,” Osborne Association (Jan. 5, 1945), unpublished manuscript, SBP.

58. See, for example, the effort by Coxsackie to establish a vocational placement program for reformatory parolees by working with unions and business. See New York State Commission of Correction, Thirty-First Annual Report (1957), 165; and New York State Commission of Correction, Thirty-Second Annual Report (1958), 165. As late as 1969, Price Chenault remained committed to expanding inmate vocational and postrelease employment opportunities. See Glenn Kendall to Lithgow Osborne, March 18, 1969, AMC.

59. For inmates in the case file sample released during the war itself, the percentage serving in the military was slightly higher, at 26% (27 of 103).

60. Case M, box 100, CCF.

61. Case C, box 30; case D, box 50; case O, box 140; and case B, box 150, all CCF. For draftees, wart ime service interrupted more promising marriage and work situations. Peter F., pleased with his work as a printer in Albany, was married early in 1942. “We both know,” Peter wrote his parole officer, “that our getting married will not stop me from going in the draft. I have a good job and am working steady and feel that we can get along on this.” Two months later, Peter was inducted into the army, and he died in military service in July 1944. See case A, box 20, CCF.

62. Case A, box 150, CCF.

63. See case E, box 50 (sentenced to U.S. military prison at Green Haven); case G, box 60 (under psychiatric evaluation in an army hospital following unspecified criminal conduct); case E, box 80 (arrested for robbery while in U.S. Army); case F, box 80 (given a four-year sentence as a U.S. Army deserter); case F, box 90 (given a five-year sentence as a military deserter); case N, box 90 (sentenced to five to ten years in Sing Sing after induction into the U.S. Army); case D, box 120 (sentenced by military for being AWOL and escaping confinement); case E, box 140 (under psychiatric observation at a naval hospital); case R, box 170 (charged with being AWOL); case H, box 220 (charged with being AWOL).

64. Case E, box 160, CCF.

65. Case F, box 120. Consider also the case of Howard G., “one of the most capable bakers that has been trained in this institution.” Paroled in 1940, rearrested for petty larceny but acquitted, he enlisted in the army in late 1940 but stole the family car and disappeared before actually reporting for duty. Returned to Coxsackie for violation of parole, Howard was released in early 1942 to serve several months of military time for desertion. He was drafted by the army in 1943 but was sentenced to a five- to ten-year term in Sing Sing before he could report for duty. Case N, box 90, CCF.

66. A study conducted by the DOC of 950 adolescent males paroled from reformatories between June 1957 and May 1958, showed that 371, or 39.1%, were returned for violation of parole (the subgroup of Coxsackie inmates returned for violation of parole was also 39%). See Russell G. Oswald and Paul D. McGinnis, Parole Adjustment and Prior Educational Achievement of Male Adolescent Offenders, June 1957-June 1961 (Albany: New York State Division of Parole, 1961).

67. The Oswald-McGinnis study also found no statistically significant differences between parole completers and parole violators, based on IQ, race, age, or educational progress while confined in reformatories.

68. The literature on prison reentry has become quite robust. Jeremy Travis notes that “the odds against successful reentry are daunting,” and that two-thirds of released prisoners will be arrested for one or more crimes. Travis, But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2005), particularly chapter 5, “Prisoner Reentry and Public Safety,” which offers a useful overview of the contemporary research literature on postrelease criminality.

69. Case A, box 30, CCF.

70. Case K, box 180, CCF; “30 Robberies Laid to Brooklyn Pair,” New York Times, 24 May 1952), 12.

71. Jake LaMotta recalled deciding to pursue boxing upon his release from Coxsackie and facing the anger of his best friend, who challenged him: “What are you gonna do for eating money? Join your old man in the peddling business?” Likewise, he angered the local mobster who wanted to represent him: “Want to make it own your own yet? You know what you can make on your own, don’t you Mister Chump? Nothin’, that’s what!” LaMotta, Raging Bull, 74, 80.

72. Ralph S. Banay, Youth in Despair (New York: Coward-McCann, 1948), 59–60.

73. English, Savage City, 180.

74. Mack, “An Open Letter to the Parole Board,” 8.

75. Case I, box 170, CCF.

76. Cases C and H, box 100, CCF; case A, box 50, CCF.

77. Case E, box 30, CCF.

78. See case B, box 180, in which Warren W. was convicted for beating a man to death two years after his parole from Coxsackie, a crime for which he could give no explanation.

79. “To Die For $11 Robbery,” New York Times, 19 March 1942, 16; New York v. Bender, 176 NYS 2d 27 (1958); New York v. Bender, 37 NYS 2d 227 (1942); New York v. Elling, 46 NE 2d 501 (1943). In a similar vein, Bernard Berman was convicted of first-degree murder in Erie County in 1944, a conviction later overturned because of a coerced confession (1965) in the case of New York v. Augello and Berman, 265 NYS 2d 509. There is considerable evidence that Berman, Joseph Augello, and their wives had committed a series of crimes. A gasoline ration book found in their possession after the Syracuse murder and robbery belonged to a Cleveland, Ohio, man who had been held up, robbed, and left tied to a tree. Other holdups in Utica and Albany were linked to the foursome. See “ ‘Honeymoon Bandits’ Crime Wave Betrayed by Red Coat,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 16 Jan. 1944, 8. Augello pled insanity at their trial, and the two men were convicted in March 1944. See “Augello, Berman Found Guilty of Tavern Slaying,” Grape Belt and Chautauqua (NY) Farmer, 10 March 1944, 1. The two participated in a mass escape from the Erie County jail while in custody. They were picked up trying to board a freight train at a railyard east of Buffalo, shivering and hanging on to the sides of a tank car. See “Three of Eight Prisoners Nabbed by Sheriff’s Staff,” Avon (NY) Herald News, 10 Feb. 1944, 1.

80. Case C, box 10; case G, box 20; case B, box 30; all CCF. See the case of James Watkins, on parole from Coxsackie in 1942, then convicted of second-degree assault and sentenced to five to ten years. People of New York ex rel. James Watkins v. Robert E. Murphy, as Warden of Auburn State Prison, 3 NY 2d 163 (1957). For more on the practice, see New York State Division of Parole, Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Division of Parole, State of New York (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1957), 155.

