Norfolk Prison

History

Howard Belding Gill (1890–1989), a Harvard MBA with an interest in prison reform, was first superintendent of the Prison Colony at Norfolk. He was appointed in 1927 and directed the completion of work on the prison. The first prisoners came to the site in 1927 from the Charlestown State Prison. They finished building much of the prison complex itself, including the construction of the perimeter wall.

Gill considered Norfolk to be one of the first examples of “a new prison discipline.” In contrast to the traditional Auburn prison model, which he believed was designed to “break the spirit of the criminal,” Gill envisioned a community with an emphasis on education and industry (Gill, 2001, p. 49). Norfolk prisoners would not wear traditional prison uniforms. They were granted a stake in the management of the institution through participation in an advisory council.

Gill's philosophy depended upon classification. At its simplest, this entailed sorting the tractable from the intractable. He argued that the traditional view that “every prisoner should be treated alike” (2001, p. 51) could not be supported in light of the recent psychological studies by such criminological pioneers as William Healy (1915) and Bernard Glueck (1916). “Tractable prisoners,” he proposed, should be housed in cottages or dormitories, rather than “massive, monolithic monkey cages” (Gill, 2001, p. 51) and provided with “work, education, medical care religion, recreation [and] family welfare … designed to adjust the offender to the society to which he will return, i.e. acculturation” (Gill, 2001, p. 52; italics in original).

After four inmates escaped from the colony, Gill came under fire from the Massachusetts legislature, and following a controversial hearing in 1934, he was removed as superintendent (Johnsen, 1999). The second superintendent, Maurice N. Winslow, continued many of Gill's policies, though he instituted uniforms and did not allow prisoners to own dogs. Norfolk maintained a reputation as a progressive institution, supporting such diverse activities as poetry reading, debating society, and an academic quiz team.

Perhaps the most famous alumnus of the Norfolk Prison Colony was Malcolm Little (Malcolm X), who lauded the “culture” of the institution as he found it in 1948 and credited the educational support he received there with enabling him to achieve a level of fluency that far surpassed his formal eighth grade education. According to Malcolm X: