Introduction. The Ashes of Reform

Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform

INTRODUCTION

The Ashes of Reform

“Maybe this is the beginning of a new future.”¹ The hopeful words of Leo Martinez, a prisoner in Coxsackie (pronounced “cook-sock-ee”) Correctional Facility, stood in sharp contrast to the setting in which they were delivered. Martinez was a spokesman for roughly forty inmates who earlier in the day had taken three hostages and were now talking to four reporters brought into the prison that evening as part of negotiations with authorities. Both prisoners and prison staff were aware that the prison had been on the verge of an explosion well before the hostage crisis of December 2, 1977. The former reformatory for young male offenders—opened in 1935 as the New York State Vocational Institution and called Coxsackie throughout its history—had been through years of wrenching transition, as the rehabilitative and educational ideals that had inspired its construction waged a losing battle with punitive and custodial interests. The previous evening, a strongly negative announcement from program staff had informed inmates that formal education programs were being scaled back. Reacting to the news, prisoners staged a mass boycott of breakfast the next morning. The boycott turned into a hostage incident when authorities failed to secure the E-2 division, and inmates there seized a correctional officer, a lieutenant, and an investigator from Albany.

Any collective action within the prison setting poses a serious security threat, and never more so than in the super-heated political atmosphere of Coxsackie in 1977. Prison officials were already sensitive to the looming threat of prisoner action following a serious rebellion in August at Eastern Correctional Facility, another former reformatory. At Eastern, inmates protesting a history of Ku Klux Klan activity among the prison staff had taken eleven hostages as a way of securing a public airing of their grievances.² At Coxsackie, Leo Martinez and the prisoners of E-2 division likewise employed hostage negotiations as a mechanism for making public charges of racism and brutality. “We respect the system, but they [correctional officers] don’t respect us,” declared one of the prisoners. Instead, he told the reporters, “they treat us like animals and kids.” While respecting the system may have seemed a curious turn of phrase, the demands of Coxsackie’s hostage takers did not challenge the legitimacy of the prison itself, only the grossly deficient conditions of confinement and the refusal of the institution to recognize their basic worth as men and as citizens.

The hostage incident ended peacefully that evening. Before it did, Leo Martinez worried out loud to the reporters that his optimism might be misplaced: “Days like this happen, and then tomorrow it gets brushed off.”³ The day was not brushed off, but the “new future” coming was not the one for which Martinez had hoped. Instead, the hostage crisis became the occasion to bury the final legacies of Coxsackie as a reformatory. The state moved quickly to replace Coxsackie’s reform-minded superintendent—who had started in prison work as a teacher—and to impose a stricter disciplinary regime. Corrections commissioner Benjamin Ward chided those who wanted to operate Coxsackie as “some kind of reform school spin-off” instead of focusing on custody and close supervision.⁴ Coxsackie correctional officers joined in, with one observing, “We should forget rehabilitation and concentrate on security,” and another pronouncing that “a prison should be a place of fear, not a hotel.”⁵

That Coxsackie should be known as a “place of fear” was about as far, rhetorically, as could be imagined from where things had begun. The New York State Vocational Institution began life as the centerpiece of a large-scale prison-reform effort initiated in 1929 by New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and lieutenant governor Herbert Lehman. Coxsackie embodied the intention to respond to the problem of the young male offender through rehabilitative programs and humane confinement. When Lehman went to Coxsackie in 1935 to attend the dedication ceremony and seal the cornerstone of the New York State Vocational Institution, he pointed to the reformatory as a place of special importance; the new red brick institution featured a remarkable investment in prisoner education, employing more teachers and vocational instructors than any other prison in the United States.

Coxsackie’s history since 1977 shows just how completely the original reform vision has failed to sustain itself. Indeed, the New York State Vocational Institution per se no longer exists—it was renamed the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in 1970, and only a small marker at the front driveway records the former name and identity of the institution. No longer designated a reformatory, Coxsackie more often serves as a vivid example of prison life in the contemporary age of mass incarceration and punitive punishment. Ted Conover, author of Newjack, visited Coxsackie along with his fellow correctional officer trainees to get a dose of life inside a “real” prison. Newjack offers readers a chilling description of the oppressive institutional environment in the former educational institution, a prison the trainees’ tour guide called the “Gladiator School.”⁶ Documentary filmmaker Tracy Huling used Coxsackie as the prototypical “prison town” in her 1999 film Yes, in My Backyard. For Huling, Coxsackie had become emblematic of the prison-industrial complex that supported rural economies while locking up masses of urban minority poor.⁷

What happened to Coxsackie? How and when did a cornerstone of reform become a conflict-ridden warehouse? The search for answers begins with a look inside the cornerstone sealed by Herbert Lehman on dedication day in 1935.

Reform’s End

Coxsackie’s cornerstone contains a few newspapers and coins from 1935, a copy of the 1932 legislation that authorized the prison’s construction, and quite a bit of ironic history, for it also houses the contents of an older cornerstone— that of the New York House of Refuge. Coxsackie, by any definition a failed reform institution, was a legal successor to the House of Refuge, a far more famous failed reform institution. With the House of Refuge ready to be torn down in 1935, Coxsackie received the old prison’s staff, its remaining inmates, a huge collection of case files, an institution bell, and the newspapers and indenture papers that had been placed in the original cornerstone more than a century earlier.

The New York House of Refuge opened in 1825 as the nation’s first juvenile reformatory, quickly gaining fame as the embodiment of the new republic’s commitment to managing social disorder.⁸ In 1854, the House of Refuge moved from Manhattan to pleasant farmland “far out of town” on Randall’s Island facing the Harlem River. The Randall’s Island location drew admiring visitors, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, who made the new “Houses of Refuge” a centerpiece of their argument that America’s antisocial were being “saved from infallible ruin, and have changed a life of disorder for one of honesty and order.”⁹

A century later, the House of Refuge on Randall’s Island was a wreck, physically and functionally. It is astonishing in retrospect that there had been calls to close the House of Refuge as far back as 1873, and that these had sounded with some urgency since the 1880s.¹⁰ By the 1920s, most buildings were part of the original 1854 construction, the dock landings needed to be dredged for fire boats, the coal-conveying belt needed to be replaced, and the motion picture machine dated from 1909. Inmates labored simply to keep the institution from falling apart around them. Despite a plan mapped out in 1917 for emphasizing vocational training over traditional military discipline, the needs of the institution thwarted the practical achievement of that goal. Whether assigned to the masonry class, the tinsmith, the painter, or the carpentry shop, every “student” ended up working on the physical plant.¹¹ The “class” in steam fitting worked in the boiler and engine rooms twenty-four hours a day, on eight-hour shifts, suggesting something other than dedicated instruction time. For the rest, intensive military drill—including a full hour of full-dress drill each day—was intended to give “a smart carriage to the boys” and to inculcate “habits of neatness and respect for discipline and esprit de corps.”¹²

It was a motley collection of boys and young men consigned to the dreary walls of the House of Refuge, seemingly drawn at random from the great mass caught up in the nets of the criminal justice system in New York City. New commitments from the children’s courts were older than they had once been, averaging sixteen years old. Nearly 80 percent had been convicted of criminal rather than status offenses, a departure from nineteenth-century patterns, in which criminal convictions were never more than 50 percent of the prisons population.¹³ Still, it was hard to say exactly why anyone was sent to the House of Refuge. A study of 251 young offenders in the city shows that just 5 of these were sentenced to Randall’s Island: an 11-year-old for stealing pigeons; a 19-year-old for violating parole (his fourth offense); an 18-year-old charged with possession of burglar’s tools (his first offense; he was transferred to Elmira Reformatory within months after assaulting a guard in an attempt to escape); a 16-year-old convicted of attempted robbery (his fourth offense); and a 19-year-old convicted of attempted robbery (his sixth offense).¹⁴