81. Shadd Maruna, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), 55.

Chapter 7 • The Frying Pan and the Fire

1. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 57, points out, “The wartime juvenile crime wave was produced as much by the effort to curb youthful behavior as by the growth of misbehavior itself,” though he also acknowledges that wartime disruptions to family and community provided opportunities for adolescents to exercise a newly rebellious attitude. See chapter 2, “Discovering Gangs,” more generally.

2. “Population Trends in New York Prisons,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 37 (Nov.-Dec. 1946), 32; MacCormick, “Existing Provisions for the Correction of Youthful Offenders,” 588–99.

3. Coxsackie was hardly unique in this regard. Given how significant disciplinary transfers were as a resource of control for prison authorities more generally, it is surprising that they have received virtually no attention from prison historians.

4. Zinoman, Colonial Bastille, 4.

5. Abubadika, Education of Sonny Carson, 51.

6. En glish, Savage City, 60, 65.

7. Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 176–77.

8. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, 163.

9. Case C, box 220, CCF.

10. Case H, box 180, CCF. James was held until the maximum expiration of his sentence.

11. See case H, box 70; case L, box 160; case P, box 160; all CCF.

12. Case G, box 300, CCF.

13. Case F, box 350, CCF; Angelo was a serious disciplinary problem and held for the maximum expiration of his sentence.

14. The Department of Corrections would not send those convicted of drug sale violations to Coxsackie; in 1955, eighty-three young men convicted of narcotic sale offenses went to Elmira, while none at all went to Coxsackie. See New York State Commission of Corrections, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 444.

15. Case B, box 300. William, on his return to Coxsackie, was held for the maximum expiration of his sentence.

16. New York State Division of Parole, Twenty-Seventh Annual Report; Legislative Document No. 119 (1957), 14–20.

17. Case C, box 320, CCF.

18. Case C, box 320, CCF.

19. Case C, box 320, CCF.

20. Glenn Kendall felt the youthful offender designation was being poorly used by the courts, resulting in Coxsackie receiving large numbers of young men “who are so seriously disturbed or so badly conditioned that the chances for rehabilitation are small indeed.” Glenn Kendall, “Youth Offender Procedures—The Reception Center,” paper delivered at the 41st Annual State Conference of Probation Officers, West Point, New York, Oct. 20, 1949, unpublished manuscript, AMC.

21. “Dewey to Ask Aid for Young Felons,” New York Times, 5 Jan. 1953, 15. The solution of transferring Coxsackie inmates to Great Meadow persisted for years. Not until 1976 did that transfer relationship finally break down; in an effort to “improve the reputation” of Great Meadow, transfers began going to Green Haven instead. See Sheehan, A Prison and a Prisoner, 71. Sheehan also refers to Great Meadow as the “garbage dump” of the state prison system (p. 3).

22. The search for an end-of-the-line solution for adolescent offenders had at least two parallels in postwar New York social policy. In the juvenile system, the state took over the old New York City Reformatory at New Hampton in 1957, with the intention of using the institution to house youths too aggressive for the juvenile reform schools at Warwick and Industry. In a second parallel development, the New York City school system responded to delinquency and youth violence with the creation of the “600” schools for troubled youth, and a smaller number of “700” schools for older delinquent students. For more on the 600 schools, see the excellent study by Daniel Hiram Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

23. Emma Harrison, “Youth Board Sifts Work Camp Plans,” New York Times, 28 Aug. 1957, 29.

24. I was fortunate that the inmate case files from Great Meadow extended just far enough chronologically to capture the shift to a transfer institution. These cases are all drawn from boxes 314–320 of the Great Meadow Inmate Case Files at the New York State Archives. I reviewed every file in these boxes, not all of which were transfers from Coxsackie. Some came directly from the Elmira Reception, others from Elmira and Wood-bourne, and a few from the maximum-security prisons. It should be noted, however, that more came from Coxsackie than anywhere else.

25. New York State Commission of Correction, Thirtieth Annual Report, 175.

26. New York State Commission of Correction, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 442–43.

27. Conboy would remain as the warden of Great Meadow until his retirement in 1972. His retirement was preceded by another major disturbance. See Emanuel Perlmutter, “Guards Put Down Disorder in Great Meadow Prison,” New York Times, 16 Sept. 1971, 49. Scott Christiansen recalled a visit to Great Meadow right around the time Conboy retired, observing that the warden appeared to be “a relic from another century” who offered commentary on “how to handle the coloreds.” See Scott Christiansen, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), xi.

28. Thomas, Seven Long Times. One of Thomas’s friends, Bayamon, warned the younger cons: “You cats better believe it, you can pick up all the sticks and stones you want and do all kinds of numbers with your fists, but you better dig that it’s gonna take more than heart to go against guards and state troopers and, dig it, even the armed forces if need be. They’d send planes in to strafe this fucking place if they had to. I’m in for the idea, but not for it coming out of thin air” (p. 189).

29. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 209.

30. Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (New York: Knopf, 1967), 283.

31. The Comstock riot is well described by Piri Thomas in Seven Long Times and Down These Mean Streets. See also, “Clubs Quell Riot in Upstate Prison,” New York Times, 19 Aug. 1955, 40.

32. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 214.

33. For the Associated Press coverage of the Great Meadow riot, see “Convicts Riot is Broken Up,” Milwaukee Journal, 18 Aug. 1955, 9. See also “Clubs Quell Riot in Upstate Prison”; “Prisons Chief Calls Riot ‘Spontaneous,’ ” New York Times 28 Aug. 1955, 58.

34. Stafford Derby, “A Firm Hand Needed—And Supplied,” Christian Science Monitor, 12 Sept. 1955, 16.

35. “Keeplocked” refers to the practice of keeping an inmate confined in his cell for disciplinary reasons. Keeplocked inmates could not participate in the regular daily schedule of prison activities. Great Meadow Case Files, boxes 318 and 320.

36. Case C, box 380, CCF.

37. Sullivan, Tears and Tiers, 26.

38. En glish, Savage City, 65–66. By the 1960s, Great Meadow prisoners in disciplinary cells were also having their heads shaved bald, according to one account.

39. Chinlund, Prison Transformations, 47–48, 167.

40. Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 184.

41. Ibid.

42. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 219.

43. Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates: The Rise of the Prisoners’ Movement (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979), 39.

44. See Gottschalk, Prison and the Gallows, 171–76. That the concentration of disaffected minority youth under racially discriminatory conditions should have produced political consequences is not surprising. This is consistent with basic argument made by Daniel Kryder that wartime mobilizations during World War II fundamentally altered the American racial dynamic and gave momentum to the movements for civil rights and racial equality. The prison was simply another setting in which the configuration of race in America was reshaped. See Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

45. The quote comes from Lumumba Shakur, in Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 180. This is not unlike the Harlem activists Martha Biondi has studied, who “discursively linked police brutality in New York to southern lynching and racist violence, but they offered a distinct analysis of urban police brutality.” Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 70.

46. Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land, 326.

47. English, Savage City, 66–67. Bin Wahad also read the work of J. A. Rogers, a pioneering scholar of African history and anthropology. According to Savage City, Rogers’s writings “were so prized in prisons that inmates painstakingly copied his pamphlets by hand so that more inmates could have access to them” (p. 66).

48. Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land, 332–33; see also “Riot in Gallery Halts U.N. Debate,” New York Times. 16 Feb. 1961, 1.

49. Thomas, Seven Long Times, 219. For Dhoruba Bin Wahad, the turning point came after Malcolm X’s assassination. While still a prisoner in Great Meadow, in 1965, he changed his name from Richard Earl Moore to Dhoruba al-Mujahid Bin Wahad. See English, Savage City, 115.

50. Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 242–43.

51. “Prison Racial Fight Injures 23 Upstate; 450 Join in Melee,” New York Times, 23 Sept. 1963, 22. Conboy observed to reporters, “The whites consider certain courts their domain and the Negroes consider certain courts to be their own.” “Handball Game Turns into Riot at Prison,” Amsterdam Daily Democrat, 28 Sept. 1963, 1.

52. “Prison Racial Fight Injures 23 Upstate,” 22.

53. The quote comes from the Associated Press coverage of the riot; see “Racism Linked to Prison Riot,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, 28 Sept. 1963, 18.

54. “State Transfers 30 Rioters from Racially-Torn Prison,” Auburn (NY) Citizen-Advertiser, 17 Oct. 1963, 7.

55. Barbara Lavin McEleney interviewed Vito Ternullo, a longtime ally of the reform interests within the New York State Department of Corrections. Ternullo believed that the growth in black and Puerto Rican inmates was the number one issue for security personnel in the New York State system and was one motivator behind their push for new institutions in the system, a push that began with the adoption of Great Meadow as a transfer reformatory and developed into the proposal for a further-down-the-end-of-the-line prison in 1963. That prison was not constructed, in part owing to the modest declines in overall prison population. See Barbara Lavin McEleney, Correctional Reform in New York: The Rockefeller Years and Beyond (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985).

56. Felipe Luciano, “1969,” Lords of East Harlem (2009), http://felipeluciano.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/hello-world.

57. Felipe Luciano, “Speech by Felipe Luciano, New York State Chrmn., Young Lords Organization, at the First Spanish Methodist Church in El Barrio (111th St. & Lexington) on Sun., December 21, 1969,” in The Young Lords: A Reader, ed. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, Iris Morales, and Denise Oliver-Velez (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 208–212.

58. Armand Schaubroeck’s recordings remain as powerful as ever, though not nearly as well-known as they should be. The best overview of his Elmira project is Elwood Mole, “Armand Schaubroeck Steals,” Perfect Sound Forever (April 2006), www.furious.com/perfect/armandschaubroeck.html.

Chapter 8 • Out of Time

1. The crisis of the liberal prison is well documented, but the deep roots of that crisis are not well understood. Francis Cullen and Karen E. Gilbert, in Reaffirming Rehabilitation (Cincinnati, Ohio: Anderson, 1982), 82, assumed the dominance of liberalism in corrections into the late sixties: “Rehabilitation thus remained unchallenged as the dominant correctional ideology. There seemed to be little chance that there would be a call either to revert to the punitive principles of bygone days or to abandon the quest to build upon the foundation of the therapeutic state.” Recent historical scholarship has begun to develop a clearer picture of the significance of conservative politics during the “liberal” era of crime and punishment. Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) is a useful account, particularly as it explores the 1950s-era foundations of law-and-order politics. See also Gottschalk, Prison and the Gallows, and Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

2. Bertram M. Beck, Youth within Walls.

3. Bertram M. Beck, Short-Term Therapy in an Authoritarian Setting (New York: Family Service Association of America, 1946), 7, 35.

4. David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 162.

5. F. E. Haynes, “The Sociological Study of the Prison Community,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 39 (Nov.-Dec. 1948): 432–40, 435.

6. Norman Polansky, “The Prison as an Autocracy,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (May-June 1942): 16–22; see also K. Lewin, R. Lippitt, and R. K. White, “Patterns of Aggressive Behavior in Artificially Created Social Climates,” Journal of Social Psychology 10 (1939): 271–99; Gresham Sykes, “The Corruption of Authority and Rehabilitation,” Journal of Social Forces 34 (1955): 257–62.

7. Lucy Freeman, “State Prisons Seen Lax Toward Youth,” New York Times, 5 Jan.

8. Beck, Youth within Walls, 18–19, 32.

9. Ibid., 24, 27.

10. Ibid., 17.

11. Ibid., 42.

12. “Youth Work Camps Held Undesirable,” New York Times, 8 Jan. 1951, 18.

13. “Grave Mistakes Seen in Youth Psychiatry,” New York Times, 8 March 1951, 31. E. R. Cass represented the Prison Association of New York. Bertram Beck attended, as did Austin MacCormick.

14. “Aiding Youthful Prisoners,” New York Times, 19 Jan. 1951, 24.

15. Edward Hudson, “Young Offenders to Get Camp Term,” New York Times, 17 Aug. 1955, 22.

16. Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest,” 706.

