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[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) had no such scruples. With General Raoul Salan as its figurehead, this sinister alliance of diehard pieds noirs and mutinous paras and légionnaires turned to indiscriminate terrorism after the failure of its April 1961 uprising. With no real goal beyond the preservation of settler supremacy, its declared enemies included General de Gaulle himself, the security forces, Communists, peace activists (including Jean-Paul Sartre), and, especially, Algerian civilians. (Oddly enough, the OAS seldom confronted the FLN directly.) 

In order to disrupt the Evian peace talks between de Gaulle’s representatives and the Algerian leaders, the OAS launched a series of festivals de plastique (380 bombings throughout Algeria in July 1961 alone), using the 4132 kilos of plastic explosive and 1000 electric detonators that it boasted of having liberated from army arsenals. Chief of the OAS’s dreaded “Delta Commandos” was Roger Degueldre, a 36-year-old veteran of Dien Bien Phu who led 500 Légionnaire deserters and Algérie française ultras from his hiding place in the petit blanc district of Bab-el-Oued. In early 1962, as de Gaulle began to yield to FLN demands for complete independence, Salan declared “total war” and ordered Degueldre to unleash the Deltas against both Algeria and France.

….

Although the OAS was effectively decapitated in April 1962 with the arrests of Salan (codename: “The Sun”), Degueldre and other key leaders, the at-large middle leadership – les colonels – was even more fanatically fixated than the generals on provoking an Algerian Götterdämmerung. Their almost insane strategy was to massacre so many ordinary Muslims that the otherwise highly disciplined FLN would be forced to break its truce with French forces and retaliate massively against the pieds noirs. The OAS “bunker,” in other words, was deliberately fomenting a race war that they hoped might topple de Gaulle and lead to a “Rhodesian” or “Israeli” solution." - Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. Verso, 2017 (2007). p. 42-43

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"It was at Sing Sing that the instrumentalization of new penological reform found its fullest expression. More than any other prison warden, Sing Sing’s Lewis E. Lawes insisted that the best prison was one in which the prisoners were well-fed, well-exercised, and frequently entertained. Lawes had risen through the ranks of prison administration from the position of prison guard at Clinton, in 1905, to that of Superintendent of the New York Reformatory for Boys, in 1916, and, finally, in 1920, to the wardenship of Sing Sing. He brought with him an unusually acute understanding of the peculiar problems that beset prison administrators in the years after the abolition of prison labor contracting. A first-hand witness to the great disciplinary and political crises that beset New York’s penal system in the early Progressive Era, he also had an intuitive grasp of the “unwritten law” of the prison that the convicts would forcefully defend what they took to be their fundamental rights. Between 1920 and 1943, Warden Lawes carefully and skillfully constructed a prison order based on the principle of the square deal and the morale-building techniques that Moyer had begun to refine at Sing Sing. Grasping that the stability of the prison also depended upon outside forces, he also worked tirelessly to legitimize his administration in a slew of books, articles, radio shows, and Hollywood films.

When Lawes arrived at Sing Sing in 1920 to take up his wardenship, he gave all the prisoners a clean disciplinary slate and placed them in “A” grade. As “A graders,” they were entitled to all entertainment and recreational privileges. Lawes explained that if they broke a rule, they would be demoted to “B” grade, with limited privileges. A further offense would land them in “C” grade, with no privileges. Good behavior would result in promotion to a more privileged grade. As part of this overhaul of the disciplinary system, Lawes reorganized the sale of tobacco and other comforts at the prison, linking the purchase of those “pleasures” to the disciplinary system: He merged the two commissaries to create a single grocery store, and authorized prisoners to purchase a set amount of goods each week, to be determined by the grade they were in. Lawes then set about extending sporting activities at Sing Sing and made the mass media of radio, film, and newspapers part of the fabric of everyday life. He installed a master radio receiving station in the east wing of the prison and appointed a civilian censor, who then relayed selected radio programs to loud speakers and headphone sets around the prison and cellhouse. He also expanded the prisoner baseball program, established a football team, laid down playing fields and handball courts, and gave the prisoners three hours of outdoor exercise time every afternoon in the summer months. Like Moyers and Osborne before him, Lawes continued the practice of having outside teams come to play the prisoners; in 1925, he also organized a memorable ballgame on the prison diamond, between the New York Giants and the New York Yankees (Babe Ruth was reported to have hit the ball over the field wall for a home run; unfortunately, the outcome of the game appears not to have been recorded). Although Lawes understood prisoners’ conception of their elemental rights, he recognized few of these rights as having any basis in positive law (the two he did explicitly acknowledge as properly legal were the right to attend a religious congregation of the prisoner’s choosing and the right to a minimum food allowance.) Nonetheless, Lawes’s actual management of the prisoner indicates that he understood the force of custom in the prisons and that he was very attentive to convicts’ sense of fairness in all his dealings with them.

As at other New York prisons, the new warden retained the Mutual Welfare League (MWL), chiefly as an organizing staff by which to provide entertainments, education, and recreation, and as a disciplinary agency, by which convicts who transgressed minor rules would be policed and punished. Lawes also moved to consolidate his administrative powers viz. the MWL (which, just like outside reformers and embattled politicians, was a potentially disruptive force from the administrators’ point of view). In particular, he took steps to mute the league’s voice beyond the prison walls and to curtail the scope of its activities within the prison walls. The administration clamped down on prisoners’ correspondence with the outside world, and warden Lawes established a censorship office where all prisoners’ outgoing correspondence (whether letters to loved ones or short stories for publication) and incoming mail were scrutinized for subversive content. Lawes also restructured the league’s election process and prohibited the prisoner “political parties” that had emerged in the late 1910s, on the grounds that prison-yard electioneering was overly exciting and emotional for the prisoners, and hence damaging to prison morale. From 1920 onwards, the league’s primary obligation was to regulate the leisure hours of prisoners, Lawes directed; its other obligations were to maintain discipline at these events and to represent prisoners’ grievances and requests to the warden: “The League was to be a Moral force,” insisted Lawes; “If it could not sustain itself in that capacity it was futile and should be eliminated.”

Lawes also maintained the automobile, barber, cart, and tailoring classes and made reading and writing courses compulsory for all illiterate convicts. By 1934, all convicts were routinely administered educational tests. Those achieving lower than the level of the sixth grade were then enrolled in classes taught by a civilian head teacher, two civilian assistant teachers, and twenty grade school convict teachers. Ten prisoners taught more advanced courses, and several convicts were enrolled in correspondence college courses run by the Massachusetts Department of Education. It was under Lawes that psychomedical therapies became a critical component of the disciplinary regime, not merely as a means of classifying prisoners (as the new penologists had initially envisioned them), but as a means of managing convicts’ daily frustrations, depression, and desire to rebel. Like the educational, recreational, and athletic programs, the psychomedical sciences were given over to the therapeutic pacification of convicts. Glueck’s psychiatric Classification Clinic was reorganized and funded by the state in 1926 and proceeded to surveil the entire prison population; clinicians also began attending the warden’s court to give advice on disciplining rule-breakers. Convicts were encouraged to seek psychological and psychiatric advice from Dr. Amos T. Baker and his staff of psychologists and psychiatrists. Throughout his career, Lawes repeatedly made it clear in press releases, radio interviews, and a series of books and articles that high prisoner morale was the immediate objective of his penology, and the peace and security of the prison were his foremost concerns. As he put it in an interview in 1924, under his system:

The men are no longer bottled up, constrained to silence, tyrannized and brutalized by unworthy keepers, or exploited and spied upon. They are permitted some chance of self-expression, some freedom for their personalities. They are shown humane and constructive precepts and they are not repressed, screwed down and baffled. The result is that we have almost done away with those emotional explosions so common in the older kinds of prisons. All acts of violence and attempts at escape are the result of these emotional disturbances.

Lawes conceptualized the various reforms initiated by the new penologists as means to the end of higher morale. On the question of education, for example, Lawes justified the expense of running classes for prisoners: “To me, as a warden, prison schools more than justify their continuance and expansion if for no other reason than to foster and maintain the morale of those prisoners who take advantage of the facilities offered them to study and to learn.” In a similar vein, Lawes argued for the benefits of commercial radio at Sing Sing: “I am happy to report,” he wrote in Radio Guide in 1934, “that since this system has been in vogue, the morale and behavior of the prisoners [have] rocketed sky-ward.” As Lawes conceptualized it, the proper objective of prison management was to facilitate “decent, normal and satisfying expression of personal interests.” This expression was entwined in a system of incentive and privilege that aimed at keeping the convicts more or less happy. Even fire-fighting (for which the convicts were responsible) succumbed to the logic of Lawes’s managerialism. As he wrote, “There is a keen rivalry between the different fire companies and positions on the fire department are frequently given as rewards of merit.” So, too, the death of a prisoner (by natural or other causes) became an occasion for boosting the morale of other prisoners: “When a fellow dies,” Lawes informed an audience at the New School for Social Research in 1931, “whatever his religious belief was, or if he had any, or if he hadn’t, whatever his belief was, it is respected. I don’t know if that helps a fellow that is dead any, but I think it helps the fellows who are left behind” (emphasis added).

Notably, Lawes rarely mentioned the new penological objective of restoring convicts to citizenship. Indeed, he frequently argued that crime originated in the structures and pathologies of modern industrial society itself, and would be eliminated only once those structures were themselves changed. As he saw it, “(u)nder our present social order prisons are a necessary evil.” For Lawes, unlike Osborne and the new penologists, the chief task of prison administration was not to “cure” criminals or deter crime; it was to maintain the peace and security of the prison, both within the institution’s walls and outside, in the large sphere of penal politics.

Although most, if not all, the disciplinary techniques found in Sing Sing and the other New York prisons in the 1920s owed their origins to the progressives, those techniques were being put to different uses and were taking on very different meanings than the ones progressives had intended. At Sing Sing, the enlightened “republic of convicts” became a bargaining table across which prisoners and administrators hashed out a “square deal;” the goal of making good prisoners of convicts usurped that of restoring convicts to manly worker-citizenship. The lament of one new penological investigator, in 1924, was typical:

The emphasis today is laid on the gaining of privileges as a reward for conduct rather than in stimulating the sense of individual responsibility for the common welfare, which is the basis of good citizenship. In one case the privileges are used as a (sic) end in themselves; in the other, merely as the means to a very different, and far greater end.

The disappointed observer concluded that the warden “uses the League chiefly to serve the prison administration rather than uses both the League and Administration to serve society.” Although rehabilitation remained a formal objective of imprisonment, “morale-making” was the guiding principle of the new system. Although both the new penologists and the administrators of the 1920s aimed to produce a prison order in which the convict turned outwards from his self, his soul, or his morbid unconscious and became absorbed in activities that sublimated his mental and physical energies, the new penologists had subordinated those techniques to the overriding objective of socializing prisoners as self-disciplined worker–citizens. After the war, conversely, New York’s prison wardens consistently reiterated that imprisonment’s principal task was essentially managerial in nature: The administrator’s job was to maintain what Lawes referred to as the “morale of the domain” and he was to achieve this by establishing various activities that sublimated the passions and desires of the prisoners.

The morale of the domain depended upon prisoners and keepers entering a double relationship of exchange. On the one hand, prisoners exchanged their good behavior for “good-time”: That is, if they behaved well, they would regain their liberty sooner. In the meantime, they also traded obedience for the gratifying privileges of attending (or playing in) convict baseball matches, watching movies, making use of psychiatric counseling services, and purchasing tobacco and other small pleasures from the prison commissary. Radio, cinema, recreational activities, athletics, access to a well-stocked grocery, and therapy were all part of one pervasively psychological penal order of sublimation. These various activities were comforting commodities to be purchased with the only hard currency a prisoner possessed: obedience. Lawes did not hesitate to plainly state this point: “Naturally the convicts have to pay some price for the possession of such a cherished bounty. The asking price is a matter of obedience.” At Sing Sing, in particular, but to a significant degree in Auburn and Clinton as well, prison order came to rest on a more or less tacit agreement between prisoner and keeper that the former could purchase some measure of pleasure from the latter by resisting the urge to cause trouble. Morale-building, as a technique of maintaining peaceful institutions, took the place of moral reform.

Within a few years of arriving at Sing Sing, Lawes had completed the transformation of the original new penological project into a new, managerialist penal order. Although elements of this penal managerialism could be found in other New York prisons (and in a number of other states, including Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, and California), nowhere was it as fully and systematically developed as at Sing Sing. In the few years either side of 1930, three separate, though related, strings of events – the Baumes laws, prison riots at Auburn and Clinton prison (but not at Sing Sing) and federal regulation of prison labour - would propel Lawes’s system to national notice and reinforce the relevance and utility of penal managerialism."

- Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941. Cambridge University Press, 2008. McCormick, p. 443-449.

