Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [101]
Real life inside the walls was very different. In some instances, the regimen broke down, and discipline turned to flab. At Sing Sing, in the 1870s, corruption was rife; a prisoner could buy forbidden items from guards; convicts lolled about in the yard, which had “something of the atmosphere of a village.”44 More generally, real life meant filth and degradation. In the state prison of New Jersey, as described in 1867, prisoners lived as many as four to a cell, in cells measuring seven by twelve feet; the newer cells were only four feet wide and seven feet long. Real life was lived “in a room the size of a small bathroom, with a noisome bucket for a toilet and a cot narrower than a bathtub.” A prisoner might bathe “occasionally” in a bathhouse in the yard, “which was closed in bad weather.”45 Wardens and guards, in many prisons, whipped prisoners liberally to keep them in line, regardless of what the statutes said.
There were other ways, too, to punish the convict’s body. In New York, we hear about a practice called “bucking”; the convict sat with an iron bar between his legs and his wrists fastened down with chains. In Sing Sing, some inmates in the 1870s were hanged by the thumbs. In Ohio, there was the “humming-bird,” an electric shock administered while a steam whistle blew. The cold-water bath was another trick of the trade in Ohio: the convict was tied to a chair or post, and buckets of ice water were poured over his head. Or the prisoner might be “blindfolded and lifted into a large vat filled with water.”46
Prisoners were supposed to work; work was a tool of reformation. It was also a way to make prisons pay for themselves. The trick was to put prisoners to work on something the state could profitably sell. But this made prisoners direct competitors of organized labor; this provoked a bitter political struggle in state after state. The California constitution of 1879 included a clause against convict labor. The Illinois constitution was amended in 1866 to make it “unlawful ... to let by contract ... the labor of any convict.” Under the Michigan Constitution of 1850, as amended, convicts were not to be taught any “mechanical trade” except the “manufacture of those articles of which the chief supply for home consumption is imported from other States or countries.” A Pennsylvania statute of 1883 required convict-made goods to be branded as such, in “plain English lettering,” and the brand had to be put “upon the most conspicuous place upon such article.”47 Some states tried to turn prison labor to political or economic advantage: in Minnesota, in the 1890s, prisons were directed to manufacture twine, to be sold to farmers. In this way, farmers would be helped in their struggle with the National Cordage Company, which the farmers considered one of the worst of the “trusts.”48
Most often, however, it was out-and-out war between the unions and prison labor, which unions regarded as a vicious scab tactic, a strikebreaking, union-busting tool. In New Jersey, New York, and New England, prisoners manufactured hats, which made them economic enemies of hatters. In 1878, New Jersey banned hatmaking in state prison; and campaigns in New York, Connecticut,