17. Peter Kihss, “Rockefeller Seeks More Work Camps for Delinquents,” New York Times, 9 Sept. 1959, 1.

18. Warren Weaver, Jr., “Campers Uphold Governor’s Idea,” New York Times, 3 Oct. 1959, 1.

19. Emma Harrison, “Work Camp Boys Find New Lives,” New York Times, 4 Sept. 1957, 35.

20. “Young Offenders Work in Camps,” New York Times, 7 Dec. 1958, 154.

21. “50 Offenders Going to Forestry Camp,” New York Times, 27 Aug. 1955, 17. See Milton Bracker, “Governor Hints State May Widen Youth-Camp Plan,” New York Times, 7 Sept. 1959, 1; Robert Alden, “A Work Camp Assessed: Better Boys, Better Forest,” New York Times, 7 Sept. 1959, 1.

22. The entire discussion of Roger V.’s case comes from case B, box 380, CCF.

23. This quote comes from the original 1965 study proposal, part of the New York State Department of Corrections records at the New York State Archives.

24. “Corrections Chief Will Ask Fund Rise,” New York Times, 6 Nov. 1955, 38.

25. New York State Department of Corrections, Your New York State Department of Correction and the Challenge of Delinquent Youth (New York: Department of Corrections, 1955). 6.

26. Characteristics of Inmates Under Custody in New York State Correctional Institutions (Dec. 31, 1962), Department of Corrections, Division of Research (New York State Department of Corrections, 1963). The IBM punch card data were collected and maintained by the division, who systematically compiled information on every inmate entering and leaving the Department of Corrections. First published in 1963 and collected for 1962, the punch card data were collected at some point between the authorization of the division in 1954 and the 1962 collection, but exactly when is unclear.

27. The push for a research division goes back at least to a 1952 Prison Association of New York report, which called for the creation of a division of research. See “Prison Study Unit for State Asked,” New York Times, 4 Feb. 1952, 10. Back in 1955, Commissioner Thomas McHugh had sounded the call for “careful research.” “Correctional Education Looks Ahead” Journal of Correctional Education (Oct. 1955): 70. During this period, department officials routinely decried the lack of resources for research programs. Reports of program success tended to take the form of case reports of positive accomplishments, such as Price Chenault, “The Illiterate Who Would Be a Reader,” Journal of Correctional Education (July 1965): 5–12.

28. New York State Division of Parole and New York State Department of Corrections, Parole Adjustment and Prior Educational Achievement.

29. New York State Department of Corrections, Annual Report (1963), 33.

30. New York State Department of Corrections, Correction (1967), 12.

31. The initial sample of 220 cases was reduced to 186 by eliminating deceased, fugitives, and former Elmira Reception Center prisoners who were living out of New York State. Of the 186, a total of 112 were located in time to complete the pilot project in 1967, and 106 of those agreed to participate in the study, reflecting a generally quite agreeable response of former inmates (though it is obviously hard to speculate on the actual response of ex-prisoners to being contacted for the project).

32. Legislative Budget Hearing, Department of Corrections, 20 Feb. 1967, series 3, box 5, Howard F. Miller Papers (hereafter HMP), M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, State University of New York.

33. Ibid..

34. Robert E. Lynch to John R. Dunne, 18 Feb. 1966, Penal Institution Committee Files, John R. Dunne Papers (hereafter JRDP), M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, State University of New York.

35. Statement by Paul D. McGinnis, Commissioner of Correction, State of New York at a Public Hearing of the New York State Senate Committee on Penal Institutions, Albany, 27 March 1968, Penal Institution Committee Files, JRDP.

36. Preliminary Report of the Governor’s Special Committee on Criminal Offenders (New York, 1968).

37. Ibid., 45–46.

38. Ibid., 57.

39. Ibid., 212.

40. Ibid., 29.

41. Ibid.

42. Karl Menninger to Austin H. MacCormick, 18 March 1969, AMC.

43. The same may be seen in MacCormick’s response during a meeting of the Crime Control Council, Citizens Advisory Committee of the Governor’s Special Committee on Criminal Offenders (St. Albans, New York, 1968), held at the Roosevelt Hotel.

44. Crime Control Council, Citizens Advisory Committee of the Governor’s Special Committee on Criminal Offenders, 13.

45. Ibid., 33–34, 36. Meanwhile Donald H. Goff of the Correctional Association of New York rather lamely praised the report, which “we believe will set guidelines for the next 50 years.” Ibid., 60. For works opposing the discretion that lay at the heart of the rehabilitative regime, see Kenneth Culp Davis, Discretionary Justice: A Preliminary Inquiry (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), and Marvin E. Frankel, Criminal Sentences: Law without Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973).

46. Preliminary Report, 301–302. The list included inadequacy, immaturity, dependency, ill equipped in social skills, ill equipped in education, vocational maladjustment, cognitive deficiency, compulsive pathology, organic pathology, antisocial attitudes, career commitment, catalytic impulsivity, habitual impulsivity, asocial attitudes.

47. Ibid., 307.

48. Ibid., 311.

49. Ibid., 26.

50. Crime Control Council, Citizens Advisory Committee of the Governor’s Special Committee on Criminal Offenders, 12.

51. Bob Martinson, Cold War on the Campus (New York: Socialist Youth League, 1950); see also Robert Martinson, letter to the editor, New International (Sept.-Oct. 1952), 265–67.

52. Robert Magnus Martinson, “The Role of the Communist Party in the Spanish Civil War” (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1953), vi.

53. Ibid., 189.

54. Ibid., 190.

55. Numerous scholars have observed a connection between civil rights and prison activism, usually observing that the legal branches of the civil rights movement turned to prison litigation as more and more activists went to jail. See, for example, Gottschalk, Prison and the Gallows, 177. On the other hand, Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 71, perceptively suggests that civil rights attorneys had often acted as public defenders, suggesting a path from jail to civil rights, rather than the other way around.

56. Robert Martinson, “Solidarity Under Close Confinement: A Study of the Freedom Riders in Parchman Penitentiary,” Psychiatry (May 1967): 132–48.

