"After Confederation, when the province's sources of income were reduced to licences, fees, direct taxes and the crown lands, the financial importance of the forests increased tremendously. Whenever the provincial treasurer required additional revenue to meet his obligations (this usually happened just before an election), the Commissioner of Crown Lands merely auctioned off another batch of timber limits. By this time good timber was in such demand that lumbermen were prepared to bid against one another—paying what was called a bonus—for cutting rights. Timber dues (paid on the amount cut at the time of cutting) and ground rent (paid annually on the area under licence) were, of course, in addition to the initial bonus payment. Good reasons could always be found for holding a timber limit auction. The usual one was to protect the area from fire. Encroaching settlers or railroads as a rule supplied the necessary menace. Better the timber be cut over than burnt over. But one of the most obvious and persistent pressures for such sales, succinctly stated in E. H. Bronson's (a lumberman, Minister without Portfolio in the Mowat cabinet) notes for a speech defending the 1892 auction was simply: "WE WANTED THE MONEY." To help pay for railroad subsidies, roads, public institutions, hospitals, public works and the Parliament Buildings, Sandfield Macdonald's government sold off 635 square miles of timber; Edward Blake's ministry parted with 5,031 square miles in one year, and over the next 20 years Oliver Mowat disposed of 4,234 square miles. Between 1867 and 1899 bonuses, dues and ground rent from the lumber industry produced in excess of $29 million, or approximately 28 per cent of the total provincial revenue. Only the federal subsidy brought in a larger sum. In large measure the flourishing state of Ontario's public finances after Confederation can be traced to this extraordinary income from forest regulation. As a result, politicians were not overly eager to pass on this paternity free of charge to homestead farmers if the lumbermen would literally pay millions for it. And while the state had sold rights to the lumbermen and was to a certain extent bound to protect those rights, they were not those of exclusive possession. No politician dared to appear to exclude the pioneer, the symbolic embodiment of all civic virtue, from the northern forest. The device of crown ownership and licensed rental gave the lumbermen access to the forest, returned a welcome revenue, and under ideal circumstances generated cut-over lands that could then be recovered from the lumbermen and passed on free to the homesteaders. The visibly temporary tenure of the lumberman, expressed in his annual licence and ground rent charges, allowed the state to open up desirable lands when pressed to do so. Because it served the political and economic interests so well, crown ownership continued to serve as the basis of Ontario's forest law on into the twentieth century."

- H. V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines & Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849-1941. Second Edition. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005 (1974). p. 18-19

"As stated previously, the system of transportation, at least as far as Australians were concerned, was a system for bringing cheap labour to the market. Australia was an open prison system that provided the colonies with workers – on infrastructure projects in government chain gangs or on assignment to local employers – who were still officially serving their sentences. The original intention of the ticket of leave system was to promote good behaviour in convicts as well as to provide labour for growing economies far quicker than would otherwise have been possible. Convicts on this ticket boosted the economy – and they could be sent places where free labour did not want to go, such as uninviting and geographically dispersed rural settlements. The system was, in essence, a grand device for sorting labour. It was also a way of ‘rewarding’ those who possessed higher levels of useful skills with a quicker release from the drudgery and pains of convict life.

This system of convict labour supply probably reached its apogee in Western Australia in the early 1850s, at which time over half the transported men were working for private employers. Approximately a quarter of the convicts who arrived in Western Australia were issued tickets of leave upon entry, so they were able to take employment assignments as soon as they started their lives in the colony. However, when the government removed the stipulation that convicts had to spend half their sentence in a British prison before being transported, new arrivals to Australia in the 1850s were forced to spend more time in the ‘probationary system’ – on road gangs and on government work – before being eligible for a ticket of leave.

For both the Australian and the British authorities, the ticket of leave system had three main benefits. First, it delivered labour to the colony as soon as was practicably possible. Second, it gave colonial authorities an unusually high level of control over the ex-convict population. Third, it considerably reduced the costs of the convict system.