The photo shows an officer instructing a Sing Sing prisoner on bed-making, from Lewis E. Lawes, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing.  New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1932, p. 176.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Much of the canal labourers' reported drinking consisted of the payday binges common among both skilled and unskilled workers. The release from work in bouts of hard drinking was a time-honoured and, in the right hands, tolerable tradition. Though these drinking bouts were under attack from temperance advocates and other members of respectable society, they remained common practice among segments of the working class through the latter half of the nineteenth century. The sheer numbers and concentration of construction labourers, however, gave to their payday binges a particularly frightening edge. The first payday on the Welland in 1873 offered the surrounding community a foretaste of future problems. With all the appearance of a "jamboree," labourers took over the bars and served themselves, ran the city, and drank their way through the town's supply of alcohol, though they were careful to pay their way. According to the Welland Tribune, these sprees followed a long dry spell: "Dry as a sponge after a month's forced abstinence," labourers settled their accounts for board and lodging and then descended on taverns and hotels." Repeated each month, these binges became an expected, if not welcome, part of the construction process.

From the more isolated Grenville, reports of payday binges emphasized less the threat to the peace of the community and more the disruption to the work. In the early months of construction before the supply of labour became more plentiful, the contractor claimed that problems in maintaining an adequate labour force were compounded by the opportunities for heavy drinking in the area. When the Department of Public Works recommended paying the workers more frequently to make the job more attractive, Goodwin countered that he had no problem with paying as often as once a week, but that would only create another problem. As it was, he lost too much time to the men's monthly drinking binges. More frequent payment would increase those binges to the point that "it would be impossible to keep the men at their work" Of course, contractor Goodwin had his own reasons for preferring the longer interval between paydays, not to an important point, nonetheless, for those who tied excessive drinking to paydays. From his perspective, unless the means could be found to stop or at least regulate the sale of alcohol, the choice appeared to be between a small workforce sober much of the time and a larger workforce too frequently drunk.""

- Ruth Bleasdale, Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. p. 196

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"While the war raged in Europe, psychiatrist Arild Faurbye, together with three colleagues, introduced electro-convulsive therapy at Bispebjerg Hospital’s Psychiatric Department in Copenhagen. Faurbye had been in the audience at Cerletti and Bini’s lecture at the congress, where he had understood the interest in the new treatment. Shortly after, he employed a Danish civil engineer to construct an electroshock device based on the Italian example and received an experimental device with a transformer that could deliver a voltage from 0 to 150 volts. The shock was given as an alternating current via two electrodes, which consisted of two zinc plates of 4 × 5.5 cm with gauze that was smeared with a glycerine ointment and fastened using a rubber band around the patient’s head.

Having received the device, the first treatment at Bispebjerg Hospital was performed on 15 November 1940, and in the following two months 200 electro-convulsive treatments were given to 26 patients. In the first attempts, Faurbye and three other psychiatrists from Bispebjerg Hospital noted in the patients’ records that there were improvements in a little under half of the patients, but they did not report of actual recoveries. The results were assessed based on experiences with Cardiazol shock therapy. At Bispebjerg, the doctors concluded that “all in all it appears to us that electro-convulsive therapy has the same effect as Cardiazol and is not subject to many of the Cardiazol’s drawbacks.”

In the Directorate for the State’s Psychiatric Hospitals, the new treatment method was noticed by the director, Georg Brøchner-Mortensen, who in the beginning of 1941 contacted chief physician Max Schmidt from Augustenborg Psychiatric Hospital. The directorate’s director wanted to hear Schmidt’s assessment of the new treatment, since he knew that two doctors from Augustenborg had previously visited Bispebjerg Hospital to observe the electro-convulsive therapy.

In his reply, Schmidt highlighted that there appeared to be certain advantages with electroshock but that with each new treatment there was always an associated risk that in “the case at hand could not easily be over-looked.” The existing knowledge on the effect of electricity on the human body could not be considered to be exhaustive, and there had been “an inexplicable death in connection with the treatment” at Bispebjerg.Hospital. Since he at the same time found that the Cardiazol treatment in Augustenborg worked well, and since he “did not like the matter of death,” he had refrained from introducing electroshock therapy.

Financial circumstances had also contributed to Max Schmidt’s reluctance, and he had assessed that it was not possible to make any savings by using electro-convulsive therapy instead of Cardiazol. But after Brøchner-Mortensen’s enquiry, he had begun to calculate the costs again and had reached the conclusion that electroshock would be cheaper in the long run. In his letter, he therefore ultimately recommended for electroshock therapy to be thoroughly tested in at least one of the state psychiatric hospitals.

Max Schmidt—after applying a great deal of pressure himself—was assigned the task by the Directorate of the State Mental Hospitals, and on 3 October 1941 he was able to start the first test of the treatment. Thereafter, he kept the Directorate informed of the progress, and in his letters, he was able to report good results. Electro-convulsive therapy was thought to be just as effective as Cardiazol, induced less angst in the patients and caused slightly fewer physical injuries. In relation to Cardiazol, there was also “a considerable time-saving,” since, for restless patients, it was not necessary to have “a significant number of care workers to strap down the patient” and the electroshock could be carried out before the patient was “aware of what lay ahead.” Therefore, in the beginning of 1942, Max Schmidt warmly supported the new treatment and suggested to the Directorate that the other hospitals should also benefit from it.

At a chief physician meeting on 27 January 1942, Schmidt presented electroshock therapy to the other senior consultants from the state mental hospitals, and everyone was very positive regarding the new method. After the meeting, when the Directorate’s director was willing to provide money for the treatment, all the chief physicians wanted two or three electroshock devices available at their hospitals. Comprehensive electrical work was however needed so that all the hospitals were able to use the Swedish devices that had been chosen for the treatment. Therefore, the Directorate applied for additional funding, which was granted by the Ministry of Finance on 4 March 1943. Subsequently, electro-convulsive therapy could take its place in all the state psychiatric hospitals.

Just like the previous physical treatment methods, electroshock therapy quickly became popular among psychiatrists at the psychiatric hospitals, and it also received a warm welcome among the general public. The treatment was praised by popular magazines such as Billed-Bladet, which in 1943 visited Augustenborg Mental Hospital and received a demonstration of electroshock therapy as the latest breakthrough in psychiatry. And Danish newspaper readers were also informed of the new treatment. In the newspapers, electro-convulsive therapy was portrayed positively, even though the journalists also discovered that, as a treatment, electric shocks were rather dramatic in nature.

However, even when the journalists witnessed electroshock therapy— and did not simply refer to doctors’ statements—they were not negative regarding the treatment (the press’ critical attitude towards electroconvulsive therapy first came later). As was the case with a journalist in May 1950, the press occasionally witnessed demonstrations in electro-convulsive therapy at state mental hospitals. That year, the journalist had been given permission to be present at the shock therapy on one of the departments at psychiatric hospital in Middelfart and in a detailed account described the process surrounding the treatment in the newspaper Fyns Social-Demokrat:

The midday siren rang out from the top of the kitchen building, but the ambulatory patients return only reluctantly from the arts and crafts rooms. They know that the department is at the other end, because it is shock day! In the long corridor, no nurses are to be seen. They are all inside to assist on the shock wards – the two small rooms that have been cleared, making six patients homeless until late in the afternoon. At a long table, a number of patients are sitting and eating lunch. Others are waiting to talk to the doctor. Those who will have shock treatment are in their night clothes with a blanket over them. If they have not been lethargic before, then they are now completely empty in the eyes after a restless night and a morning’s anxious wait – all on an empty stomach. (...) The door to the office springs open and a whole procession, with doctors leading the way, turns in to one of the shock wards. At the end, the shock device is rolled in. And the door is shut. The treatment happens as if it is on a conveyor belt. The first patient is treated in the bed by the window, a screen in front, the next patient is called in, another screen in front – but when number three comes to the door it can well be that the first patient by the window has woken up after the shock. And it is not nice to lie there after a shock and hear another patient’s unconscious screams from the seizures. It is not nice at all ... Even at the lunch table out in the corridor, one cannot escape the seizure screams. The newly arrived stare terrified at the treated patients, who are supported by nurses as they are led back to their own beds. They do not know that these exhausted, unwell people will most often laugh and talk merrily by the evening. Nonetheless, this is the most natural. The shock therapy can seem like a complete miracle.

The journalist concluded the article, entitled “Electric shock can lead the mentally ill back to life,” by saying that it “is really a fact that psychiatric hospitals the world over are able to send several hundred patients home cured every year – only because of a couple of electrodes’ miraculous effect."

- Jesper Vaczy Kragh, Lobotomy Nation: The History of Psychosurgery and Psychiatry in Denmark (Springer: 2021) p. 132-136.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

What was the licensing system for?

"Although the repatriation of the licensing system following the end of transportation seems to have been, at least in part, an unthinking policy reflex, as the system persisted through the nineteenth century, it appears to have offered three distinct advantages to the authorities.

First, it reduced costs to the extent that it made the convict prison system more affordable. At between £32 and £42 a year, the average cost per convict was remarkably stable between 1856 and 1914. This cost approximately doubled in the wake of World War I, but it was only in the 1930s – a time when the convict population was much smaller – that it rose significantly. After the prison closures of the inter-war period, the cost was, on average, £140 per convict. The total cost of the system was, of course, affected by the number of people consigned to convict prisons. Although there were fluctuations in numbers and therefore costs, the system as a whole was expensive. Between 1856 and 1940, the average cost of the convict prison system was £218,000 per year. By the start of World War II, the cost of the overall system was still £240,000 per year, not far off from the £226,000 it had cost to run in 1856. In the post-World War II period, the cost rose steeply once more. The prison system has always been (and continues to be) very expensive. However, its costs were considerably lightened by the licensing system. Without a licensing system, the average daily prison population would have increased by one-quarter to one-third, as would the financial costs of running the convict prisons.

The licensing system operated like a pressure valve that made the convict prison system manageable and able to operate at a much-reduced cost. Between 1870 and 1885, when the long stretches handed to people sentenced under habitual offender legislation inflated the convict population, the licensing system saved the authorities close to one million pounds. After 1882, convict establishments largely became net exporters of prisoners, and the licensing system continued to save a considerable annual sum for the prison estate. The proportion of a penal servitude sentence that needed to be served before release on licence was formalized in 1853, long before the prison crises of the next three decades, but the impact of reducing the number of licences granted between 1856 and 1859, and the concomitant rise in the prison population, must have been a lesson for the authorities. The system could be viewed as an elegant mechanism for the authorities, allowing them to reduce costs whenever the system became bloated with convicts by releasing more and more men and women on licence. The system had not been conceived as a cost-saving device, but it was quite evidently operated in that way, making the convict prison system as a whole financially viable.

Second, the promise of a licence being dangled over prisoners’ heads helped to keep order inside the prisons. In Walls Have Mouths, former convict McCartney wrote that ‘a good prison record means that the convict is at the beck and call of every jailer in the prison, that he has to suffer every indignity and injustice in silence, that he cannot associate himself with any complaints, and that he has to do whatever is convenient to the warders, otherwise he gets a bad report, and that report may militate against him to the extent of an extra five years in prison’. The explicit and implicit threat of the loss of remission was one way of keeping discipline in a prison, especially as it would have inculcated self-government among convicts.

Lastly, the licensing system allowed the prison authorities to put right obvious errors that might have undermined the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. This was especially important – or, indeed, may have only been important – when glaring miscarriages of justice attracted attention from the media or from politicians. For example, George Whitehood and Charles Holden were charged with the arson of three haystacks at Hayes on 25 October 1869. In court, Holden stated that ‘he would rather be in prison than not, walking about with nothing to eat’, and he received a ten-year sentence at the Old Bailey on 22 November 1869. Whitehood, however, who may well have been in the same state of poverty, desperation, and disillusionment as Holden, had difficulty proving that he had been anywhere near the crime scene. He had only been liberated from Wandsworth Prison at 9.30 a.m. on the day of the fire and could not possibly have walked to Hayes (a five-hour journey) by the time the fire was started (just after midday). The judge at the Central Criminal Court believed Whitehood had confessed to the crime in order to be transported – if Western Australia was no longer an option, perhaps he was thinking of Gibraltar (where penal servitude continued until 1875), although the judge seems to have been unclear about the options. Whitehood’s case was taken up by the governor of Brixton Prison and the Home Office, who were on firmer footing in correcting the error through the licensing system. Whitehood, having served less than a year of his ten-year sentence, was given a licence in 1870. ‘If he commits another offence it will subject him to imprisonment in, and not removal from this country,’ stated the governor. Whitehood never reoffended, but without the intervention of the prison authorities he would have served another six years in prison before becoming eligible for release on licence. It should be noted that Whitehood’s case had been taken up by MPs in the House of Commons, no doubt putting pressure on the Home Office to act. The number of highly visible cases were few, and therefore one assumes that the number of ‘corrections by licence’ were similarly few.