57. Robert Martinson, review of Where It’s At: Radical Perspectives in Sociology, by Steven E. Duetsch and John Howard, eds., American Sociological Review 35 (Dec. 1970): 1103–1104. For more on the process by which left-wing anti-Stalinists embraced conservative politics, see Alan W. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

58. Jerome H. Skolnick and Elliott Currie, Crisis in American Institutions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 1.

59. Sociologist Donald Cressey succinctly laid out the critical perspective: “A research study which seemed to show that attending a prison school had little or no effect on the reformation of criminals would not necessarily lead to abandoning the school program. Rather, the ‘intangible benefits’ of education would probably be enumerated … in our society, education is a Good Thing, and schools must be maintained in prisons and justified as corrective (‘good’ men are educated; therefore, to make bad men good, educate them) whether or not there is any scientific evidence of their effectiveness.” Donald R. Cressey, “The Nature and Effectiveness of Correctional Techniques,” Law and Contemporary Problems 23 (autumn 1958): 754–71, quotation on 760. See also Joseph W. Eaton, “Symbolic and Substantive Evaluative Research,” Administrative Science Quarterly 6 (March 1962): 421–42.

60. Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism, 194, see also 240–41.

61. Martinson argued that California was a model of the modern alliance between treatment professionals and prison administrators, where “centralized control was combined with efficient classification … middle management was trained in group treatment techniques and custodial ranks were indoctrinated with the new perspective which came to be called the ‘correctional therapeutic community.’ ” Robert Martinson, “The Paradox of Prison Reform—I, The Dangerous ‘Myth,’ ” New Republic, 1 April 1972, 24.

62. Robert Martinson, “The Age of Treatment: Some Implications of the Custody Treatment Dimension,” Issues in Criminology 2 (fall 1966): 281.

63. Robert Martinson, “What Works?—Questions and Answers about Prison Reform,” Public Interest 35 (Spring 1974): 22–54, 23.

64. Ibid., 24.

65. Preliminary Report of the Governor’s Special Committee on Criminal Offenders, 197–98.

66. Ibid., 200–201.

67. Ibid., 224.

68. The general liberal-radical revolt against the rehabilitative ideal has been well described already, though it has not often been linked to the developments of the postwar period. See Francis Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); for contemporary expressions of the sentiment, see Erik Olin Wright, ed., The Politics of Punishment (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); American Friends Service Committee, Struggle for Justice: A Report on Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971).

69. Lucia Mouat, “Penal Reforms Come—But Too Slowly,” Christian Science Monitor, 19 Jan. 1973, 2.

70. Martinson, “The Paradox of Prison Reform—I,” 25.

71. Martinson, “The Paradox of Prison Reform—III, The Meaning of Attica,” New Republic, 15 April 1972, 19.

72. Ibid., 19.

73. Martinson, “What Works?” 25.

74. Ibid., 49. The larger project, once published, was commonly, if inaccurately, referred to as “the Martinson Report.” For a vigorous early critique from within the correctional bureaucracy, see Ted Palmer, “Martinson Revisited,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (1975): 133–52.

75. Martinson, “What Works?” 48.

76. Ernest van den Haag and Robert Martinson, “Review of Deterrence: The Legal Threat in Crime Control, by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon J. Hawkins,” Contemporary Sociology 3 (Sept. 1974): 454–56.

77. Report of the Special Committee on Criminal Sentencing, Correctional Association of New York, 8–9.

78. Martinson, “The Paradox of Prison Reform—I,” New Republic, 1 April 1972.

79. Martinson, “The Paradox of Prison Reform—IV, Planning for Public Safety,” New Republic, 29 April 1972, 23.

80. Francis Cullen, Paula Smith, Christopher Lowenkamp, and Edward J. Latessa, “Nothing Works Revisited: Deconstructing Farabee’s Rethinking Rehabilitation,” Victims and Offenders4 (2009): 101–123.

81. Lee Wohlfert, “Criminologist Bob Martinson Offers a Crime-Stopper: Put a Cop on Each Ex-Con,” People, 23 Feb. 1976.

82. Robert Martinson, “New Findings, New Views: A Note of Caution Regarding Sentencing Reform,” Hofstra Law Review 7 (winter 1979): 243–58, 254, 258.

83. “It Has Come to Our Attention,” Federal Probation 43 (1979), 87. Martinson remains a figure of some mystery, with many accounts of his death failing to even correctly identify the year in which he committed suicide.

Chapter 9 • Floodtide

1. Glenn M. Kendall, “The Anatomy of a Youth Reformatory Sub-Culture,” Proceedings of the Ninety-Fourth Annual Congress of Correction (Washington, D.C.: American Correctional Association), 178–91, 189.

2. Ibid., 189.

3. Ibid., 190.

4. Howard Lewis, “A New Chance for Community Failures,” Knickerbocker News, 29 March 1964, 13A; Dick Weber, “New Dope Cure at Coxsackie,” Knickerbocker News, Feb. 1963, 3B; Howard Lewis, “A Crucial Time at Coxsackie,” Knickerbocker News, 26 May 26 1964; “Explorer Post Formed at Area Institution,” Kingston Daily Freeman, 20 November 1967, 21.

5. This account of the Coxsackie experience reinforces Marie Gottschalk’s essential observation that “remarkable transformation took place in the interest groups and social movements involved in criminal justice” during this period. See Gottschalk, Prison and the Gallows, 40.

6. See, for example, Paul D. Meunier and Howard D. Schwartz, “Beyond Attica”; specific testimony to this effect came from Wim Van Eekeren, deputy commissioner of administrative services, and from Frank Daley, director of the budget.

7. Meunier and Schwartz, “Beyond Attica,” 928–29.

8. “Youthful Offenders,” New York Times, 14 Feb. 1956, 28.

9. Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 18911986 (New York: William Morrow, 1992), particularly chapter 20, “Governor,” and pp. 516–533.

10. Barbara Lavin McEleney, Correctional Reform in New York, 29–30; McEleney’s fine account employs interviews with a number of important figures from the period.