However, when faced with the prospect of the end of convict transportation, the British government regarded the application of the ticket of leave system on home soil suspiciously. Employers in Britain were not crying out for labour, and the newly established police constabularies had enough on their plate without supervising more and more convicts and ex-convicts. While the opportunity to reduce the costs of imprisonment through a system of early release was appealing, and might even have been viewed as fundamental to the running of a large prison estate (which was already proving to be expensive), the public could take fright at ex-convicts being ‘at large’ in their towns and cities. This was something that would require delicate handling. There was no dominant view on how all this should be achieved.

The first question was, whose views would prevail? [Joshua] Jebb [Surveyor-General of Prisons] started with an optimistic approach. He suggested that the authorities encourage ex-convicts released in Britain to opt for assisted passage to Western Australia. He was convinced that this scheme would see many willing volunteers sign up (he even assumed that the scheme was so attractive that ex-convicts would pay their own fares); however, it is unlikely that his rosy view of the opportunities offered by voluntary transportation would have attracted many ex-convict émigrés, especially since they would still have been subject to restrictions and regulations – and they would still have to hold a ticket of leave on their person whenever they ventured outside of their homes. No, the system would have to work for those who were intent on resettling into their own British neighbourhoods following release from prison.

Knowing the anxieties around released convicts, Jebb tried to assure government that the ticket system was safe and reliable. He was careful to explain that tickets of leave were only granted to those who were ‘ready’ to be released. This explains the extensive bureaucracy in Australia related to convicts’ characters, assignments, offences committed upon sentencing, and so on: these records were needed to assess who was ready to receive their ticket. A scaling-up of prison bureaucracy can be seen in the United Kingdom from the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, it is these sets of records that form the basis of much modern historical research on convicts. However, when the convict system was repatriated to the British mainland, Jebb turned away from an individualistic approach (the kind of labour-sorting device that had predominated in Western Australia). Instead, he favoured a form of ‘conditional release’, whereby most if not all convicts received a stipulated and prescribed period of release (subject to certain conditions, such as not committing more offences and not consorting with known offenders and/or prostitutes). The promise of release on licence under certain conditions would, Jebb hoped, produce a more orderly response to imprisonment – if you kept your nose clean while inside, you could calculate the day of your release with a fair amount of accuracy.

The Penal Servitude Act of 1853 was the government’s first attempt to repatriate the convict system. As McConville noted, ‘all the essentials of penal servitude were in full operation considerably before 1853: all that the 1853 Act added to these was the certainty of release on licence in this country for all those whose sentences would not, before the passing of the Act, have exceeded fourteen years’ transportation’. Despite the public’s general dissatisfaction with tickets of leave, the system seems to have been put into operation with few problems. However, the publication (and republication in the newspapers) of annual statistics of recorded crime in 1856 and 1857, which appeared to show unacceptably large amounts of offending, caught the public’s attention.

The annual statistics collected by the police and the courts also revealed to the public a new putative category of ‘criminal classes and habitual offenders’, who were said to inhabit the rookeries and haunts of British towns and cities. This group was thought to be comprised of habitual offenders, ex-convicts, and ticket of leave men who had not been reformed by their prison experiences. High levels of crime began to be strongly associated with men who would previously have been transported to Australia, and newspaper reports lost no time in reflecting this view:

Shockingly attacked by a Ticket-of-Leave convict. The murderer, Jenkins, was convicted and sentenced to transportation in 1853. For some time after his release as a Ticket-of-Leave man he was in employment. He had no excuse of destitution or inability to earn a maintenance honestly, therefore, for relapsing into crime.

The under secretary at the Home Office, Horatio Waddington, who disliked Jebb’s ideas about early release and the act of 1853 that made them concrete, took advantage of the public’s increasing disquiet. He held the view that a ticket or conditional release should only be granted to a prisoner who was too ill to continue serving their sentence (he did not anticipate that this would apply to many), or who had served their time with such remarkable good conduct that they deserved to be rewarded with conditional release (he did not anticipate many being released on these grounds, either). Moreover, Waddington felt that release should be curtailed on the suspicion (not the conviction) of further offences being committed, and that licences should be permitted to be revoked on a whim: a capricious act on the part of the authorities. As a result, released convicts would live in terror of being recalled to prison and therefore be cautious not to draw any adverse attention to themselves.