The results of time spent on the island seemed to confirm that the institution was as unsound programmatically as it was structurally. Interviews with adult men in state prisons produced unsettling reminiscences about the House of Refuge: “Bad company and the House of Refuge; that’s where I learned to be a real professional thief. I went out of there with the ambition to become a great thief and wound up here with 7 years.” From another state prison inmate: “A better name would be deformatories, for unless a youngster has an exceedingly strong character, he is well on the road to the ‘Gray Brotherhood’.” And further along these lines: “A kiddie learns more wicked things in a year in this institution than he could possibly learn in five years outside.”¹⁵

Despite decades of misery at the island reformatory, its closure was ensured only by a proposal from New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses to turn Randall’s Island and nearby Ward’s Island into an extensive public park. The East River Islands—Randall’s, Ward’s, and Blackwell’s (also known as Welfare Island)—were first targeted for redevelopment in the Sage Foundations Plan of New York. A 1924 exhibition of the plan in progress drew a circle around the three islands, with a caption: “Within the line live a million people who now can make no use of the islands. Meanwhile most of the unfortunates who crowd the islands probably would be better off” elsewhere.”¹⁶ Urban planners saw the great appeal of the islands in their being “entirely dissevered from or outside of the close network of the city’s traffic-ways. This is their unique quality.” This made them desirable locations for a series of parks and recreational facilities, a sentiment reiterated in the 1928 published volume on recreation, which designated Randall’s Island as a future “municipal amusement park.”¹⁷ Randall’s Island also figured into the planning for the proposed Triborough Bridge. Conceived at least as far back as 1916, plans for the Triborough Bridge construction were formally announced in 1927 and included Randall’s Island as the central juncture point for the project’s series of highways.¹⁸

In effect, Randall’s Island had become too valuable to be “wasted” on the young delinquents who bided their time at the House of Refuge. At the same time, the State of New York was conducting a new round of investigations and inquiries into the operations of the House of Refuge, an institution largely supported by state funds though still run by the same private corporation that had founded the institution more than a century earlier. Governor Al Smith, supported by the state’s leading reform organization, the Prison Association of New York, labeled the House of Refuge a failed institution. An investigating committee determined in 1928 that the institution either required closer state control or should no longer be funded by the state. The committee found unsanitary living conditions, classrooms that “would not be tolerated in any public or private school in the state,” and work assignments that were “merely supplying the labor that might go to the upkeep of the institution.” The report concluded, “It is a disgrace for the sovereign body of the State to acknowledge ownership therein, and the fact that they are confining the youth, whether delinquents, minor criminals or otherwise, in such a place is inexcusable.”¹⁹

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as governor in 1929, he reiterated that same position, though he pledged to continue state funding for the House of Refuge until new institutions could be constructed. The next year, Moses’s plan to remake the East River Islands was formally given the go-ahead; all public institutions, including the House of Refuge, would be razed to make way for new parks.²⁰ Boys between the ages of 12 and 15, and therefore subject to the state’s juvenile courts, would be sent to a new juvenile reformatory under construction at Warwick. Inmates over 16 would go to what would be the New York State Vocational Institution, for which Roosevelt eventually approved the purchase of seven hundred acres in Greene County.²¹

The venerable institution’s final year was one of its worst. With the younger inmates already transferred to Warwick, the older inmates who remained gave full vent to their frustrations and unrest. Tensions reached a critical point on a warm late summer Sat. in 1934, in the worst outbreak of rioting the House of Refuge had ever seen. The inmate baseball team was playing its regular Sat. afternoon game, squaring off against the visiting team of the Seventh District Republican Club. Four guards stood watch over the 365 inmates in the bleachers watching the game. The visiting Republicans took an early 2–0 lead in the game, and they were about to take the field after batting when one inmate stood up and lit a cigarette. A guard approached and ordered the inmate to put the cigarette out. The young man pushed the guard, and within moments dozens of inmates had jumped up from their seats and begun running for the dugouts and the bats. Yelling, waving the bats over their heads, they made a general rush for the south end of the field and the prison gates. A young Italian inmate had somehow procured a key to the gate, and forty-five young men made it through before guards were able to shut it again.