11. Ibid., 22.

12. Ibid., 32, quoting a former legislative aide to the committee.

13. Ibid., 32.

14. “Wider Youth Law Asked by Judges,” New York Times, 8 Dec. 1957, 75.

15. See “Hogan Says G.O.P. Shams on Crime,” New York Times, 7 Oct. 1958, 26; Warren Weaver, Jr., “Rockefeller Charges Rival Harms State Crime Fight,” New York Times, 8 Oct. 1958, 1; “G.O.P. is Accused of Lag on Crime,” New York Times, 9 Oct. 1958, 29. Rockefeller blasted Harriman, for example, for being slow to build more camps of the Camp Pharsalia model; see, “Queens Children Mob Rockefeller,” New York Times, 30 Oct. 1958, 25.

16. Layhmond Robinson, “Mayor’s Auto Ban Backed in Albany,” New York Times, 23 March 1961, 25; “Rockefeller Signs Youth Act Repeal,” New York Times, 30 March 1961, 21.

17. For an important review of the Rockefelter laws, see Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “ ‘The Attila the Hun Law’: New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State,” Journal of Social History (fall 2010): 71–96.

18. Prison population totals also miss developments like the court rulings that required the state to largely empty its institutions for the criminally insane. At the start of 1966, Matteawan and Dannemora housed 2,597 prisoners, a number that had been reduced to 998 by the spring of 1968, as prisoner inmates were shifted to state hospitals.

19. The New York City jail uprisings of August and October 1970 were the most notable product of this overcrowding. One of the most useful accounts of the 1970 jail rebellions is Diaz-Cotto, Gender, Ethnicity, and the State, 35–45.

20. Walter Wallack reached mandatory retirement in 1966 and departed Wallkill Prison; Price Chenault reached mandatory retirement in 1970.

21. “Escaped Hunt Selves; Caught,” Greene County Examiner-Recorder, 21 May 1942; “Foiled Inmates to Face Grand Jury Here,” Greene County Examiner-Recorder, 5 March 1942, 1.

22. “Grand Jury Asks Steps to Protect People of Area,” Greene County Examiner-Recorder, 24 Dec. 1942, 1.

23. “40 Hour Week Is Stressed to Help Morale of Guards,” Kingston Daily Freeman, 1 March 1955, 5.

24. “Prison Local Hits Pay Plan,” Newburgh News, 3 March 1958, 6.

25. “500 In March Asking State Pay Increase,” Yonkers (NY) Herald Statesman, 3 March 1959, 12.

26. J. Earl Kelly, director of classification and compensation, “Appeal to the State Civil Service Commission in Connection With Title of Correction Officer and Related Titles After Denial of Reallocation Request,” 23 Aug. 1965, 21, Council 82 Papers.

27. John R. Martin, “Council 50 to New York State Senators and Assemblymen,” 24 Jan. 1966, JRDP.

28. “13 Unions Again Hit Napanoch,” Newburgh-Beacon News, 13 Oct. 1960.

29. Jerry Wurf to Al Wurf, Sept. 2, 1969, series 2, box 3, Council 82 Papers.

30. James B. Jacobs and Norma Meacham Crotty, “Collective Bargaining in New York State Prisons,” in Guard Unions and the Future of the Prisons (Ithaca: Institute of Public Employment, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 1978), ^10–39.

31. Contract negotiations, 1969, items of locals, series 2, box 1, Council 82 Papers.

32. Diaz-Cotto, Gender, Ethnicity and the State, 104.

33. Correction Policy Committee, 1971–1972, series 2, box 2, Council 82 Papers.

34. The literature on public employees, correctional officers, and the labor movement is small but helpful: Joseph E. Slater, Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900–1962 (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR, 2004); Paul D. Staudohar, “Prison Guard Labor Relations in Ohio,” Industrial Relations 15 (May 1976): 177–90; Jacobs and Crotty, Guard Unions and the Future of the Prisons; John M. Wynne, Jr., “Unions and Bargaining Among Employees of State Prisons,” Monthly Labor Review (March 1978): 10–16.

35. Linda Greenhouse, “Correction Bill Signed By Carey,” New York Times, 13 Aug. 1975, 1.

36. John Burke to Honorable J. J. Marchi, 8 March 1976, series 2, box 1, Council 82 Papers. One union member put it this way: “I was one of the most vocal opponents Mr. Schwartz had or ever will have in his life—he was an ultraliberal, sick member of our society while local correction officers are conservative and vehemently opposed to Schwartz because of his behavior at Attica and his views on rehabilitation.” Jacobs and Crotty, Guard Unions and the Future of the Prison, 35.

37. Linda Greenhouse, “Senators Cool to Correction Chief,” New York Times, 26 Jan. 1976, 45.

38. Linda Greenhouse, “Schwartz Appears Headed for Defeat as Correction Chief,” New York Times, 4 March 1976, 1, 29. Senator Edwyn Mason accused Schwartz of caring more for “the incorrigibly depraved than for the state’s law abiding citizens.” Linda Greenhouse, “Politics and Little More Stopped Schwartz,” New York Times, 11 April 1976, 146.

39. Tom Wicker, “Attica and Schwartz,” New York Times, 29 Feb. 1976, 15.

40. “Statement by Carl F. Gray, Executive Director Security and Law Enforcement Employees Council 82, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, before the Senate Standing Committee on Crime and Correction, 30 March 1977,” series 2, box 1, Council 82 Papers.

41. Council 82, “New York State Correctional System” (1976), series 2, box 2, Council 82 Papers.

42. McEleney, Correctional Reform in New York, 136.

43. Crisis Management: The State of Corrections in New York State, Report of the Assembly Republican Task Force on the Corrections Crisis (22 March 1983), 2.

44. Correctional Services News (July 1981), box 5, Correctional Association of New York Papers, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, State University of New York.

45. Lewis B. Oliver, Jr., “Summary of Testimony,” series 5, box 1, New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice Records (hereafter CCJR), M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, State University of New York.

