Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [50]
All the new penitentiaries, whatever their differences, were committed to silence, to a certain amount of isolation; and, more fundamentally, to discipline and regimentation. When the prisoner entered the gate, the staff stripped him of his individuality and reduced him to a common fate. At the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, the new convict was undressed, his hair cut, and his body “cleansed in a warm bath.” Then he put on the prison uniform; and a “cap or hood” to blindfold him; in this condition, he was led to his cell.77 No one in the prison could speak. At Sing Sing in New York, officers wore mocassins, so that they could “approach the cells without the convicts being aware of their presence.” The rule of silence was so well enforced that “for several years there has not been any case reported of a prisoner talking after he was locked up.”78
During the long years of prison, all convicts dressed alike, gulped down the same food, woke, moved (often in lockstep), worked, ate, and slept to the same daily rhythm. At Auburn, summer’s work began at five-thirty A.M. A bell rang; the cells were unlocked; then the men came out; they emptied their “night-tubs,” washed them, and placed them in rows. They worked until breakfast, which took place at seven or eight A.M., “on the ringing of a large bell.... The convicts form in a line and are marched ... across the yard.... On entering the mess-room they face round to their plates and stand in their places until all are assembled, when a signal being given, they instantly sit down to their meals.... The tables are narrow and the prisoners sit on one side only, and are never placed face to face, in order to avoid the exchange of looks.” The rest of the day was equally regimented.79 Unlike the corrupt, haphazard, filthy jails of the past, the penitentiary was a place of strict justice, a place of penitence and reformation.
Regimentation and uniformity: when Massachusetts converted its own state prison to the Auburn method, in the late 1820s, it specified detail after detail: each year a convict was to be allowed “one pair of thick pantaloons, one thick jacket, one pair of thin pantaloons, one thin jacket, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of socks, three shirts, and two blankets, all of a coarse kind.” The law specified, too, the daily ration, down to an allowance of “two ounces of black pepper,” for every hundred rations. 80 The daily allowance at Sing Sing was similarly specified; six pounds, nine ounces of food a day, beef and pork, flour, mush, molasses and potatoes.81 Every detail, every item of discipline, every step of the daily regimen, was part of the plan of punishment and reformation.
Beaumont and De Tocqueville strongly believed in the system, as did almost all the prison reformers of the day. The prison was stem but effective medicine. Men turned to crime because of their defective background, their weak wills, their bad society. The prison cured these problems. It provided the missing training, the missing backbone. It was a caricature of the unyielding, disciplined, incorruptible family that the prisoners had never had for themselves.
There were dissenters, but they were not penologists. Charles Dickens, who visited the great Philadelphia prison in the early 1840s, was horrified by what he saw: “Those who devised this system ... and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what ... they are doing.” Prison life was nothing but torture and agony.