Immediately the institution’s alarms started blaring. Running and stumbling, the boys raced through a rough three-quarters of a mile to reach the Bronx Kill River, where they faced only 150 yards of water separating them from the Bronx and freedom. The faster boys made it to the Bronx Kill and jumped in the water. The slower boys never made it to the water and were met by marine police and guards. The marine patrol, brandishing rifles, ordered the boys in the water to swim back. One of the boys yelled to the gun-toting patrol, “Go ahead and shoot,” and dove under the surface, but a few warning shots turned most back. The weaker swimmers were held afloat by their friends until police launches could pluck them from the water.

Back at the baseball field, guards launched tear-gas canisters at the remaining rioters and shepherded the frightened visiting team to safety. Superintendent Frederick Helbing waded through the tear gas to personally plead with the rebellious inmates: “Haven’t I been square with you?” “Hasn’t the food been all right?” Helbing and his chief disciplinary officer were both burned by the tear gas as they made their appeals in the midst of the uprising. Within a short time, most of the young men dropped their makeshift weapons and went back inside, while guards subdued the remaining rioters after a brief struggle.²²

Although House of Refuge officers and city police had quickly suppressed the riot, and only two inmates actually made good their escape, the events on Randall’s Island attracted considerable media attention. As so often happened in such cases, the state sent investigators to the House of Refuge, who quickly concluded that the disciplinary situation was terrible. The investigators, Philip Klein and Leonard W. Mayo, subjected Superintendent Helbing to an extensive questioning, making clear that they found excessive discipline, racial segregation, useless regimentation, and a failing rehabilitative program.²³ Whatever reform luster the House of Refuge may have once enjoyed was a faded and distant memory by the time carloads of inmates and employees began making the trip upstate to Coxsackie. On May 11, 1935, the last fifteen inmates left Randall’s Island, leaving behind the shell of an old reform project for the new facility at the center of the state’s latest reform project, the New York State Vocational Institution.

Prison Histories

The intertwined histories of the House of Refuge and the New York State Vocational Institution featured early days of great promise and grand ambition, followed by decades of actual practice that obliterated the promise and mocked the ambition. Reform visions of the well-ordered and disciplined prison gave way to disorder, violence, and racism. The gaps between correctional ambitions and prison realities have long been an object of scholarly interest. Reformers themselves, ever conscious of their real-world failings, published some of the earliest and most penetrating studies. The reformist tradition, however, consistently framed failure in terms of implementation—attributable to public hostility, baneful political influence, a lack of proper funding, inability of staff to meet appropriate professional standards, corruption, or any number of equally plausible factors.²⁴

The most important challenge to the reformist emphasis on implementation gaps appeared in David J. Rothman’s landmark 1980 study, Conscience and Convenience. Too often, Rothman’s pioneering work is lumped together with the work of other revisionist historians of the 1970s, most notably Michel Foucault. This is unfortunate, for it obscures Rothman’s distinct—and, for the purposes of this study, important—contributions to the historical study of the prison. Conscience and Convenience employed a broad overview of America’s twentieth-century prisons, mental hospitals, and juvenile reformatories to highlight a ghastly record of ineffective operations, inmate mistreatment and neglect, and an utter failure to live up to the high-minded creeds that had justified their construction. Where Foucault and other revisionists found prisons to be a direct expression of the impulses that underlay their creation, Rothman offered up a far more ironic history, in which the intentions and self-image of reformers were wildly distorted in actual experience. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rothman was no stranger to the dreadful condition into which an institution of confinement could degenerate; he had seen more than his fair share of horrors in his own reform work “in the field” during the 1970s, and he demanded that historians open their eyes to actual practice, and not just the intellectual evolution of reform.²⁵

