Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [292]
Eddy now proposed to use imprisonment as an alternative to corporal punishment. In New York, as elsewhere, prisons had always been thought of only as places to detain idle and suspicious persons, vagrants, and debtors. Soon after the Revolution, however, this notion had begun to give way before the arguments of Beccaria and Howard—not merely that prisons could also be employed to punish, correct, and deter lawbreakers but that they were the most humane, effective, and politically appropriate means of doing so. After all, what more fitting penalty could a republican people impose on those who violated its laws than the loss of their personal liberty?
Eddy’s reform campaign bore fruit in 1796 when the state legislature abolished corporal punishment and trimmed the number of capital offenses from sixteen to three (treason, murder, theft from a church). Persons convicted of lesser crimes like burglary and arson were to be sentenced to hard labor in Newgate Prison, the state’s first penitentiary, which stood on the Hudson River shore at the foot of Amos (now roth) Street in Greenwich Village. Named warden when it opened in November 1797, Eddy saw Newgate as a historic opportunity to prove that a rational legal system, affording certain yet humane retribution for infractions of the law, would actually reduce crime and promote public virtue. To that end, he arranged religious and moral instruction for all inmates while subjecting them to strict discipline. Those who responded positively won special privileges; those who didn’t wound up in solitary confinement, which Eddy considered a progressive way to make prisoners “perceive the wickedness and folly” of their conduct, experience “the bitter pangs of remorse,” and prepare themselves for “future amendment.”
Newgate Prison from Greenwich Street. “Unseen from the world,” according to a contemporary account, evildoers here “expatiate their transgressions in contrition and repentence.” (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
In reality, Newgate was a fiasco. Designed to house 432 inmates in fifty-four eight-person cells, it soon became overcrowded, dirty, pestiferous, and violent. Its inmates resisted prison regulations and failed to work together productively. (Eddy himself described them as “wicked and depraved, capable of every atrocity, and ever plotting some means of violence and escape.”) Many were West Indian blacks—the “French Negroes”—who had a history of opposition to white authority. About 20 percent of the prison’s population, moreover, were women. They had separate quarters and exercise facilities, but their presence made for trouble. “The utmost vulgarity, obscenity, and wantonness characterizes their language, their habits and their manners,” said one scandalized ex-con. “Their beastly salacity, in their visual amours, is agonizing to every fibre of delicacy and virtue.”
Frequent riots—no fewer than four in its first seven years of operation alone—caused severe damage to prison buildings and at least several fatalities among the inmates. Breakouts grew so common that the city formed a special squad of armed watchmen to surround the prison at night; after an especially serious riot in 1804, the public outcry forced Eddy to resign.
DEPARTMENTS AND DEBTS
Despite the failure or limitations of some of its parts, the municipal-state administrative apparatus as a whole had been transformed by the time Eddy departed office. Where power had been almost completely centralized in a handful of magistrates at the time of Washington’s inauguration, responsibility for various aspects of city government had now been parceled out to administrators with sharply denned duties. A superintendent of scavengers looked after the cleaning of streets, while their repair was the province of the Street Department. A Board of Health oversaw disease-related issues. A superintendent of wells and pumps concerned himself with water supply.