Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [291]
The mayor and aldermen also drew back slowly but surely from the exercise of their judicial functions, giving rise to a de facto separation of powers. Under De Witt Clinton, the jurisdictional reach and number of meetings of the Mayor’s Court increased steadily, forcing him to turn its proceedings over to the recorder. He maintained his involvement in the Court of General Sessions, but there too specialization took hold, and the adjudication of petty criminal cases was spun off to new special justices of the peace. Since 1798, moreover, a new Police Office had been established, in which police justices sat to examine all those detained overnight by the watchmen; this new layer of judicial officials heard complaints, examined witnesses, imposed small fines or penalties, and passed only the serious cases on to the higher courts.
For those placed in detention while awaiting trial for violation of municipal ordinances or state laws, or those few found guilty and sentenced to prison—only eighty-three during the ten years between 1784 and 1794—the destination was the old New Gaol (1759) on the northeast corner of the Common. Here too were incarcerated debtors, who were expected to pay for their own food, clothing, and fuel. At the northwest corner—separated from the New Gaol by the almshouse—sat the Bridewell, built on the eve of the Revolution, with space for 400 vagrants, disorderly persons, and prostitutes. This creaky, colonial-era institution was about to undergo a transformation, however.
In 1764, an Italian nobleman named Cesare Beccaria had published his landmark Essay on Crimes and Punishments, denouncing inhumane punishment as both the major cause of crime and an instrument of despotism. During the seventies and eighties Beccaria became a pillar of enlightened opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. His ideas influenced John Howard, an English penologist who fought the death penalty and advocated imprisonment at hard labor in place of corporal punishment. Howard and Beccaria in turn fired the imagination of Thomas Eddy. Born in Philadelphia in 1758 to a prominent family of Tory sympathizers, Eddy had settled in New York after the Revolution and become a successful insurance broker, a Federalist, a Quaker philanthropist who promoted a variety of humanitarian causes (including antislavery), and a commissioner of the almshouse. In the mid-1790s, Eddy marshaled politically influential acquaintances—Philip Schuyler and George Clinton, among others—to reform the state’s antiquated criminal code. It was, he said, a relic of “barbarous usages” and “monarchical principles” ill suited to “a new country, simple manners, and a popular form of government.”
The idea was to replace a system of harsh laws, mitigated by frequent grants of clemency, with milder statutes and fewer pardons. There were good practical as well as ideological reasons for modernizing the criminal code. It had, for one, patently failed to stop criminal behavior. The list of offenses punishable by death in New York had grown longer and longer during the eighteenth century and by Eddy’s day had come to include housebreaking and malicious mischief as well as murder; lesser infractions were punished by lashing, branding, flogging, and the pillory (though a 1785 city ordinance had given magistrates limited authority to substitute confinement at hard labor in the Bridewell for corporal punishment). Even so, the incidence of crime in every category had seemed to rise at least as rapidly as the city’s population, and its law enforcement officials had real trouble keeping up. In certain neighborhoods their authority had virtually evaporated. One resident later recalled that this was a time when “no man would venture beyond Broadway