Having described what he regarded as a nearly universal gap between reformist creed and institutional deed, Rothman then provided a powerful explanation— the gap was not due to the contingencies of implementation failures that the reformers themselves saw and bemoaned; the gap was inevitable and built right into the DNA of institutions themselves. For this explanation, Rothman drew heavily on sociologist Erving Goffman’s conception of the “total institution.” Total institutions, Goffman argued, were uniquely self-enclosed environments in which all forms of social interactions bent toward the bureaucratic demands of institutional maintenance. Following this logic, Rothman concluded that no amount of money, goodwill, or human effort could have remade the prison (or the reformatory, or the mental hospital) along the lines of the reformist vision, for the inherent dynamics of institutional confinement would always and inevitably have defeated reformist intentions. The necessary “convenience” of institutional administrators trumped the “conscience” of reformers every time.²⁶

Conscience and Convenience appeared in the midst of, and reflected, the anti-institutional politics of the 1970s, but some critics wondered why Rothman paid any attention to reform creeds at all, given how predictably they appeared to wilt in the heat of institutional bureaucracy. Andrew Scull, in his review of Conscience and Convenience, posed the question most directly: “If so many of these changes were no more than cosmetic, how can he [Rothman] simultaneously grant them such revolutionary significance?”²⁷ It was a good question, and Rothman’s work supplied a plausible answer—reformist “conscience” served as justification, as a prop, for the assertion and expansion of state power and authority. Despite its real-world failures, creed mattered because it provided a ready rationale for, and defense of, the institutional confinement of convicted criminals.

This study affirms and builds on this element of Rothman’s argument about the rhetoric of reform.²⁸ The House of Refuge and the New York State Vocational Institution were able to escape careful scrutiny for many years in no small part because outsiders (legislators, courts, media, and the public) accepted the argument that these places were run by experienced professionals who knew what they were doing, and who did what they did in the best interests of the inmates. The liberal idea of the reformatory wove together some ideas that, from the vantage point of our era of mass incarceration, seem remarkably attractive: the quest to cultivate in prisoners the qualities of civic participation and community membership, and the related view that most young men behind bars possessed those qualities; the emergence of adult education in its various dimensions as an influence on prisons; the identification of youth and adolescence as critical moments of personal development and thus for criminal justice intervention; and a critical stance toward the punitive impulse in criminal justice, and a corresponding privileging of decency and compassion.²⁹ Taken together, these threads constitute a liberal vision of the prison embedded in the broader universe of efforts to define and cultivate social citizenship.³⁰

Liberal reform interests were able to deploy these ideas to assert some measure of control over New York State’s prison system. In the wake of a series of prison riots in 1929, reformers used various political resources to embed themselves into the state’s correctional bureaucracy and to create and legitimize new expansion and growth. Their successes came at the expense of competing visions of punishment: the punitive model, in which prisoners were made to suffer for their crimes in the name of retribution and deterrence;³¹ and the managerial model, where prisoners were pacified, in the name of stable institutional management and secure confinement.³² But there were spaces within the reformatory, and within the larger prison system (including entire institutions), over which liberal reformers were never able to exert any substantial influence.³³ Liberal corrections remained just one of several political visions, engaged in a constant battle for authority.

Conscience and Convenience made only a limited impression on the subsequent historiography of Western prisons, with scholars drawn to the far neater story of power’s expression articulated by Foucault and other revisionists. Histories of the colonial prison, on the other hand, were far more attuned to the gulf that separated justificatory rhetoric from actual prison practice. An early, and outstanding, study of the colonial prison, Peter Zinoman’s The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940, made a convincing case that the prison philosophies of metropolitan France were scarcely in evidence in their colonial counterparts. Instead, a confused and corrupt colonial prison administration maintained order through brutal violence in prisons that were “repressive, not corrective.”³⁴

Histories of the colonial prison, then, strongly affirm Rothman’s attention to the distance between rhetoric and practice. In doing so, however, they have developed explanations for that gap that go well beyond Rothman’s emphasis on the universal imperatives of institutional convenience. Colonial studies have laid considerably more emphasis on the integration of prison practice with three interrelated aspects of political economy: race and racism, labor control, and the overtly political nature of colonial criminal justice. Zinoman and others have made the case that these dimensions of colonial prison practice distinguished it from metropolitan prison practice.