For most people on licence, it served one very real and valuable purpose: it got them out. As the outpouring of emotion at the beginning of this chapter from people about to be released from prison attests, this purpose should not be underestimated. However, there was not much support with regard to rehabilitation while on licence, and, indeed, there were many barriers to reformation that the system itself put in the way of anyone attempting to ‘go straight’. The authorities were more than aware of the stigma attached to those who had been in prison. The Penal Servitude Acts Commission of 1863 reported that it was ‘far from confident that persons in this condition would find it easy to obtain an honest livelihood. Men with characters branded by their having been convicts are exposed to insuperable disadvantage, in the strong competition for employment.’ This issue was also a topic of considerable discussion by the Kimberley Commission fifteen years later. Several ex-convict witnesses who gave evidence objected to police supervision on the grounds that police officers informed their employers of their status as ex-prisoners and this resulted in the termination of their contracts. Representatives of the Royal Discharged Prisoners Aid Society also put forward a few examples in which this had been the case. A number of male and female convicts in our study also claimed to have experienced this problem. The commission recommended improving the system of supervision in this regard, arguing in line with the 1863 commission that

no time should be lost … in improving the present system. We fear that supervision, if left in the hands of ordinary police constables ... will tend more and more to become a mere matter of mere routine, harassing to the men who are subjected to it, and affording no real security to society against the criminal classes.

However, the licensing system did reduce the period in custody and thereby gave people more time to do the ordinary things that other Victorians and Edwardians did: form relationships, marry, settle down, and have children; find work and build a career or at least have a steady form of income; build relationships and put down roots in a neighbourhood after establishing a secure and stable residence; and take responsibility for one’s own actions, rather than being told what to do and when to do it. All of this helped to build maturity and foster self-reliance and responsibility. These structural factors operating at the individual level encouraged rehabilitation and desistence from offending, but they took time – time that was given back to convicts through the granting of a licence. Although it offered significant financial and operational benefits to the convict prison system, the licensing system was of no intrinsic value to individual convicts, except as a temporal window that allowed more supportive processes to get to work beyond the prison gates."

- Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox, Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. p. 147-151

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The reach of the law [in 19th century Britain] was extended through several means. The best known is the creation of professional police forces, urged and supported by most law reformers. Peel's Act of 1829 established the metropolitan police, providing a model of a force consisting of a larger number of constables, set apart from the population by uniform and discipline and pressed to be more active and less discretionary than their predecessors. Acts of 1835, 1839, and 1856 first encouraged and then required the creation of county and borough police forces on that model. As police forces grew, the summary jurisdiction of magistrates also expanded, capped by a series of acts between 1847 and 1855 making it possible to process a much higher caseload without creating many expensive new courts. Enforced by professional police and harder working magistrates, the law became less discretionary and less tolerant, pulling in more and more lesser offenders - vagrants, drunkards, prostitutes, and disorderly juveniles. Many of these offenses had traditionally been ignored by the authorities. A police commissioner reflected in the more settled situation of 1880 that "The Metropolitan Police in their early days were rather over enthusiastic in enforcing the law and dealing with minor offences." This widened activity of the criminal law embraced not only apprehension and trial, but conviction and punishment for offenses that, as the first prison inspectors noted in 1836, "were formerly disregarded, or not considered of so serious a character as to demand imprisonment." " The sharpest rise in prison admissions came not for serious felonies, but for petty felonies and misdemeanors. Not only were more people being taken into custody, many more also were being summoned by magistrates for public order and nuisance offenses; the number of summonses issued in London rose faster than the population until the early 1870s. Clearly, during the first half of the century and beyond, governmental intolerance for popular immorality and disorderliness, however minor, was on the rise.

- Martin Weiner, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. p. 50-51.

[More 'efficient' police functionally creating more crime and more criminals by broadening who was considered a criminal and who would be identified, caught and punished.]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Coordination and regimentation were crucial to the efficient deployment of men labouring at close quarters on interrelated tasks. Along the more isolated excavations and embankments or on any section where the workforce was thinly stretched, close surveillance was difficult, but ideally it was built and maintained through a rigid hierarchy of supervision moving up through gangers and foremen to the section supervisors who patrolled the work. At mid-century a gang of roughly seven to fifteen members worked to the rhythm set by the ganger tasked with maintaining the pace of the work and paid at a higher rate to ensure his commitment to the contractors interests. On some private railway projects in British North America during the 1850s, gangs were modelled sometimes on the "butty gangs" of Britain's early railway age. The aristocrats of the pick and shovel, members of butty gangs either formally subcontracted for a quantity of the work or worked collectively at piece rates. They were only indirectly responsible to the contractors' supervisory personnel and consequently enjoyed considerable independence on the job. On public works by mid-century the relative independence of the butty gang appears to have been reserved for small groups of skilled workers. For the unskilled, division into gangs was a means of supervision, not a measure of autonomy.

How gangs formed, how long and at whose discretion they remained together, and whether the gang travelled as a unit from project to project were questions of fundamental importance to the labourers. The men with whom they worked most closely helped determine not just quantity and quality of their output but also the tone of interpersonal relations on the site and the labourers' capacity to survive them without injury. The composition of gangs in industries such as long-shoring, mining, and lumbering suggests the likelihood that labourers themselves played an important role in determining those who worked alongside them. Likely they preferred to labour beside those whose work rhythms and proficiency they had learned to trust, and experienced contractors and supervisory personnel would have seen the advantages to gangs whose productive capacity was well oiled by familiarity, provided that familiarity did not undermine the author ity of those pressing the work. Pragmatism would also have endorsed what the gang members of the 1840s and 1850s clearly embraced, the opportunity to work with those whose language they readily understood. How strong that preference remained into the 1870s is less clear. The familial and kinship ties which helped define immediate workmates in mining and longshoring probably were also important among labourers on construction sites. Bonds of family and kin within gangs are suggested but confirmed only in rare images: of one family's relief when two brothers escaped a cave-in on the Lachine in January 1877; of another family's grief compounded when the same cave-in claimed brothers-in-law working side by side."

Above gang ganger was the foreman, responsible for coordinating the efforts of a number of gangs and reporting up the chain of and supervision to the contractor's representative. Fragmentary evidence suggests that from the 1840s into the 1880s some contractors eroded the importance of or dispensed altogether with the ganger and concentrated in foremen the responsibility for both setting the pace and coordinating the work. This shift could directly shape the work environment by giving to the contractor's staff more immediate control over how hard the work was pressed. In the all-too-appropriate language of the industry, the foremen gained increased power to "drive" the workers to greater expenditures of energy. Even as gangs grew in size to as many as twenty-five and more members on sites in the 1870s, foremen, with or without gangers' assistance, attempted to keep labourers working at a gruelling pace. In this, they were aided by the increasing substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power. Horses experienced at strenuous labour could set an arduous pace, but their energies were expended at the dictates of men, from teamsters through foremen and up to contractors, only the most short-sighted of whom would drive beyond endurance the power in which they had made a significant investment, either through hire or purchase. Less biddable by those working directly with them were the machines whose impersonal appendages regularly and continually swung round and down, bringing more fill or carrying away muck. Machinery operated at the dictate of foremen, men commonly paid more than twice the wages of labourers to help maintain their focus on the contractors' interests. That focus was sharpened by the widespread belief in and numerous-enough examples of the ability of a diligent foreman to rise within the industry and become the contractor, or at least subcontractor, through learning the industry from the ground up and attracting the attention of men with capital. From within Canada came few better examples of such a rise than Horace Beemer's ascent from foreman for an American subcontractor on the Welland in the 1870s to the position of principal contractor on one of the most difficult sections of the same canal by 1880. Similar examples from within construction and analogous industries demonstrate the value of the foreman's ability to identify with both those he supervised and those for whom he worked."

Experienced navvies on the site may have helped to maintain the pace, by force of habit or to demonstrate their abilities. On the other hand, one of the first lessons in heavy manual labouring jobs was to resist the drive to accelerate the work and instead conserve energy for the long haul. The pace likely became appreciably slower and more ragged on those sites on which unseasoned labourers predominated. But nothing suggests a deliberate slackening of the pace on the part of overseers to accommodate those men not yet toughened up. Ideally gangers and foremen were experienced labourers promoted above their fellows and taking what might prove their first significant steps upward within the industry. Following this path, John Power, a native of Newfoundland, worked for two years as a labourer, then ganger, for Elliott and Grant on the Intercolonial until he was hired by Berlinguet as the foreman overseeing one of the difficult cuttings near Campbellton. The value of such men lay in their first-hand knowledge of the best methods of pushing the labourers.

Over the course of the century those best methods changed. By mid-century, alcohol was being phased out in a wide range of workplaces, though its consumption on the job would survive into the twentieth century at a reduced level and less as an employer-provided stimulant or panacea to keep men working during the heat, cold, and monotony of their tasks. As temperance gained ground contractors may have introduced coffee to British North American construction sites as early as the 1850s to replace the regular visits of the jiggerman along the works. As the jiggerman officially disappeared from construction sites, some labourers would have experienced a gut-wrenching adjustment as alcohol was withdrawn and would have found their own means of easing the transition by smuggling a supply onto the job and by chivvying supervisory staff. 

Physical driving of the workers had long been established as crucial to production in a number of related workplaces, in the building trades in particular, where the cost of heavy manual labour was frequently the main cost over which employers could hope to exer- cise a degree of control. This put a premium on the speed at which manual labourers worked." However, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century rods and whips were being phased out where the workforce was drawn from the ranks of free labourers, less likely to tolerate, though not immune to, the brutality with which slaves, convicts, and the indentured were harried. In the later decades of the century, physical force was still used to drive men who, though technically free, were in some way indebted or recruiting agent, contractor, or company. Chinese and Italian laborers were reportedly beaten viciously to increase their output on railways pushed across the prairies and through the Rockies and even on worksites where their treatment was more open to observation. However, gangers and foremen working with the labourers studied here appear to have depended on verbal abuse and used their rods and firearms as symbols of power, though during workplace confrontations the pistols foremen packed on sites such as the Lachine in the 1870s were ready and used to maintain order and protect men at work as much as to protect themselves and contractors' property

At mid-century experienced engineers argued that a major draw back in the type of contractor attracted to the public works was their failure to invest in an adequate staff of trained supervisors and foremen. To Laurie and Light on the Nova Scotia and European and North American Railways respectively, this was a measure of both poor business practice and insufficient capital. Both argued that until contractors channelled more resources into supervisory staff, governments would have to pay the price for shoddy construction or pay for more government supervisors, or both." Concerns about inferior supervision continued into the 1870s, when inexperience, the need to cut costs, and the inability to secure seasoned foremen led some contractors to skimp in this area of operations. For example, when Goodwin ran into trouble on the Grenville in 1871, he readily admitted that he lacked men able to oversee the work effectively, and the department agreed to send the expertise he needed. A gift or charge to Goodwins account, the foremen were a good investment and one which contrac tors overlooked to their detriment.

Whether Goodwin is representative of a significant number of contractors in the 1870s is unclear. A key aspect of supervision throughout the period was the extent to which contractors themselves played an immediate and direct role in overseeing the work. This was true not just for small contractors and subcontractors. In large partnerships and among those major contractors in business on their own, close personal supervision appears to have been the norm right through the 1870s. To look at only three of the largest firms on the Welland, in each case at least one princi pal engaged in active supervision. In executing their contracts worth approximately $2 million, two principals in Hunter, Murray, and Cleveland worked on the site to such an extent that they were described in the press as fulfilling the functions of foremen, and the men immediately under them, the functions of subforemen. Hunter assumed direct day-to-day supervision at one end, and Cleveland at the other." Ferguson, Mitchell, and Symmes adopted a similar approach to their four contracts which comprised approximately one-sixth of the work of enlargement. Symmes's daily personal supervision was credited with keeping the work progressing "with the regularity and harmony of clockwork." John Brown oversaw his workforce with such attention to detail that on his daily inspection of the works he reputedly took note of those in the workforce, skilled and unskilled, whom he considered capable of assuming more responsibility." Major contractors on the Lachine demonstrated the same commitment to personal supervision, though not always as amicably as Brown. Michael Davis, one of the sons in Davis and Sons, stands out for his aggressive personal attention to the conduct of labourers, on at least two occasions reprimanding them physically, once with his blackthorn walking stick and once with a revolver." Along the Intercolonial principals in major firms also appeared regularly, like Grant and Sutherland, who superintended their own work. Those from outside the immediate area took up temporary residence on the spot to facilitate oversight, including Berlinguet, who positioned himself at Dalhousie while Bertrand was stationed at Bathurst." Such direct supervision suggests these firms had not yet created the impersonal management structure that came to characterize their even larger counterparts. Having the top men on the worksite did encourage a heightened sense of accountability, however, and it opened up the possibility of clearer communication with government engineers who patrolled the works regularly.

Beneath the chief or superintending engineers were resident district engineers and their assistants stationed permanently along the sites. In their concern to ensure timely completion of contracts, they paid particular attention to the deployment of the workforce, noting whether the numbers and the manner of their employment would enable the contractors to meet both deadlines and quality standards. They were not loathe to intervene where they detected inefficiencies, to not only suggest but demand that gangs be reorganized and workers not pulling their weight terminated. Not surprisingly, government officials seldom found fault with their own place and performance within the hierarchy of supervision. Whether they achieved the level of efficiency they claimed for themselves was subject to debate, by those who considered government staffing of public works inadequate, those who considered it excessive, and those who perceived it as a profligate extension of patronage in which incompetent party faithful supervised incompetent contractors chosen for their political connection The niceties of these debates aside, on the ground the goal was strict control of the work process and production of maximum and displined output from the men. On a well-run construction site work progressed at a steady, gruelling pace. One writer described what he had observed on construction sites in England during the 1850s

I think as fine a spectacle as any man can witness who is acc tomed to look at work, is to see a cutting in full operation with about twenty wagons being filled, every man at his post, and every man with his shirt open, working in the heat of the day, the gangen looking about and everything going like clockwork. Another thing that called forth remarks was the complete silence that prevailed among the men.