46. The accounts of violence against inmates were consistent with what had been reported for years, but prisoner charges were now given a more public airing. One inmate cautioned legislators, “When they talk about special housing they don’t mention the beating you get on the way up.” Annabar Jensis, “Legislators Grill Ward At Committee Hearings,” Greene County News, 16 Feb. 1978, 1, 8. In June 1977 four officers were involved in an assault on inmate Jerome Handy, who was badly beaten. Handy was charged with assault but acquitted by a Greene County jury in June in a rare defeat for officers in the local criminal justice system. See Oliver, “Summary of Testimony” CCJR.

47. Jeff Sommer, “Coxsackie: A Look Inside,” Knickerbocker News, 1 March 1978. In 1974, Coxsackie had only six Spanish-speaking officers in the institution; see John E. Van De Car, Director of Manpower and Employee Relations to Thomas Holland, Chairman of the [Council 82] Corrections Policy Committee, Correctional Policy Committee Meetings, 1974, series 2, box 2, Council 82 Papers. Correctional officers were not particularly concerned about the lack of diversity among them, arguing that it was a natural effect of the location of state prisoners and the standards of merit-based civil service. “No one from the minority groups is being discriminated against” was the position of the officers; John J. Panella to State Senator John Dunne, 12 July 1967, Penal Institutions Files, JRDP. Bryant Collins, “Where I’m Comin’ From,” New York Amsterdam News, 5 Feb. 1972, A1, pointed out that Coxsackie had just one black guard at the start of 1972, David Harris, and he was being transferred, leaving no black guards at all at the former reformatory.

48. Jeff Sommer, “Correction Chief Ties ‘Politics’ to Coxsackie’s Troubles,” Knickerbocker News, 2 March 1978, 13A.

49. Ahbegee Abdul, “West Coxsackie Plea,” New York Amsterdam News, 18 Sept. 1971, A7.

50. “Cells Are Searched After Disturbances at a Prison Upstate,” New York Times, 9 April 1972, 57.

51. “Prisoners Stop Work in Food Dispute,” New York Times, 11 Aug. 1973, 23. A spike in protests coincided with the arrival of Harry Fritz as superintendent, which represented a huge victory for the custodial staff. Fritz had been a sergeant at Coxsackie back in the 1950s and had risen through the custodial ranks to the position of warden. He had been known as a tough-minded officer when he was first at Coxsackie (harsher assessments came from the inmates; see chapter 5); moreover, he had long been active in promoting the labor interests of correctional officers. Fritz arrived after serving as warden of Auburn during its 1970 uprising, which he blamed in testimony to the state legislature on the “permissive attitude” of the previous administration. See “Prison Practices Aired As 9 Testify At Hearing,” Schenectady Gazette, 17 Dec. 1970, 9.

52. Oliver, “Summary of Testimony,” CCJR; Oliver observed that “being so young, the Coxsackie blacks do not have the maturity to understand that all whites are not bad and keep their reactions [to official racism] from being generalized to all whites, including fellow prisoners.”

53. “Area Men Score on Job Test,” Newburgh (NY) Evening News, 15 Dec. 1971, 9.

54. Elizabeth Gaynes described the basis for officers’ resentment: “Perhaps Mr. Ternullo’s alleged leniency refers to the large number of volunteer programs he permitted and encouraged to supplement the limited programs which the budget and central office offer. Or maybe it’s the emphasis he placed on education. Or the display of inmate art on his office walls. Perhaps the respect he received from inmates and their attorneys discredited him.” Elizabeth A. Gaynes, “Summary of Testimony,” series 5, box 1, CCJR.

55. Among the ILC’s objectionable behavior, they apparently selected the film Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be shown. Permission to do so was only revoked after protests from correctional officers. Annabar Jensis, “New Warden and Policies for Coxsackie Institution,” Greene County News, 26 Jan. 1978, 1, 3.

56. Gaynes, “Summary of Testimony,” CCJR.

57. Oliver, “Summary of Testimony,” CCJR.

58. “Statement of Officers Wives,” Greene County News, n. d. 1978, n. p., series 5, box 1, CCJR.

59. Council 82 Executive Board Files, minutes, 24 Jan. 1977, series 1, box 1, Council 82 Papers.

60. “Coxsackie Guards Demanding Search,” Newburgh (NY) Evening News, 27 Jan. 1977, 7.

61. “Coxsackie Guards Tell of 14 Attacks,” Schenectady Gazette, 25 March 1977, 2.

62. Memorandum, Robert Maloney, policy chairman, 4 April 1977, series 2, box 2, Council 82 Papers.

63. Gaynes, “Summary of Testimony,” and Oliver, “Summary of Testimony,” CCJR.

64. In April 1979, Council 82 reversed its tentative acceptance of a state contract, leading to a systemwide strike later that month, led in part by the resistance of union locals at Elmira, Great Meadow, and Coxsackie. The Elmira local had successfully sued to enjoin the implementation of the 1977 contract agreement between Council 82 and the state; Jacobs and Crotty, Guard Unions and the Future of the Prison, 17. Two years later, the union did renege on an agreement because of locals’ discontent, which precipitated a full-blown prison officers’ strike. See Richard J. Meislin, “Prison Guards’ Chief Jailed as Strike Enters 9th Day,” New York Times 28 April 1979, 1, 28. Officers there claimed, “In five or six years it will be renamed ‘the Elmira Recreational Facility,’ ” and “the prisoners up there have it better than we do.” See also Alan Richman, “Striking Guards Say They Are the Prisons’ Real Inmates,” New York Times 27 April 1979, B1. The state refused to reopen negotiations, which led to the strike. Sheila Rukle, “Talks Begin in Strike by Prison Guards,” New York Times 21 April 1979, 26.

65. “Group Wants End to Big Prisons,” Hudson Register Star, 15 March 1977, n. p.

66. Ibid.

67. Memorandum from Benjamin Ward, commissioner, Department of Correctional Services, 16 June 1977, series 5, box 1, CCJR.

68. “Work Mandated, Study Voluntary,” Albany Times-Union, 25 June 1977, 8.