But just how far does that distinction go? Most colonial historians have contented themselves with asserting the difference between colonial practice and metropolitan rhetoric and have rather uncritically assumed the real-world existence of “rational and disciplined” institutions in Europe and the United States.³⁵ This study argues, in contrast, that the conceptual frameworks of colonial historians are essential for comprehending prison practice generally, including the New York State Vocational Institution. The question of prison labor, for example, remained central to United States prison regimes—and not simply in the South.³⁶ Likewise, scholars interested in the history of modern mass incarceration in the United States have turned their attention directly to labor exploitation, racism, and politics.³⁷ We may now finally be realizing a new history of imprisonment in the United States, in which prisons are understood as fields of conflict rather than instruments of order.³⁸

Building this new narrative will require close attention to the lives and actions of all those who lived and worked behind bars, whose struggles for influence and survival powerfully shaped the world of the prison.³⁹ Accounts of correctional policy or politics cannot afford to neglect this level of analysis. At Coxsackie, young men arrived at the reformatory with complex family lives, educational histories, and not infrequently with established institutional and delinquent careers.⁴⁰ Their encounter with Coxsackie’s extensive educational and vocational programs produced, at best, mixed results for liberal reform. Implementation matters, and no social policies can be fairly evaluated if they are never given a chance to work.⁴¹ Coxsackie’s rehabilitative programs often simply foundered on the shoals of internal division, staff conflict, resource shortages, and personnel limitations.

The failures of the New Deal-era reformatories in New York cannot be evaluated solely in terms of program implementation; for the tens of thousands of young men who went through the system, imprisonment left a legacy of racism and brutality. At the Woodbourne Reformatory, Coxsackie’s sister institution, an inscription from the Book of Ecclesiasticus (2:4–5) was placed above the mess hall door: “Whatever is brought upon you, take cheerfully and be patient: for gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.”⁴² The furnace of adversity was precisely what the state created by placing young men from all over New York in a social setting as fraught as it was isolated. The reformatory experience was both an ongoing conflict between custodial staff and prisoners and one in which prisoners contested among themselves (often violently) for control of prison space and resources. While reformers spoke of social citizenship, they created a space in which young men were stripped of the most basic legal protections of citizenship and subject to the unbridled powers of the courts and institutional personnel. At its worst moments, Coxsackie replicated the very forms of torture and abuse that the reformers so abhorred.⁴³

Like New Deal liberalism generally, reform at Coxsackie spent the postwar years embattled and under siege. The mission to “save” the reformatory produced increasingly desperate efforts to cordon off ungovernable youth into separate spaces within the penal system, and ungovernability itself was increasingly defined by gang membership, heroin use, and racial conflict. As reformers abandoned the idea that every young man could benefit from prison programs, large numbers of young men were removed from the frying pan of Coxsackie into the fire of a new end-of-the-line reformatory at Great Meadow. Great Meadow, in turn, became ground zero for a newly organized prisoner resistance movement. Long before the Attica riot of 1971, the obvious failures of the reformatory system had helped politicize a generation of young men. The roots of the liberal prison crisis, as for liberalism more generally, reach back to the earliest postwar years.

By the end of the 1960s, the reformist structure was in tatters, and by the 1970s, it was gone entirely, replaced in the short term by institutional chaos, and in the longer term by a massive new apparatus of control and mass incarceration. The reformatory and the very concept of rehabilitation were subjected to withering attacks from all ends of the pol itical spectrum, while veterans of Depression-era reform programs increasingly retreated to a rigid and defensive posture that became self-defeating. The collapse of the liberal model of the prison ran parallel to a collapse of the position of the reformers within the prison bureaucracy, as control-oriented interests gained the upper hand within Coxsackie and the New York Department of Corrections. As it brought the story of the reformatory to a close, the new politics of punishment paved the way for the modern era of mass incarceration.