Another testified to the remarkable regimen on worksites: "Every thing on the ground appears to be conducted a [sic] la militaire the strictest discipline being enforced and every movement like clockwork. So strict are the regulations that amongst the hundreds employed there is not such a thing to be seen as a labourer leaning on his spade or enjoying a whiff of his pipe." Observers reported comparable regimentation on construction sites in British North America. The Acadian Recorder used military analogies to convey the sense of order among gangs along the Nova Scotia Railway, and the Antigonish Casket provided a similar picture of work on the St Peter's Canal where in the summer of 1855 some three hundred men worked quietly and steadily under the close and regular supervision of the overseers.

It was an image which contrasted strikingly with the stereotype of lazy and disorderly workers during their leisure hours, and it may have been promoted to offset that stereotype and to highlight labourers is the embodiment of the speed and energy at the heart of the transportation revolution. It was, nonetheless, a consistent image across projects and across decades. By the 1870s, accounts of construction sites placed even greater emphasis on well-regulated and disciplined output by the labourers. Everyone on the site undertook their tasks "like clockwork"; the work proceeded "scientifically" and "energetically the men were compared to ants and bees. Advances in machinery increased the need for order and sharpened attention to booms and buckets swinging overhead and steam-powered machinery close at hand, in the interests of self-preservation, if nothing else. Even on the less-mechanized sites an experienced navvy, or any labourer accustomed to working at close quarters in gangs, would have welcomed a well-coordinated worksite as an important protection against injury and death.

In the 1840s the pace on construction sites was maintained for twelve hours in the summer months, at times fourteen, and normally was reduced to ten hours for those who worked through the winter. During the 1850s labourers on some sites worked slightly fewer hours. By the 1870s the working day was generally shortened to ten, perhaps eleven, hours in summer and ten, perhaps nine, in winter. These hours could vary from section to section on the same project, depending on the nature of the work and the contractors' needs. Hours were strictly enforced, the blowing of the horn or whistle signalling the beginning and the end of the workday. A typical day's end on the Welland in 1880 occasioned amused comment from a local reporter: "[W]hen the whistle blows to shut down work, and the men grab their coats and make a rush for the embankments one would think an army of men were scaling the walls and were bent on taking the town by storm." In addition to the normal workday, labourers might work overtime into the late evening when contractors were rushing to beat the winter freeze or the opening of navigation. In emergencies, it was every man to the task for as long as was necessary to remedy the problem. When cracks appeared in a canal bank workers could be called from bed and expected to work around the clock to repair them. When a break occurred on the west bank of the Welland at midday on a Sunday in June 1877, the labourers ran from church to meet the emergency. Two years later, on a Sunday evening in July, when a brace gave way on the wall between the old and new aqueducts, the men worked through the night to prevent a disastrous cave-in."

- Ruth Bleasdale, Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. p. 93-99.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Prison Uniform

"Convict prisons were busy places, with many people moving throughout the facility and its grounds during daylight hours. The visibility of convicts was therefore of considerable importance to prison staff. All convicts wore identifying circular cloth badges (around 3 inches in diameter and sewn to their uniform) that showed the type of sentence they were serving (e.g., PS for penal servitude), their prison register number (e.g. 50844), and the length of their sentence (depicted in numeral form, with the exception of those sentenced to life imprisonment: this was designated by an ‘L’); but such badges were not large enough to be read at a distance.

Therefore, convicts’ uniforms were designed to make it immediately apparent to staff (and indeed to other convicts) what the current status of a prisoner was in terms of both their respective conduct and their present stage. Those inmates in the ‘star class’, for example, had a scarlet star on their cap and the right and left sleeves of their jacket. Prisoners in different stages were kept apart. All convict uniforms were stamped with a large, broad arrow, signifying they (and by extension their wearers) were the property of the government. This mark was intended to shame the wearer and was used on both male and female prison uniforms (it often featured widely in contemporary publicity photographs of suffragettes who had been imprisoned for their cause). The usual male convict prison uniform for inmates in the probation class (i.e., those who were at the start of their confinement or had been demoted as a result of an infringement of the prison rules) consisted of a drab or light-brown two-piece suit of fairly coarse cloth with no other identifying features. Convicts in the third class wore the same basic uniform with black facings; second class had yellow facings and first class had blue facings.

Edward Bannister Callow, who wrote under the pen name ‘one-who-has-endured-it’, describes these facings in more detail: ‘The facings consist of nothing for probation, three inches of black or yellow cloth one inch wide on each side of the neck and across the upper part of the sleeve at the cuff for 3rd and 2nd class, and a blue stripe one inch wide all around the collar and cuffs for 1st class.” Those prisoners designated as ‘special class’ convicts had a different blue uniform. A convict of Dartmoor Prison, where able-bodied convicts carried out their labour on the moors, one-who-has-endured-it explains that ‘every man who was drafted for outdoor work had an extra suit of clothes supplied to him, and a blue and red striped canvas short jacket, reaching just below the hips, and termed a “slop”. This he wore over all, and it was the only protection against either cold or rain, except during the winter months, when every man was supplied with a thick blue Guernsey shirt.’ Again, visibility over long distances on the bleak moors was clearly at the forefront when it came to design and choice of colours. There was some variation in uniform when a convict became a trusted orderly; one-who-has-endured-it vividly describes his new uniform after being granted a position of trust in the prison administration block: ‘Let the reader picture to himself the dress. Grey woollen cap striped with scarlet; drab jacket and vest, with a blue collar, and badge on [the] left arm, and scarlet cuffs; blue breeches to the knee, with blue-grey stockings embellished with three scarlet rings round the legs an inch wide. Add to all this an embellishment of the broad arrow stamped in black all over, and conceive anything more like a macaw if you can.’ Convicts undergoing punishment were required to wear what was known as a particoloured dress. This consisted of a uniform with quarter facings of bright colours, which immediately identified the wearer as a potentially troublesome individual – such uniforms looked like a parody of a Harlequin costume. Those who destroyed their clothing were given an additional punishment of having to wear a tear-proof canvas uniform made from No. 1 Grade Navy Canvas that was ‘not to exceed 12lbs in weight’. There were eight grades of Navy Canvas (used to make sailcloth), and No. 1 Grade was the heaviest, weighing twice as much as the lightest grade. This must have been a considerable inhibitor of movement and – as the material was particularly ungiving – a very uncomfortable experience. Female convicts were provided with serge dresses. In the probation and third classes, these were ordinary brown in colour, although prisoners in the third class also wore a badge that said ‘No. 3’. Those convicts in second class wore a green serge dress and a ‘No. 2’ badge, while those in first class wore a dark blue serge dress and a ‘No. 1’ badge. A special dress was worn in refuge class (while awaiting a space at a refuge), which was later called special class, and then a grey linsey dress. Women were also subjected to canvas dresses – weighted Navy Canvas garments (as described above for male convicts) – if they destroyed their normal prison uniforms.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were seasonal variations, too: serge dresses in winter and cotton prints in summer. While wearing different uniforms at different stages may have played an important role in the security of the prison, to those subjected to this feature of prison life, it was often viewed as a process of shaming and anguish as their body was given over to the institution. Florence Maybrick gives the following account: ‘I was dressed in the uniform to which the greatest stigma and disgrace is attached ... The warder then stepped quickly forward, and with a pair of scissors cut off my hair to the nape of my neck. This act seemed, above all others, to bring me to a sense of my degradation, my utter helplessness.’ This uniform was not necessarily shed upon the end of a convict’s sentence: prisoners were given a suit of clothing upon release, which became known as ‘liberty clothing’, that was normally made within the convict prison tailoring shop." - Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox, Penal Servitude: Convicts and Long-Term Imprisonment, 1853–1948. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022. p. 63-66

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The third, and equally critical component of the new penological disciplinary regime at Sing Sing was the development of techniques aimed at the discovery, classification, and eradication of sexual relations among prisoners. Sex had almost certainly been going on in prisons since the first prison was built. But the opportunity for sex had probably been much more restricted in the hard-labor prisons of the nineteenth century; and when hard industrial labor collapsed in many American prisons, as the contract system was dismantled, opportunities (and perhaps prisoners’ energy) for sex were greatly multiplied. Prison administrators of the early twentieth century appear to have known that prisoners were having sexual relations with one another. Nonetheless the subject was not openly discussed or theorized in any sustained manner.

This began to change in the 1910s. From the point of view of a penology committed to the socialization of prisoners as self-governing manly citizens, sexual relations between men posed a particularly urgent problem. Through the lens of the prevailing gender ideology of early twentieth century ... sex between men was intrinsically emasculating of at least one partner – the supposedly passive “receiver,” whether or not the sex was consensual. Such a feminized position, as it were, contradicted precisely the ideal of manly subjectivity that the new penologists sought to realize in prisoners. Added to this difficulty was the problem of “manly discipline”: The new penologists hued to an ascending, middle-class view that, rather than reflexively act on their sexual passions, men ought to channel or sublimate those passions into activities deemed socially or personally useful. On this view, then, the active or penetrative partner, although supposedly the masculine partner in the act, was failing to exercise manly self-discipline; he, too, presented a challenge to the manly ideal. In their Sing Sing laboratory, Osborne and his fellow penologists proceeded to drag prison sexuality into the light of day, examine it, and “cure” it.

Fragments of evidence from the New York prison records of the early 1910s suggest that sex among prisoners at Sing Sing and elsewhere had been happening for some years. In some instances, it involved physical coercion, but in many it did not. As James White’s report had suggested, sex was being traded for food or money as a matter of course. Various reports also suggested that, before Osborne arrived at Sing Sing, such relations mostly went unpunished, and that when a person was punished in connection with prison sex, it was usually in connection with a sexual attack. It was not the aggressor, however, who received the punishment: Any prisoner who complained to the warden that he had been coerced into sex, and any prisoner who sought protection from coerced sex, was likely to be severely disciplined, while the alleged attacker – or attackers – would probably not be disciplined at all. (One of Osborne’s predecessors at Sing Sing, Warden John Kennedy, had sometimes gone so far as to send the complainant, rather than the alleged attacker, to New York’s most feared prison – Clinton). Similarly, when Superintendent Riley heard of cases of sexual assault occurring during Osborne’s wardenship, he proceeded to order the transfer of the complainants to Clinton, which suggests that the punishment of the complainant was standard practice. Indeed, it is likely that the act of complaining, and not the act of sodomy per se, was cause for punishment in prisons of the 1900s and early 1910s.

Osborne and the new penologists broke with the usual approach to prison sex, and on a number of counts. First and most conspicuously, Osborne discoursed at some length – and in public – on what had thitherto been the taboo topic of sex in prison; in true progressive style, Osborne argued that in order to solve the problem, one had first to study and understand it. Describing sex between convicts as “vile” and as a “problem ... which should no longer be ignored,” Osborne made it clear that he considered sex between men to be one of the most serious and little-understood problems of the American prison. In his early speeches and writings on the topic, Osborne drew distinctions between different kinds of men who engaged in sex with other men. On the one hand, he explained to members of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor (NCPPL), there was the man who “allows himself to be [sexually] used”; on the other, there was the man whose “passions are cut off from natural relief.” The latter, according to Osborne, was simply acting on an “ordinary” sexual impulse that, because of the deprived conditions of incarceration, had been directed toward a man, rather than a woman. As Osborne wrote in Prisons and Commonsense, “Here is a group of men – mostly young and by no means deficient in the natural passions of youth – but cut off from the natural means of satisfying them.” Osborne refined this rather crude typology a few years later, in a tripartite taxonomy recalling Sigmund Freud’s 1909 classification of inverts in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: According to Osborne, in prisons one found the “degenerate,” whose “dual nature” made him the passive (and therefore feminine) partner of active, masculine men; the “wolves,” a popular term that Osborne appropriated to describe aggressive men who consistently preferred men to women; and the “ordinary men,” whose incarceration deprived them of their “natural” sex outlet – sex with women – and who consequently made use of other prisoners as “the only outlet” they could get.

Finding ways to channel the natural passions of “ordinary” men and youths turned out to be one of Osborne’s key projects at Sing Sing: Indeed it was a recurring theme of his wardenship. Osborne developed several tactics in his fight against the “vile” practice: He emptied the cellblock of the surplus of prisoners (whom he installed in a dormitory), so as to ensure that there was only one man per cell; he attempted to direct the natural passions of the supposedly ordinary men to nonsexual activities; he implored the Mutual Welfare League to police prisoners’ sexuality and to “condemn vice and encourage a manly mastery of the passions;” he set about identifying and isolating both the “degenerate” men who offered themselves as passive partners and the “wolves” who actively preferred other men; and he redoubled his efforts to smash the underground economy that James White had identified as a principal stimulant of prisoners’ sexual relations. (According to White, the systematic theft and underdelivery of prison provisions led to hunger among the prisoners, who then sold sexual favors for cash, and used the cash to buy the stolen food on the prison’s black market).

