Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [32]
There were also “houses of correction,” or “workhouses.” These were roughly halfway between a poorhouse and a jail. They housed the lumpenproletariat: people classified as vagrants, idlers, paupers. Pennsylvania’s Great Law of 1682 provided for workhouses, one in each county. The houses were not to charge fees. Prisoners were to have “liberty to provide themselves bedding, food, and other necessaries.”94 A New Hampshire law tells a good deal of the tale about these houses. They were to be built for the “Keeping, Correcting and Setting to Work of Rogues, Vagabonds, and common Beggars, and other Lewd, Idle and Disorderly Persons.” Other candidates for the house of correction included “Persons using any subtle Craft, Jugling, or unlawful Games, or Plays, or feigning themselves to have knowledge in Physiognomy, Palmestry, or pretending that they can tell Destinies, Fortunes, or discover where lost or stolen Goods may be found; Common Pipers, Fidlers, Runaways, Stubborn Servants, or Children, Common Drunkards, Common Night-walkers, Pilferers, Wanton, and Lascivious Persons, either in Speech, or Behavior”; also “Railers, or Brawlers [who] neglect their Callings, Mispend what they earn, and do not provide for themselves, or the support of their Families.” The “Master” of the house could put these people to work; or punish them with “Fetters or Shackles,” with “Moderate Whipping,” or “abridge them of their Food,” if they made trouble.95
The house of correction was thus a kind of heightened form of the normal mode of punishment; and a convenient place for “correcting”; significantly the New Hampshire act does not specify any particular length of time for vagabonds and the like to be incarcerated. Moreover, the workhouse did not interfere with the labor system; after all, inmates were people who did not figure in the work force anyway; and the workhouse was, as its name suggested, designed to cure this little disease. A Massachusetts Bay law of 1673, on the punishment of those who had the “Presumption” to run a “Whore House, or Brothel House,” shows how aspects of the correctional system were interlaced in that colony. After thirty lashes “severely” administered “at the Carts-tayle,” these convicts were committed to the House of Correction “to be kept with hard fare, and hard labour, by dayly Task, and in defect of their duty to be severely whipt every night with Ten Stripes”; at least once a week they were to be dressed in “hair Frocks and blew Caps,” fastened to a hand-cart, and “forced along to draw all the filth laid up in the Cart, through the Streets, to the Sea side going to the Gallows in Suffolk, and in all other Counties where the Court of each Shire shall appoint, and so returned to the House of Correction, to be alike kept with hard Fare and Labour,” for an indefinite term, that is, “during the Courts pleasure.”96
Conditions in workhouses or jails were hardly luxurious, as one can imagine; but a prisoner with friends or family or connections did not have to eat swill or wear rags. For those who could not get things from outside, the jails were, at times, totally deplorable. The eighteenth-century jail in Charlestown, South Carolina, was described as “Close and Stinking.” A person would be better off in the “French Kings Gal-lies, or the Prisons of Turkey or Barbary.” The jail was small and had five or six rooms, each jammed to the gills with debtors. The summer heat was “intolerable”; prisoners often had no “Room to lye at length, but suceed each other to ley down—One was suffocated by the Heat of this Summer—and when a Coffin was sent for the Corps, there was no room to admit it.... Men and Women are crowded promiscuously—No Necessary Houses to retire too—The Necessities of Nature must be done by both Sexes in the presence of each other.”97
Who Were the Criminals?
The answer is, primarily, men at the bottom of the heap. Women appear more rarely.