Massachusetts Reformatory

History

The first Massachusetts Prison, designed by Charles Bulfinch, was built in Charlestown in 1806 and reorganized in the 1820s as a model penitentiary. The rules and regulations of the facility provided for an initial period of solitary confinement for each inmate to ensure reflection and remorse, to be followed until the end of their sentence by “hard labor” in silence, augmented if necessary by the use of the whip. As described by one warden in an 1829 report, the inmates moved and acted “like machines” under the discipline of the penitentiary. Under labor contracts, the productive labor of the prisoners was assumed not only to provide for the costs of the prison but also provide a profit for the state, a goal retained but frequently not met.

With the aging of the Massachusetts Prison at Charleston, in 1878 a new facility, considered a model prison for the time, was built at Concord, with individual cells lit by large windows. In 1884, in the midst of controversy over both the profitability of its vocational shops and the desire that Massachusetts respond to the recommendations of the 1870 Principles of the National Congress of Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline, the governor signed a bill that returned the prisoners held at Concord to Charleston and established the Massachusetts Reformatory for Men. Rejecting the systems of isolation, lockstep, and fear, the principles emphasized that the goals of prison discipline were to reward good conduct, industry, and educational efforts—to resocialize, retrain, and reform offenders, especially the youthful offender. One consequence of these goals was the movement to indeterminate sentences, with release from prison based on the individual efforts of the prisoner.

Massachusetts had already responded to the reformatory movement after successful agitation by influential women within the state, with the construction of the Reformatory Prison for Women at Sherborn (later renamed Framingham) in 1877—one of the first reformatories for women in the United States. Containing large work- and school-rooms, the reformatory offered the hope that with disciplined work and education, and incentives of increased privileges and conditional release, vagrants, prostitutes, drunkards, and “idle and disorderly women” would be reformed. Women convicted of more serious offenses continued to be sentenced to the penitentiary.

The Men's Reformatory at Concord

In an effort to bring the 1870 principles into practice in Massachusetts for male inmates, in December 1884, the name of the Concord Prison was changed to become the Massachusetts Reformatory for Men. The initiative was based on the widely heralded New York Reformatory for Men in Elmira, founded by Zebulon Brockway. However, like Elmira, it did not live up to its promise, facing, as did the New York facility, major overcrowding as well as other difficulties. In the first nine months of operation it held more than 700 prisoners.

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