This latter tactic was especially crucial in Osborne’s strategy. As Osborne put it, every prison had “some degenerate creatures who are willing to sell themselves, any time, for a few groceries,” and the key to the prison sex problem in general was to ensure that prisoners were, on the one hand, well fed (and therefore not in need of procuring cash for extra food), and, on the other, afforded appropriate mental, physical, and spiritual outlets for their natural passions. In theory, the reconstitution of every prisoner as a waged consumer and producer in a simulated economy would ensure that the prisoner was no longer in a position of emasculating dependence. As long as convicts were eating well, engaging in a market economy that rewarded hard work and promoted financial responsibility, and sublimating their life force in educational and recreational activities, Osborne reasoned, the sex market in prisons would lose both its buyers and sellers.

Osborne’s conceptualization of the prison sex problem underscored the new penology’s central commitment to innovating various disciplinary activities that would absorb and direct prisoners’ energies in the face of limited industrial and other forms of labor. As the new penologists saw it, plays, motion pictures, lectures, musical events, and athletics not only addressed the problem of underemployment and initiated prisoners into the personality-building pasttimes of the ideal citizen, they sublimated the libidinal drive of the ordinary convict. Indeed, Osborne established a number of new activities at the prison in the name of vanquishing the “unnatural vice” that the prison investigators had documented in the early 1910s. Prisoners converted a basin in the Hudson River into a large swimming pool in 1915, because, as Osborne put it, swimming was a “practical method of reducing immorality” and an activity in which prisoners would “work off their superfluous energies. ... and head off unnatural vice.” (Four hundred prisoners per day were working off their “superfluous energies” in the pool by 1916). One of Osborne’s support committees, The New York State Prison Council, reiterated this point in defending the innovation of moving pictures, lectures, concerts, and other stimulating activities at Sing Sing. “These were established not as Amusements;” the Council explained somewhat defensively, “but as a definite means to an End” (caps in original): That end was “keeping the men out of vermin-ridden cells and of stimulating their minds – inured to the gray and sodden monotony of Prison walls.”

It was in no small part to combat prison sex that Osborne and the new penologists paved the way for the introduction of psychiatric and psychological testing to Sing Sing in 1916. Osborne and his supporters considered psychomedical study a crucial tool in their efforts to more accurately classify prisoners and to develop a specialized state prison system; to the classificatory system that administrators had established in the 1890s (and which classified and distributed convicts according to sex, age, sanity, physical fitness, and supposed capacity for reform), the new penologists added the distinctly psychological categories of sexuality and personality. In their view, sexual “degenerates” were a distinct category of prisoner and the prison system ought to identify and deal with them separately. Whereas the new recreational activities, better food, and prisoner self-policing were aimed at eradicating the sexual relations of the supposedly ordinary prisoner, the small army of doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists who descended on Sing Sing in 1915 and 1916 were chiefly concerned with the group of prisoners Osborne had described as degenerate.

The new penologists’ effort to conscript psychiatry and psychology into prison reform was complemented by the reformers’ enhancement of general medical facilities at Sing Sing in 1915 and 1916. In February 1915, the New York State Department of Health inspected Sing Sing and recommended that a separate ward be set up for patients suffering from sexually transmitted disease (STD). This recommendation was seconded a few months later by two state investigators who suggested that Sing Sing open a new hospital in which “psychopaths,” STD patients, and convicts suffering from contagious diseases would be held separately from prisoners in the general wards. Those suffering from infectious diseases other than STDs would be labeled “normal,” while “psychopaths” and STD patients should be held in a ward for “special” cases. The investigators further recommended that a psychiatric study of prisoners be undertaken in which all new admissions to the prison would be thoroughly studied according to a case method, with special attention paid to those with mental and nervous disorders, “sexual perversions,” suicidal tendencies, and records of multiple convictions. The 1915 plans for a psychomedical facility at Sing Sing proposed a double innovation of the established prison system: The psychic lives of prisoners would be added to the fields of scrutiny, and the past and present sexual practices (and desires) of convicts would be read as signs of a peculiar psychic type (the psychopath), who, in turn, would be incarcerated in separate facilities.

The following year at Sing Sing, Dr. Thomas W. Salmon, of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, and Dr. Bernard Glueck, a psychiatrist who had recently instituted nonverbal intelligence testing of immigrants at Ellis Island, set up the country’s first penal psychiatric clinic. Funded by a sizable grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the clinic proceeded under Dr. Glueck’s directorship to examine virtually all of the 683 prisoners committed to Sing Sing between August 1916 and April 1917. Glueck’s dense, seventy-page report on his findings was published to much acclaim in 1917; it was the first comprehensive psychiatric case study of adult convicts in the United States. Like the Health Department investigators, Glueck conceived of his studies as just one element in the much larger effort to develop “rational administration” in imprisonment. He and his clinicians proceeded to interview every incoming convict about his family background, sexual practices, health, education, and employment history; they then conducted a series of psychological tests for “mental age” and dexterity, and administered psychiatric tests of the prisoner’s emotional state. On the basis of this information Glueck divided all the incoming prisoners into three groups: the intellectually defective (those with low “mental ages”); the mentally diseased (those who suffered from hallucinations and delusions); and the psychopathic, whom he described as the most difficult to define and the most baffling. He concluded that almost six out of every ten of the incoming convicts were either intellectually defective, mentally diseased, or psychopathic.

Glueck’s study of Sing Sing convicts was one of the first to theorize the existence of “psychopath criminals,” and his work became foundational both in studies of criminality and homosexuality. According to Glueck, approximately one in five of the incoming prisoners was a psychopath. It was to this category that those prisoners with a history of homosexual relations were most commonly consigned. As Glueck put it, the classification of psychopathic was a judgment of the prisoner’s entire way of life, not just the crime he had committed; sexual habits were one of four determining fields of enquiry (the others were the family’s medical history and the convict’s employment and education history). From the beginning, then, scrutiny of prisoners’ sexual relations – and homosexual relations in particular – was critical in the study of psychopathology among prisoners. He wrote that, “in contemplating the life histories of these (native-born psychopaths), one is struck very forcibly with the unusual lack of all conception of sex morality.” A wide range of sexual activities, and not simply sex between men, was read as psychopathological. He described one in three psychopathic prisoners to be “markedly promiscuous,” and nine percent as polymorphously perverse: He was perplexed to find that many individuals who had had “repeated” sexual relations with other men had been equally sexually active with women, and concluded simply that these convicts were not “biologically sexually inverted.” They were, however, as psychopathological as “biological inverts.”

....

As well as striving to discover, prevent, and punish sexual relations between convicts in the model progressive prison, the new penologists attempted to change relations between black prisoners and white prisoners. Unlike the matter of sex, neither the “race question” nor the prison’s small minority of black prisoners were objects of sustained discourse among Sing Sing’s reformers at this time. Nonetheless, race ideology deeply influenced and was, in turn, influenced by, the new penological program of reform. At Sing Sing (and at Auburn) the new penologists set about classifying and more formally segregating prisoners on the basis of the “one-drop” criterion of American race ideology. The new penologists conceived of their task primarily as one of assimilating prisoners born in Europe and native-born Americans classified as “white” to an ideal, manly citizenship. Programs that were designed to socialize prisoners as citizens were implicitly aimed at white native-born Americans and European immigrants; certainly, no resources were specifically earmarked for the education or postrelease employment of black prisoners. Many of the educational programs were specifically aimed at Italian, Polish, and German immigrants, with the objective of socializing them to be good Americans. Classes were started in English literacy and civics (the one at Auburn was known as the “Americanization” class) for white prisoners, and on at least one occasion, a large business enterprise sent an Italian-speaking agent to Sing Sing to train and recruit Italian convicts for postrelease employment. Besides crafting a prison program that took for granted that white convicts were the proper object of reform, the new penologists took steps to formalize and rigorously enforce the physical separation of white from black prisoners. Black prisoners were concentrated in the unskilled work companies, and white prisoners in the semi- and skilledlabor companies by day. By night, under Osborne’s direct orders, black convicts were segregated from white convicts. Early on in his wardenship, Osborne’s expressly prohibited white and black convicts to share cells with each other.

Black prisoners did not miss out entirely on the privileges and activities established under the new penologists. As a rule, privileges that were extended to white prisoners (such as membership in the leagues, participation in sports, etc.) were generally extended to black prisoners, too, suggesting that the new penologists considered black prisoners capable of participating in democracy and civil society. But, as had been the case at Auburn, these privileges were always extended in such a way that they would not undermine the segregation of white from black, nor, more critically, raise a black prisoner above a white prisoner. Indeed, new penological reform in general seems to have formalized race segregation and, not incidentally, widened racial inequality, at Sing Sing.

- Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941. Cambridge University Press, 2008. McCormick, p. 397-402, 404.

Image is Warden T. M. Osborne, Sing Sing, centre, surrounded by Sing Sing prisoners. c. 1915-1916. Bain News Service glass negative. Library of Congress. LC-B2- 3310-7.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The restructuring of labor and training, and the establishment of job placement programs at Sing Sing, were a critical aspect of the new penological strategy to socialize convicts as manly worker–citizens in an industrialized economy. A second, related, field of action was that of personal financial responsibility. At Sing Sing, the new penologists set about disciplining prisoners as consumers and small investors capable of providing for their immediate needs while planning for the future: In other words, prisoners had to be taught not only how to make a wage, but how to save and spend it. As the authorities understood it, the convict was a citizen-in-training, and the best way to train a citizen was “to teach [him] the basic principles of monetary systems on larger scales... and teach economy.” This principle, which Osborne had first encountered while on the board of the George Junior Republic for children, now became a critical part of the experiment at Sing Sing.

Here, Osborne and his supporters took the idea of “modeling the prison on society” to an entirely new level: They set about simulating what they imagined to be the ideal conditions and relations of civil society. Beginning in 1915, every prisoner at Sing Sing was paid a wage in the specie of token aluminum coin and paper notes bearing the imprint Mutual Welfare League (“MWL”). Each convict was to be assured a minimum weekly wage of $6 but, in the spirit of Taylorist conceptions of motivation and incentive, additional income would be accrued by extra output. The prisoner was then to use his earnings to pay for what Osborne called the “cost of living” at the prison. Over the next year, Sing Sing prisoners proceeded to pay for breakfast (10¢), dinner (25¢), and the barber, laundry, bath, hospital care, and clothing. Convicts also paid weekly cell rental, or, as Osborne described it, room rental, which ranged from $1 to $1.60 per week. In seeking to simulate the civilian economy as nearly as possible, the rent for cells on the upper tiers, known as walk-ups, was lower than for those on the lower tiers, just as in Manhattan’s tenements. As some convicts made and saved more of their token wages, they could rent a more expensive room; those whose productivity fell off, or who spent their tokens unwisely, faced the possibility of having to give up better cells for worse ones.

It was estimated that the average cost of living was $4.65 per week, which left the convict with a surplus of at least $1.35. Consequently, to complete the simulation of a civil economy in which prisoners would be disciplined as consumers and producers, Osborne opened Sing Sing’s own “Self Government Bank and Insurance Company.” Nine prisoners were appointed directors, all of whom had to be stock holders in the bank (their capital consisted of league tender), and convict customers were provided with deposit notebooks, similar to those used by civilians. Prisoners could deposit and withdraw their “money” from the bank, and they could also purchase health and accident insurance, which would cover the costs of any unforeseen medical expenses. As one of the convict Treasury officials put it, business was “conducted on the same basis as any bank on the outside, having the appearance of a real bank with all the small signs and advertisements found in any well conducted banking establishment.” Mirroring the new penological rhetoric back on its authors, the convict treasurer continued:

To note the eager expression upon the men’s faces as they appear before the receiving teller’s window with their small deposit books, would convince you that they are being taught responsibility which the actual handling and earning of money produce in a man, and that responsibility and thrift they are forming in here, and absolutely essential to every man will, we presume, continue upon a man’s release.

Notably, Osborne made no formal provision for taxation; however, the prisoners set up an approximation of a taxation system, by which they required every league member to donate one month’s wages to the league every year, for the purpose of setting up a memorial fund to pay for the funeral of any deceased convict whose family could not or would not pay for a civilian funeral and burial.

Whether or not the Sing Sing prisoners in fact became well-disciplined consumers and producers, as the new penologists and convict stock holders purported, they made great use of the Self Government Bank. By May 1916, $31,424.41 league “dollars” were on deposit, and between two-thirds and three-quarters of the prisoners had accounts at the bank, most of which contained between ten and fifty league “dollars.” Previously, when they had been paid by the state, prisoners had earned 1.5¢ (U.S. legal tender) per day, and this money had been payable upon release from prison. To make the incentive as strong as possible, Osborne and the league leadership discussed ways of facilitating a similar redemption system for the token wages. It was not clear how this would be facilitated, until October 1916, when the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor (NCPPL) set about raising money for this purpose. With the help of the Outside Branch of the League, which donated $1,000 to the fund, the NCPPL raised over $10,000 in legal tender."

- Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941. Cambridge University Press, 2008. McCormick, 394-396

Image is from the book Auburn Correctional Facility by Eilen McHugh for the Cayuga Museum, Arcadia Publishing, 2010.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The writer of a modern Book of Travels, relating the particulars of his being cast away, thus concludes: 'After having walked eleven hours without tracing the print of a human foot, to my great comfort and delight, I saw a man hanging upon a gibbet: my pleasure at this cheering prospect was inexpressible, for it convinced me, I was in a civilized country.'" - from The Sporting Magazine: Or, Monthly Calendar of the Transactions of the Turf, the Chase and Every Other Diversion Interesting to the Man of Pleasure, Enterprize, and Spirit, Volume 3. London, 1794.  p. 42. (Found this anecdote in Lewis Lawes Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, with no source or name.  It's an old joke, though 1794 is as far back as I could find it.  Also found in the satirical New Cyclopaedia of Prose Illustrations: Adapted to Christian Teaching by Elon Foster under "Civilization, Mark of")

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"When, twelve years ago, I first went to prison, I began to remember what I had heard and read about convicts, prisons and prison reform. I knew that Thomas Mott Osborne had spent a week of voluntary imprisonment in Auburn (New York) Prison. I had read the book in which he describes what he experienced and learned during that week. One of the things he learned was that crime is due, among other things, to the individual criminal's maladjustment to his environment; from which Mr. Osborne concluded that crime is a problem in abnormal behavior for the solution of which society should look to the psychiatrist. I knew, too, that leaders in penological thought considered this idea sound and were trying to reform American prisons in accordance with it. It seemed to me that it was an idea which ought to meet with ready response from the convict, since it offered him a chance to learn what, as a maladjusted individual, was wrong with him; and a chance, with the help of the psychiatrist, to readjust and eventually to rehabilitate himself. But I heard, to my great surprise that, for the most part, my fellow convicts were unfriendly to the idea that there was anything wrong with them or that they needed any help from the psychiatrist. I found that their typical attitude was very aptly illustrated by the dictum I have already quoted: "Bug tests are strictly the bunk!" Upon what, I am asked, is this attitude based? What lies behind this contempt for and hostility toward the psychological tests and the psychiatric examinations? After a great deal of close contact with every known type of criminal, I believe that I can answer these questions.

At the very outset, it is well to bear in mind the fact that the average prison inmate is keenly aware of some of the purposes of these tests and examinations. He knows, for example, that if he fails to make a good showing in the psychological test he may be classified as incapable of holding certain desirable intramural jobs. He knows, too, that if the psychiatrist discovers him to be abnormal in his mental or emotional reactions, or antisocial in his attitude toward law and order, he may be classified as incapable of so conducting himself in the free world as to be safely recommended for parole. He knows, in other words, that the psychiatrist and the psychologist have the power (from his point of view) to hurt him. To the extent, moreover, that he fears somehow that he is feeble-minded or queer, and believes that the discovery of his true condition will result in his transfer to a less desirable institution, he concedes to the psychiatrist and the psychologist even greater power to hurt him. Out of this knowledge arises a fear of the mental specialists and of the tests themselves.

This is one fact which underlies the average convict's attitude toward tests and examining specialists. Another fact, the importance of which is not generally understood, is that the average convict regards the psychologist and the psychiatrist as representatives of law and order. He fears, hates, or is bound by the underworld code at least to pretend to fear and hate policemen, prison guards, and other enforcers of the punishing law and order. He makes no subtle distinctions. The warden, the chaplain, the prison physician, any one in authority unless he clearly demonstrates his friendliness is the convict's natural enemy; and thus he numbers the psychologist and the psychiatrist among his enemies.

This hostility toward the officials who represent law and order is based upon reasons which, from the viewpoint of the criminal, are entirely logical. As all experienced criminals know, crime thrives best in social darkness and needs a grim secrecy. Even the younger and less experienced criminals know that it is dangerous to give information about themselves to their enemies, the enforcers of law and order. Thus it is that such axioms as "Keep your mouth shut!" and "Death to informers!" constitute the first and second commandments of the underworld code of behavior. This means that the average criminal deems it not only weak and foolish, but positively dangerous, to be honest and truthful in his dealings with any individual from the ranks of his enemies; and since he usually considers the psychologist and the psychiatrist his enemies, he is pretty sure to be dishonest and untruthful in his dealings with them. This is a fact which these examining specialists will do very well to keep in mind.

There is, finally, the general attitude of the convict toward plans to reform him. Without going into a detailed discussion of this attitude, it is perhaps sufficient to say that the convict is, on the whole, indifferent to any plan of prison reform which does not promise an immediate amelioration of his own present condition. He is not interested in any far-reaching, general plan for classifying and segregating criminals for society's benefit. To such a plan he is often deeply hostile and at best lazily indifferent. He is interested only in plans which promise immediate and personal only in plans which promise immediate and personal benefit to himself; such as better food and entertainment, or a shortening of the length of his imprisonment. Since the psychological tests and the psychiatric examinations not only do not promise him any immediate, personal benefit, but, on the contrary, threaten to bar him from a soft prison job or a chance for release on parole, he is not merely suspicious of them, but actively opposed to them.

The convict is thus seen to have developed an attitude of fear, hatred, active antagonism toward the tests and the examining specialists.

- Victor F. Nelson, Prison Days and Nights. Second edition. With an introduction by Abraham Myerson, M.D. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1936. p. 271-273

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"It was at this point in Sing Sing’s troubled history, with increasingly critical reports of the state’s administration of the prison appearing in the local and national press and the passage of four wardens through the prison gates in as many years, that Thomas Mott Osborne became interested in taking on the wardenship of the prison. He had spent much of the summer of 1914 overseeing the development of the Mutual Welfare League (MWL) at Auburn Prison and, consistent with the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor (NCPPL)’s national drive to put prisoners to work on the highways, the creation of convict road gangs in central New York. When McCormick was suspended from the Sing Sing wardenship in October, Osborne’s supporters, as well as several hundred prisoners at Sing Sing, urged him to consider taking up the wardenship. The prison administrators in Albany also encouraged Osborne to seek the position: Besieged by successive scandals over Sing Sing, Superintendent Riley needed a warden who would both put a stop to the corruption and insubordination (or, at least end the publicity), and provoke positive reviews of his superintendency. Acting-Governor Martin Glynn, meanwhile, was facing a difficult election battle in November 1914 for the Governor’s office: The bitterly divided Democratic party seemed likely to lose to the Republican candidate, Charles S. Whitman, the district attorney of New York City. Under siege both within their own party and by the Republicans, Riley and Governor Glynn looked to Osborne for some traction. They had been impressed by his masterful orchestration of the publicity around the Auburn self-government reforms, and the apparent good order of that prison. Osborne now became the great hope of the independent Democrats.

On Election Day, the Republican Whitman defeated Martin Glynn, thereby throwing Osborne’s offer of the Sing Sing wardenship into doubt. Osborne immediately met with governor-elect Whitman to gauge whether his work at Sing Sing would receive the Governor’s support. In the months leading up to the election, Whitman had toured Auburn Prison and responded very positively to Osborne’s reforms; according to published reports, Whitman now declared he had every confidence in Osborne, and assured the reformer of his full support. (That a Democrat, Osborne, received the blessing of a Republican, Whitman, was something of a coup for independent Democrats, and progressive state-builders more generally, as it suggested that the appointment was in no way partisan). In the meantime, 250 Sing Sing prisoners had signed petitions imploring Osborne to accept the post. As one petition read, Osborne should “put into practice the many excellent ideas you have concerning PRISONS AND PRISONERS” (caps in original). Osborne accepted the wardenship shortly thereafter. “I am not unaware of the many difficulties connected with the position,” wrote Osborne in his letter of acceptance, “but the possibilities of service seem great enough to more than counter-balance them.” Upon receipt of the news, the New York Times underscored what was at stake: Under the frontpage headline, “OSBORNE SETS UP CONVICT REPUBLIC,” it declared, “Sing Sing Prison is to be the ideal penal institution in the State, or the reform plans of Warden Thomas Mott Osborne ... must be pronounced a failure” (caps in original).

Osborne’s appointment to Sing Sing constituted a significant triumph for the champions of the new penology, in general, and for the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor (NCPPL), in particular. E. Stagg Whitin and his fellow reformers at the NCPPL now had an unprecedented opportunity to develop and apply their principles in a thoroughgoing manner. As Whitin, put it:

When Osborne went in as Warden of Sing Sing we obtained a laboratory for working out many of the propositions in which [we] have been interested but have been desiring scientific application.

More than simply a laboratory, Sing Sing became an exhibition of the new penology in action and a showpiece for its supporters’ plans to spark a systematic overhaul of the nation’s penal systems. Under Osborne and with the help of the NCPPL, Sing Sing quickly became a model prison and the institution at the heart of the new penologists’ publicity machine. It also became a rallying point for a powerful coalition of civic volunteers, penal reform groups, academics, and businessmen who embraced the new penology as the penal “science” appropriate to America’s advanced industrial society. The Bastille was now in the hands of penology’s vanguard, and that vanguard was becoming increasingly well-funded and supported.

The NCPPL, the leaders of which had already been quite active in the Auburn experiment, now stepped full square into the light as an organizing base and clearing-house for Osborne’s reforms at Sing Sing. Within weeks of Osborne’s installation at Sing Sing, members of the NCPPL set up committees to work on industrial and educational programs for the prison and invested the first of many substantial amounts of money and voluntary labor into Sing Sing. They were aided in this work by a second organization, the Joint Committee on Prison Reform (JCPR), which had been founded in March 1914 following a series of meetings held by the New York and New Jersey sections of the Women’s Department of the National Civic Federation Formed in the midst of the internecine scandals over Sing Sing, the JCPR’s larger objectives conformed to basic new penological principles, including “the elimination of politics from the management of correctional institutions” and the establishment of convict self-government, just compensation for prisoners, and systematic training for wardens and guards.

From the beginning, the JCPR identified “the Sing Sing problem” as its most pressing concern. In the weeks after Osborne took up the wardenship, JCPR members began organizing traveling exhibits, retained a filmmaker to make documentary and educational films about the Mutual Welfare League and life in prison, and ran a number of very successful fundraising events on behalf of the Sing Sing reforms. They also helped to found a third support committee in November, 1915, following a JCPR-sponsored conference on Sing Sing, at the Hotel Belmont; this committee became known as the New York State Prisons Council and it proceeded to marshall support for the Sing Sing reforms from its plush offices at 605 Madison Avenue. Eventually, the Council raised funds for Sing Sing by inviting the general public to subscribe to its local “Welfare League Association.” As the leadership saw it, these local support committees were essentially, the outside, popular complement of the MWL inside the prisons and a means of galvanizing public opinion in support of the convict leagues and the new penology in general.

In 1915 and 1916, this coalition of new penologists proceeded to plot out six interlocking fields of action in and around Sing Sing. These were prisoner self-government, labor and labor education, financial education, sexuality and mental health, race relations, and relations among keepers, administrators, and prisoners. By simultaneously acting in these fields, the new penologists hoped to rapidly set in place a comprehensive set of programs that would ensure the majority of convicts became manly citizens, who, upon release from prison, would participate in the civilian economy as waged producers, consumers, financial planners, and husbands and fathers. Outside the prison, the new penologists launched a series of aggressive publicity campaigns that were designed to educate civilian Americans about the immorality and inefficiency of the “old system” and the promise of the new penology to make America a stronger, safer, socially just nation.

The first major reform measure undertaken at Osborne’s Sing Sing was to transform former Warden McCormick’s self-government league (the Golden Rule Brotherhood) into a Mutual Welfare League along the Auburn lines. Much as he had done at Auburn, Osborne organized constitutional conventions and elections. He also sent for a delegation of Auburn convicts to go down to Sing Sing to consult with the Sing Sing prisoners about how best to operate a league. Elections were held, and within a few weeks, Sing Sing prisoners began organizing convict-taught classes along the Auburn lines; the league’s entertainment committee was bringing in outside performers, musicians, lecturers, and films; and various other league committees were consulting with the warden on matters ranging from religious services to the beautification of the prison graveyard. As summer approached, the convicts established a baseball league (outfitted thanks to the New York Yankees’ donation of a complete kit of gear and uniforms for twenty-eight players), organized baseball and athletic competitions, and hosted visiting civilian teams. The band practiced its marches and the 250 convicts of Sing Sing’s first Choral Society sang for the prison. Sing Sing convicts also organized a knitting class to supply clothing for the Polish victims of the Great War. Convict “judiciary” committees began to convene in the Chapel, and convicts and guards took their minor complaints (such as spitting in the Chapel, impertinence, and disorderly behavior), to the “court” for adjudication. The league set up a garden committee that, thanks to donations of plants and tools by New York Garden Magazine, began planting flowers and shrubs for the first time at Sing Sing. Within four months of Osborne’s arrival at Sing Sing, the league was operating much as Auburn’s did, and the everyday life of the prison had been transformed.