69. Memorandum from John Ives, community coordinator, Judicial Process Commission, 12 Aug. 1977, CCJR.

70. Memorandum, Leon Van Dyke, New York State Department of Correctional Services, 1977, CCJR. Van Dyke was an educational specialist in the department, and a civil rights activist in the Albany area. Prison programs were already understaffed and overworked. Elizabeth Gaynes called the counselors, “the most concerned, dedicated, hardworking and cooperative counselors I have ever encountered in the correctional system.” Their caseloads, she observed, were “so outrageous that they cannot possibly be as accessible as necessary.” “Summary of Testimony,” CCJR.

71. In November, Coxsackie Civil Service Employees’ Association Local 162, issued a strongly worded memorandum in opposition to the proposed program changes at the institution: “The memorandum misquoted and misrepresented the proposed program,” and the negative radio announcement preceded the hostage event. See New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice, “Coalition Demands Full Disclosure on Coxsackie,” 13 Jan. 1978, series 5, box 1, CCJR.

72. R. Victor Stewart, “Albany Recalls Coxsackie Chief,” Knickerbocker News, 9 Jan. 1978, n. p. The immediate aftermath of the hostage event scarcely reduced tensions at Coxsackie. The Inmate Liaison Committee went from cell to cell, along with the volunteer services director (McKinley Johnson) to collect care packages for the prisoners being held in solitary confinement, to the outrage of correctional officers.

73. Gaynes, “Summary of Testimony,” CCJR.

74. Jeff Sommer, “Peace a Façade in Troubled Jail,” Knickerbocker News, 28 Feb. 1978, 1.

75. Annabar Jensis, “Committee to Call Ward Back Again,” Greene County News 16 Feb. 1978, 1, 8.

76. Jeff Sommer, “Coxsackie, A Look Inside,” Knickerbocker News, 1 March 1978. Coxsackie union local head Valentine Kriel reported, “There is no more Inmate Liaison Committee running the Institution and Volunteer Services has been disbanded for the present”; the new deputy for security was Donald Pierce, formerly a captain at Coxsackie. Annabar Jensis, “New Warden and Policies for Coxsackie Institution,” Greene County News, 26 Jan. 1978, 1, 3.

77. Frederic U. Dicker, “Security Tightens at Coxsackie,” Albany Times-Union, n. d., n. p., series 5, box 1, CCJR. Frederic U. Dicker, “Ward Answers His Critics on Coxsackie Security,” Albany Times-Union, 11 Jan., 1978, n. p., series 5, box 1, CCJR.

78. Jeff Sommer, “Corrections Chief Ties ‘Politics’ to Coxsackie Troubles,” Knickerbocker News, 2 March 1978, 13A; see also Jeff Sommer, “Coxsackie: A Look Inside,” Knickerbocker News, 1 March 1978, 1.

79. Annabar Jensis, “Legislators Grill Ward at Committee Hearings,” Greene County News 16 Feb. 1978, 1.

80. Annabar Jensis, “Correction Officers Wives Organize Lobbying Group; To Demonstrate in Albany,” Greene County News, 2 Feb. 1978, n. p., series 5, box 1, CCJR.

81. “Statement of Officers Wives,” Greene County News, 16 Feb. 1978, 1, 9.

82. Ibid. In New York City, police officers’ wives took a similarly active role in their political struggles. See Daniel J. Walkowitz, “Patrolling the Borders: Integration and Identity in the New York City Police Department, 1941–1975” (Ph.D. diss., New York University 2000). See also, William J. Bopp, The Police Rebellion: A Quest for Blue Power (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1971).

83. Jeff Sommer, “Peace a Façade in Troubled Jail,” Knickerbocker News Feb. 28, 1978. The New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice questioned whether prisoners were being made scapegoats in an election year. New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice, “Coalition Demands Full Disclosure on Coxsackie,” 13 Jan. 1978, series 5, box 1, CCJR.

Conclusion • The Ghost of Prisons Future

1. Selwyn Raab, “Carey Offers 275 Million Plan to Expand State Prisons,” New York Times, 6 June 1980, B1.

2. The New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice Records (CCJR), housed at the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, State University of New York, provide comprehensive coverage of the prison bond fight.

3. Dorothy J. Gaiter, “Controversy Intensifies on Prison Bond Issue,” New York Times, 1 Nov. 1981, 53.

4. Robert A. Mathias, The Road Not Taken: Cost-Effective Alternatives to Prison for Non-Violent Felony Offenders in New York State (New York: Correctional Association of New York, 1986).

5. Some of many outstanding explorations of the consequences and impact of mass incarceration: Alexander, New Jim Crow; Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Megan Comfort, “Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 271–96; Steven Raphael and Michael A. Stoll, eds. Do Prisons Make Us Safer? The Benefits and Costs of the Prison Boom (New York: Russell Sage, 2009); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage, 2006).

6. See, especially, Alex Lichtenstein, “A ‘Labor History’ of Mass Incarceration,” Labor 8 (2011): 5–14, and Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters.”

7. Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3 (2001): 95–133, 109. See also John Irwin, The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class (Los Angeles, Calif.: Roxbury, 2001).

8. For broad version of each argument, see Alexander, New Jim Crow, and Zinoman, Colonial Bastille.

9. Lorna A. Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 223.

10. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 13.

11. For an important, and useful, overview of evidence-based corrections, see Doris Layton MacKenzie, “Evidence-Based Corrections: Identifying What Works,” Crime and Delinquency 46 (Oct. 2000): 457–71.

12. Michelle S. Phelps, “Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs,” Law and Society Review 45 (2011): 33–68.

13. Perhaps the closest, and most promising, approximation of the old Osborne-MacCormick approach to the criminal offender might be psychologist Tony Ward’s “Good Lives Model” of rehabilitation. In the Good Lives Model, “an individual is hypothesized to commit criminal offences because he lacks the capabilities to realize valued outcomes in personally fulfilling and socially acceptable ways.” See, for example, Tony Ward, Ruth E. Mann, and Theresa A. Gannon, “The Good Lives Model of Offender Rehabilitation: Clinical Implications,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 12 (2007): 87–107; for a broader overview, see Tony Ward and Shadd Maruna, Rehabilitation: Beyond the Risk Paradigm (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 2007).

14. See, for example, Wilkinson, Burnham, and Spillane, Prison Work.