With the support of his new penological coalition, Osborne then set about restructuring the prison’s industries and training programs. Working in conjunction with the prisoner MWL, the reformers instigated procedures by which incoming convicts would be assigned to “suitable” labor in the prison, selected for industrial training classes, and matched with prospective employers upon release from prison. With money provided by the NCPPL, the MWL set up an employment bureau at Sing Sing in January 1915. This bureau, which consisted of two league officials (prisoners) and the prison agent, Charles Blumenthal, segregated every incoming convict in the “Awkward Squad” for the first two to four weeks of his sentence, and interviewed him for the purposes of matching him to a suitable work company. Following several weeks of interviewing and instruction, the “awkward” convict was then assigned to the appropriate work company on the basis of the bureau’s assessment of his mental and physical condition.

In attempting a comprehensive reconstruction of Sing Sing’s labor companies, Osborne sought both the financial and practical aid of big business and the consent of the trade unions and the American Federation of Labor. In accordance with the progressives’ conception of the need for cooperation among the state, labor, and capital, the NCPPL’s employment bureau actively pursued the involvement of the AFL in the restructuring of work companies at Sing Sing. The new penologists were aware that the support, or at least neutrality, of organized labor would be essential to their efforts. Moreover, they recognized that organized labor was more likely to support the programs if prisoners were able to join trade unions either while still incarcerated or upon release. Almost immediately following Osborne’s appointment at Sing Sing, the NCPPL consulted with Collis Lovely (the vice-president of the Boot and Shoe Workers International Union) and Hugh Frayne (the New York representative of the AFL), about the restructuring of prison industries.

Subsequently, in January 1915, for the first time in Sing Sing’s history, unionists went to Sing Sing Prison to discuss prison industries and labor with the convicts. In the presence of officials from the NCPPL, the unionists and convict leaders of the league discussed the question of whether or not the unions should organize convicts. By the end of this meeting, the labor organizers had assured the league that any prisoners who were “properly trained” could join up while still incarcerated, and that the AFL would work out a method by which the prisoners could pay their membership dues. The minutes of this significant meeting have not survived, but judging from newspaper accounts of the interviews, it is likely that Collis Lovely openly solicited convict membership in his union: The union, he promised, would protect the prisoner member from “evil influence and the opposition of enemies.” The problem with the unions’ offer of membership to “properly trained” prisoners, was that it was difficult to fulfill the criterion of proper training at Sing Sing. The industries were outmoded by free market standards, and the few industrial education classes in existence did not afford adequate instruction. Apparently acknowledging the limitations of the proposal, the AFL subsequently undertook to help Osborne and the NCPPL overhaul the prison industries. Shortly following the initial visit of Lovely and Frayne, a delegation of AFL leaders joined Osborne and the NCPPL’s Frederick Goetz and E. Stagg Whitin in Albany to discuss a comprehensive program of labor reform in New York’s state prisons.

Osborne and Whitin pursued material and political resources from industry as well. A number of American business leaders were quick to support Osborne – in both the financial and discursive senses. In the weeks following Osborne’s installation at Sing Sing, leading industrialists and financiers convening in New York for a meeting of the U.S. Industrial Relations Committee discussed the question of convicts and their rehabilitation. Henry Ford (of the Ford Motor Company) testified that former convicts from Sing Sing could and should be “reclaimed” as responsible citizen–workers. Convinced of convicts’ potential as disciplined consumers and producers, Ford was joined by John D. Rockefeller and a number of New York City stockbrokers and bankers in donating substantial amounts of money, equipment, expertise, and publicity to the Sing Sing experiment.

As negotiations continued with organized labor, Ford and a number of other large industrial corporations worked on arrangements both to train convicts and to provide them with employment upon release. In April 1915, Western Union Telegraph installed equipment at the prison and started a training class in telegraphy for sixty prisoners. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company also began to recruit New York prisoners for employment upon release, and sent an Italianspeaking employee to instruct the Italians at Sing Sing. The well-known New York stockbroker, Frank M. Dick, donated equipment for a mechanical drawing room, automobiles for instruction in car assembly, and typewriters for the stenography class. Dick also waged a campaign to have other businesses set up employment schemes. By October, 1916, Sears Roebuck and Co, Pullman, Burroughs Adding Machine, Packard Motor, Emerson Drug, Pittsburgh Coal, Carnegie Steel, Winchester Repeating Arms, and a number of other large national companies had joined Ford and International Harvester in seeking ex-convicts for employment.

Of all the companies involved in the reforms in New York State, the Ford Motor Company was perhaps the most deeply engaged. Henry Ford took an immediate interest in Osborne’s work at Sing Sing. In February of 1915, he boasted that he could “guarantee to take any convict from Sing Sing and make a man of him.” A few weeks later, he toured Sing Sing’s workshops and addressed the prisoners, and then made arrangements with Osborne for former Sing Sing convicts to go west to Detroit to work in his autoplant. Shortly after Ford’s visit to Sing Sing, Osborne began sending the Ford Motor Company the records of every prisoner about to be released, and Ford’s Sociology Department used these to create a “card index” of prospective employees. Ford’s eastern agents then commenced interviewing those newly released convicts the Sociology Department deemed potentially suited to labor on the auto assembly line. If a convict were hired, he was given a new set of clothes, a new legal name, and a one-way ticket to Detroit. Osborne’s friend and ally, Warden Charles Rattigan, also instituted the scheme at Auburn Prison, and throughout 1915 and 1916, a steady stream of ex-convicts headed west for employment. A number of ex-convicts also began working on Ford’s Long Island assembly line. In the meantime, it was reported in the newspapers that Henry Ford had written to a number of other Midwestern manufacturers, encouraging them to initiate similar prison schemes.

It is difficult to estimate what proportion of the convicts of the state of New York secured work at the Ford factories in Detroit or on Long Island. Although Henry Ford spoke publicly about his interest in reclaiming convicts by giving them employment upon release, the Ford Motor Company was less than open about the specific details of its arrangements with Sing Sing and Auburn. When the New York Times sought confirmation of the Sing Sing scheme, the head of Ford’s Sociology Department refused to acknowledge that an official arrangement existed, and simply noted that former convicts from Sing Sing and other prisons were arriving daily at the Ford’s “Crystal Palace” in Michigan. The following year, however, S. S. Marquis of Ford’s Education Department was far more explicit about the arrangement. In a private letter to Auburn’s Warden Rattigan, he explained that the company’s policy was “to take on as large a number” of former convicts as possible and that the company was receiving many applications from convicts from Auburn, Sing Sing, and other New York state prisons. Although he did not specify how many prisoners were arriving each day, he did comment that too many convicts from Auburn Prison were now arriving at the factory without having first received an offer of employment. (He instructed the warden that only those prisoners who had been given a written offer before leaving prison should go west to Detroit).

Just as the new penologists argued that industrial corporations were essential to the restructuring of convict laboring practices, they actively sought the involvement of civilian educational institutions in the development of academic and vocational courses at Sing Sing. They did not have to lobby hard. In the early months of 1915, as Osborne commenced the reform of Sing Sing, the ´elite activists of the NCPPL and the JCPR were joined by faculty from the schools of law, education, science, and engineering at Columbia University. With the encouragement of Osborne, these academics set up educational classes at Sing Sing and provided the support committees with meeting and fundraising space (most notably, Columbia’s Earl Hall). Their work enabled Sing Sing to offer convicts a comprehensive education. Moreover, the involvement of Columbia academics, as well as people with higher degrees from other prestigious institutions, conferred intellectual and ethical credibility on the Sing Sing experiment.

With the aid of voluntary labor from Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the convicts themselves, Osborne initiated Sing Sing’s first comprehensive educational and training classes. In March 1915, Professor Egbert of Columbia University’s Extension Department began developing plans for a night school. By April 1915, members of the NCPPL’s education committee, which included Columbia faculty and worked in consultation with Prof. Egbert and the Dean of Teachers College, James Russell, had arranged English literacy classes at Sing Sing by day, and a night class in automechanics. Over the following year, the NCPPL organized several other classes: Sing Sing’s first class in telegraphy, taught by a volunteer civilian with a degree from MIT, was underway by February 1916, by which time dozens of prisoners were enrolled in classes in civics, drafting, physics, English literature, and history.

One of the most striking aspects of these new penological reforms at Sing Sing is that all were undertaken without formal funding from the state: The new industries, classes, and recreational activities were almost entirely funded by the NCPPL, philanthropic reform groups, and American corporations. This support extended to the supplementation of civilian employees’ wages: In October 1916, for example, the NCPPL’s education committee decided to supplement the Sing Sing industrial instructor’s salary. It also included tools, materials, and teaching aids; the NCPPL provided Sing Sing with a large number of textbooks, an automobile and parts for the workshop, and a printing press for Auburn Prison. It also provided the convicts’ new “Aurora” band and orchestra a complete set of musical instruments, valued at $3,000, and employed a military band leader to train the musicians.

The new penologists solicited the involvement of capitalists, educators, and elite philanthropists in their reforms at Sing Sing because they realized both that little financial support would be forthcoming from the state, and that “at any and at all times, the latch-key is on the outside” of the prison (as Henry Ford’s secretary once pointedly remarked to Osborne). Former prisoners were less likely to offend again if they had secure employment, they argued, and the most efficacious way of providing employment was to involve large companies such as Ford and Western Union, which, unlike New York’s divided state government, had the capacity and will to revamp prison industries and to absorb significant numbers of ex-convicts. Moreover, the tremendous support accorded Osborne by capitalists, academics, and civic reformers allowed him to bypass the fraught and highly politicized process of requesting funding from the Tammany-dominated Controller’s office and the state legislature: Osborne could effect sweeping changes without permission from Albany politicians and bureaucrats. By freeing Sing Sing from Tammany’s purse strings, the new penological coalition significantly reduced the influence of Tammany Democrats on prison life. At the same time, in disregarding the usual legislative channels by which to procure funding for development, the new penological coalition insulated the prison from democratic processes, whether those processes were dominated by old-style machine politics or the progressive, commission-driven style of government." - Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941. Cambridge University Press, 2008. McCormick, 384-393.

Image is Warden T. M. Osborne, Sing Sing, c. 1915-1916. Bain News Service glass negative. Library of Congress. LC-B2- 3310-6 [P&P] LOT 10877.

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"The sudden transition from imprisonment to liberty is all but indescribable. It can be compared with nothing else that I have experienced in life. It is somewhat like coming up to the surface after years of slavery in the foulest depths of a coal mine. The very air is like old wine, the goodly sunshine too wondrously dazzling to be endured. The world is green and fresh and crystal clear: a flowery, glistening meadow stricken through with the brilliant sunlight which follows an April shower. It is partly like stepping down to earth after hours in the air: the ground is strange and infirm, and the suddenly diminished perspectives give an air of almost cubistic unreality to trees and buildings and planes. It is also a bit like coming out of the ether after an operation: one sees and hears and feels and even speaks, however irrationally; but the senses are blurred and one feels the lingering clutch of the drug-distorted world out of which one is laboriously climbing. The transition from imprisonment to freedom is somewhat like all of these things, but it is an incomparably more vital experience.

The most significant trait of the newly released prisoner is that he is the human being who has suffered and who has resolved to obtain some compensation for his suffering. Whether or not he has deserved to suffer, and whether or not Society has succeeded in the Gilbertian plan of "making the punishment fit the crime", need not concern us now. It certainly does not concern the ex-convict. All he knows is that he has suffered: that he has gone through a gruelling ordeal, that something or somebody, somehow, must make amends."

- Victor F. Nelson, Prison Days and Nights. Second edition. With an introduction by Abraham Myerson, M.D. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1936. 246-247.

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"It is also important to remember that the whole issue of treatment was not just a matter for psychiatrists and hospital administrators. In certain cases, political considerations also played a key role. Various decisions made early in the century were to prove important for doctors’ rights to prescribe therapy and for the acceptance of lobotomy. In other words, during the 1920s, the profession and its patients became a topic for political debate, an interest that would eventually lead to legislation on both castration and sterilisation. 

While the laws on sterilisation were specifically designed to prevent certain people—“the feeble minded” as they were referred to in those days—alcoholics, epileptics, the insane, psychopaths and others—from having children, castration was seen as having both preventive and therapeutic aims. It was intended as a way of preventing sex offenders from re-offending, but also as a form of relief to improve the lives of non-criminals with “abnormal sexuality,” i.e. for treating hyper-sexuality, masturbation, homosexuality, transvestism and other “sexual perversions” that led to “mental disorders or social deroute” for the afflicted.

Although many of the “sexual perversions” fell within the domain of psychiatry, psychiatrists did not lead the call for castration. The agenda was set in parliament, and the politicians were urged on by of a range of groups, including the Danish Women’s Society. In 1921 the Society submitted a petition demanding a tougher line on sex offenders. Signed by 105,000 Danes, it set the ball rolling in a debate about “perverts in society,” a debate in which the term castration was frequently bandied about.

The physician Christian Keller, head of the large institutions for people with intellectual disabilities in Jutland, was among the earliest advocates of castration for mentally subnormal sex offenders and others with perverse inclinations. The same was the forensic scientist Knud Sand, who had experimented with testicular transplants from heterosexual to homosexual men in 1921. The prominent Social Democrat Karl Kristian Steincke also welcomed such ideas. In his 1920 book The Welfare System of the Future, he promoted both social reform and eugenics, claiming that too many of “the very lowest orders, including criminals and the feeble-minded of every kind” bred far faster than the rest of the population and that made them a burden on society. If social reforms were to support such people, their number had to be curbed. In 1924, after he was appointed Minister of Justice in the first Social Democratic government, Steincke set up a commission to address these issues. The aim was to find ways of pacifying sexual deviants so that they did not trouble the general population and of limiting reproduction by the “inferior” and “degenerate” so that were less of a financial burden on society. This led to a bill on castration and sterilisation, which was to be put to both chambers in 1929.

Steincke was one of many members of parliament to support the bill. The Liberal government that came to power in early 1929 also called for surgical interventions, a position that enjoyed widespread support among politicians in general. During the first reading of the bill, the only profound criticism came from the Conservative politician and ordained minister Alfred Bindslev, who feared the act would be a slippery slope to “far more extreme eugenics experiments.” He also pointed out that both castration and sterilisation could alter patients’ personalities and lead to depression and mental illness. The bill also angered some doctors, who warned that the medical profession was about to inflict “irreparable damage” on its standing and reputation. A few lawyers, too, made critical comments, but the politicians did not waver. On 30 May 1929, the bill was passed by 116 votes to six. Denmark became the first country in the world with consistent legislation on sterilisation and castration.

Knud Sand of the Institute of Forensic Medicine was commissioned to assess the condition of those who had been castrated. As well as somatic studies and interviews with the subjects, Sand collected all of the severed testicles. Many of those that he preserved in formalin at the Institute had been removed from homosexuals, and the understandably unpopular Sand was known in gay circles as “the Stonefisher.” While Sand used the severed testicles in his own, highly specialised sexual biology research, his follow-up studies were intended for public consumption. He thought the results were highly positive. Almost all those examined could be termed “totally asexualised.” Many were released or discharged after the surgery, and this was considered highly beneficial “for the economy.”

Some of those castrated reported physical and psychological side-effects, but Sand maintained that these accounts should be treated with caution. He wrote that while some of the “castrated claim some degree of emotional depression, lassitude or mental somnolence and indifference, memory impairment, dulled imagination and interests, or portrayed life as grey upon grey,” they should not be taken that seriously, as they were often psychopaths who were “hypersensitive, liable to moods” and had “a propensity to quarrelsome behaviour.” Since castration was good for both the individual and society, he recommended less reluctance to use it and new legislation to that effect. The politicians considered the act a success, and an amended bill on sterilisation of the “feeble-minded” was adopted by a large majority in 1934. Compared to the previous act, which had only allowed voluntary sterilisation, the new one gave doctors powers to perform compulsory sterilisation and castration of so-called feeble-minded people. In May 1935, a new, amended act was again passed, this time approving the sterilisation and castration of individuals who were not feeble-minded (mentally ill, alcoholics, psychopaths, etc.). At least 11,00 people were sterilised before the repeal of the Compulsory Sterilisation Act in 1967, and 1,012 Danes were castrated before that procedure was stopped in 1969.

- Jesper Vaczy Kragh, Lobotomy Nation: The History of Psychosurgery and Psychiatry in Denmark (Springer: 2021) p. 71-72.

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"Generally speaking, Danish textbooks in the 1930s and 1940s put forward a somatic view of mental illness, with a particular focus on the physical causes. They were described as, for example, “brain disorders with predominantly mental symptoms.” The causes of mental illness were primarily thought to be hereditary or the result of physical defects or injuries. As such, the psychiatrists saw little difference between psychiatry and other fields of medicine. The same methods used in other branches of medicine could also be used to study and map mental illnesses. In the textbooks of the era, environmental, psychological and social issues generally played a minimal role in the causes and development of the conditions.

Diagnoses that fell outside of this somatic framework were instead categorised as psychogenic psychoses. This transitional group included various forms of afflictions that, according to Jens Christian Smith, were caused by “mental impressions, usually of an unpleasant nature.” Both Smith and Wimmer, who had been the prime movers in introducing the concept to Denmark, made it an open question as to whether certain people were more strongly predisposed to psychogenic psychoses. Certain historical events had cast doubt on this. As Smith explained, the experience of those who fought in World War I suggested that violent events could induce psychogenic psychoses in “an otherwise normal person.” However, he thought that it was probably “more common in cases of psychogenic psychoses that pre-existing mental peculiarities would be found, in the form of imbalances, hypersensitivity, touchiness or other peculiar characteristics,” Wimmer concurred. In his 1936 textbook, he referred to World War I in a footnote, before emphasising that psychogenic psychoses were “the product of a predisposed mental life.”

Psychogenic psychoses were a motley collection of disorders with little in common apart from their origins in “mental trauma.” Such trauma might be caused by any number of sudden, shocking experiences—war, a train crash, a fire, violent assault, sexual assault, etc.—but also “more persistent mental influences,” such as an unhappy marriage, imprisonment, social deprivation, etc. Different patients had responded differently to their trauma. Depression was a common symptom, but others included “altered consciousness,” “a fugue state” and “state of stupor,” in which the patient lay completely immobilised, unable to speak or eat. Patients could also suffer from states of “bewilderment,” characterised by hallucinations, agitation and violence, or “hysterical episodes” with fainting, convulsions, screaming and yelling. Others felt aggrieved and persecuted."

- Jesper Vaczy Kragh, Lobotomy Nation: The History of Psychosurgery and Psychiatry in Denmark (Springer: 2021), p. 102-103.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"However, his father made no effort to pursue the subject. Instead he said abruptly, “So you’re Lettie’s boy.”

Yours too, Joe was on the verge of retorting, but his father was scowling, and it struck him for the first time that his father was probably as uncertain as he as to how to proceed.

“You’re a good size.” His father rolled the cigar back and forth across his fingertips. “Kind of scrawny, but you’ll fill out. How old are you?”

“Going on twenty.”

“Got a job?”

“Part time, here and there. And summers. I go to college, to UCLA.”

“Still in the same house, are you? You and Lettie and the dummy?”

“She’s not a dummy! Pauline is slow, that’s all. But she can talk, she’s no trouble, and everybody likes her.”

His father shrugged. “Is that all? Just the three of you?”

“Uncle Jerry stays with us from time to time.”

“That free-loader. That parasite. Long on talk, short on action.”

“He does like to talk.”

“Big bag of wind. Well, if it’s money trouble, kid, I—”

“Oh no,” Joe said hurriedly. “Mother’s been doing pretty well with the store, all things considered. Business’ll probably pick up, too, Southern California’s bound to be a boom area once the defense contracts start to spread around.”

“Defense my ass. War, you mean. We’re going to—” He was interrupted by the return of Melba, who shoved the papers into a pile on the corner of the bridge table, then set a coffeepot on it and two mugs, and turned her back, all without saying a word.

“How do you take it?”

“Black.” Actually he liked milk with his coffee, but he did not see any; and he was afraid not only of putting Melba out, but of giving his father trouble.

But when his father filled a cup to the brim and shoved it at him, Joe was hard put to swallow without choking or making a face. The coffee was not only bitter, but sour, as though it had been standing around too long, heated and reheated time after time; it had a taste like the smell of the half-rancid lemons outside on the path.

“They’re going to get you, kid,” his father said, rinsing coffee around in his mouth as though it were toothbrush water. Maybe it loosened up the cigar taste? “Don’t think they won’t. First comes  the draft, then they drag you off to the war.”

“Oh, I know!” Joe said eagerly. He thought he must sound like a fool, but this was his first chance to talk seriously. He went on in a rush, “I don’t kid myself about that. My mother doesn’t understand though. It’s hard for her to see why I’ve suddenly gotten interested in politics. The fact is, I’m more concerned with the antiwar movement than I am with college. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

His father, his face furrowed, muttered something he could not catch.

Then he ground out his cigar butt and said, “What’s all this stuff with movements. You’d be better off keeping your nose clean and trying to make a living until Morgenthau and his crowd shove you into the Army.”

“Why should I toss in the sponge? I don’t mind telling you, there’s plenty of students want no part of the war.”

“Students,” his father said scornfully. “Bunch of Commies. You see them trying to stop the Russians from gobbling up Finland? That’s the only goddam country ever paid its debts, but you think the college boys care?”

He added irrelevantly, “Girls and good times.”

“At least we’re trying to do something. As a matter of fact, I’m on my way to the national convention of the American Student Union.”

“Now what do you want me to do about that?” his father asked. “Pat you on the back? You want to save your skin, don’t make out like you’re a hero in the bargain.”

“It’s not just my skin,” Joe persisted. Looking not at his father but at the worn rug that lay in the shade between them, he felt that maybe they might at least have in common the fact that they both wanted no part of the war. He went on doggedly, “When the CIO was getting started, I never paid too much attention to it. Maybe I was too young. But now I think that if the anti-war people and the students and the labor movement can get together —”

“The labor movement! Christ I hate that word. Where’d you pick up all this crap, from that dumb drunk uncle of yours? Don’t you know who John L. Lewis’s stooges are, big fella like you, college boy? Bunch of red agents, that’s what. Don’t you know what they’ve been doing right here in the state of California?”

“As a matter of fact, I thought I’d try and find out—I’m going up to the San Joaquin Valley, to see what’s been going on with those cotton pickers in that strike.”

“I’ll tell you what’s been going on. Commie agitators stirring up the Mexicans and Okies so you can’t get a goddam day’s work out of any of them. Think that’s funny, like in College Humor? Not to somebody that’s been knocking himself out trying to make a go of it.”

“All I said was—”

“I heard what you said. Those brain trusters never taught you at college that it’s the same Jew crowd behind both Lewis and Roosevelt, no matter how the two of them pretend they’re feuding. You know why? Because the professors are hand in glove with Morgenthau and the Jews to drag us into the war and turn the country over to the CIO.” 

With real satisfaction, as though he had invented the phrase, he repeated it: “Hand in glove.”

“I guess …” Joe cleared his throat in order that he might go on, and was almost surprised that it was not blood risen to his mouth. “… you and I haven’t got much to talk about.”

His father clattered cup into saucer and flung back his head in an oddly youthful gesture, to get his straight black hair out of his eyes. As though he were discussing the weather, he said neutrally, “I didn’t go to see you. You came to see me.”

Joe hated himself for sitting there, still, on the sofa, as though he were nailed to it, but he could not gather strength or breath to rise and flee. At last, though, he was able to pull himself erect. 

Looking down at his father seated before his coffee and his columns of figures, he said, “That’s true. Now that I’ve satisfied my curiosity, I’ll be on my way. And you can get back to what really matters to you.”

These words seemed to touch something in his father that had hitherto been beyond his reach. He too arose, his long, defeated countenance darkening with concentration. “Now wait a minute,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way. Let me get Melba to fix you a sandwich.”

“That’s all right I’m not hungry.”

“It’s no trouble for her, it’ll only take her a minute.”

“I’ve got no appetite.”

His father hitched up his trousers. “Then let me give you a lift downtown. I can run you back to the bus terminal, or wherever, in my pickup.”

“Don’t bother. I can go the way I came.”

As he walked to the front hall to retrieve his bag, Joe could feel his father’s breath on his neck; he was afraid to stop for fear they would collide, but at the door he had to turn once more.

“I thought you were coming to put the bite on me, see,” his father said, his voice somewhat shrill with uncertainty. “And I’m in no position—”

“Neither am I."

“Then don’t go off mad.” His father barred the door. He held Joe’s arm in a surprisingly strong grip while with the other hand he dug deep in his pants pocket.

“Here.” He fished out something and pressed it into Joe’s free hand. “It might bring you luck. Everybody can use a little luck.”

Joe pushed open the screen door with his shoulder and went on out with his bag before him, not looking back. When he was halfway down the walk his father called after him, “Keep your nose clean, kid!”

All the long way back to the highway, he did not unclench his fist, nor did he shift the bag from one hand to the other. Only after he had stood for some time at the intersection, alone, waiting for a ride to Route 99, did he open his hand.

A silver dollar lay there, wet from his sweat. As he stared down at it, and at the deep circular groove that it had bitten into his palm, the odor of lemons seemed to rise to his nostrils, dilating and prickling them.

He lifted his arm and flung the coin away with as much force as he could muster, and then, as he felt the tears coursing down his cheeks, he rubbed his palms along his thighs and pressed them to his wet face, rocking slowly back and forth at the side of the road, waiting for someone to come along and drive him away." - Harvey Swados, Standing Fast: A Novel (1971, 2013 Open Road edition)