Although his views were at the more extreme end of the debate, Waddington’s was not the only voice that outlined concern with the system as it stood. In the House of Lords in 1857, Lord Berners stated that

there was no doubt that the public mind had been very greatly agitated in reference to the ticket-of-leave system, and that the opinion was almost universally entertained, as appeared by the remarks of learned Judges, including the noble and learned Lord the Chief Justice of England himself, the Lord Mayor and magistrates of the metropolis, the recorders of different boroughs, grand juries and courts of quarter-sessions in various counties, that the system was a complete failure.

On 17 March 1857, Viscount Dungannon voiced his opinion on the matter, stating that ‘the present system was most fearful in its operation, tending to increase crime to a terrible extent, and dangerous to the peaceable part of the community. The public, therefore, had some claim for a satisfactory explanation on the subject.’ A government spokesperson replied that it was not necessary to suspend the operation of the ticket of leave system, because it only concerned a small number of convicts. ‘What is the number?’ shouted the Viscount, to which the spokesperson replied that he did not know, but he did not think it was many – not a very convincing answer given the considerable disquiet about the system among the public. None of these views carried the day, however, and – following a meeting of the Select Committee – a regulated and clear system was put in place with the introduction of the Penal Servitude Act of 1857.

The new system gave the kind of expectation of release in a calibrated manner for which Jebb had advocated. However, some saw injustice in each convict having the same proportion of their sentence reduced on licence. Why should first-time offenders, asked the anonymous author of Penal Servitude, receive the same proportion as habitual offenders who ‘spend half their lives getting into prison and the other half getting out again’? Yet, in practice, individual convicts received different periods of conditional release, structured by their progression through the system (i.e., whether they had shortened their time to release through good behaviour and carrying out their prison labour, or lengthened their time inside by breaking prison rules). While the act of 1853 had meant the certainty of release on licence in England, the act of 1857 offered the possibility of early release. An important distinction between the two acts was that, although both allowed for release on licence, only the act of 1857 allowed for remission or ‘time off’ the sentence in a more systematic manner; this resulted in a considerable amount of variation in release practices in the early years of the system as well as a sense of injustice among prisoners, especially by those held in the same prisons."

- 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. 36-40

"Contractors who appealed for the protection of strikebreakers and their property had good reason to expect armed intervention by the state. In British North America the law appeared ambiguous as to the legality of combinations of workers. Intersection of common law and criminal statute in the Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia left room for conflicting judicial decisions in this area and remains the subject of debate among legal historians. However, a primary advisor on labour relations to the Board of Works for the Canadas was unequivocal in declaring the labourers' combinations illegal, and in this was representative of others involved in controlling labour on the canals.

This was also the clear message presented to the government and the labourers by the commissioners investigating disturbances on the Lachine and Beauharnois. Their 1843 report concluded that the stipendiary magistrate appointed for the Beauharnois, on learning of the plans for a general strike, had been remiss in not impressing on the labourers "the illegality of all combinations of that nature and the punishment reserved for all those, who would dare to resort to such violations of the law."

Moreover, little ambiguity surrounded the contractors' right to continue operations during a strike. Contractors enjoyed widespread support among newspaper editors and the government, courts, and state law enforcement officers, who shared a general belief that strikers who interfered with those continuing work were, at best, acting outside the law and, at worst, "evil." They invited criminal charges for a wide range of activities, not necessarily violent. Men on the ground like superintendent Power might decry the low wages which pushed families to destitution, but their overriding responsibility was to continue the work, and even he could not condone any action which disrupted operations. As one scholar has argued, lack of clarity in this area of the law may have encouraged a legal zone of toleration of trade unions and strikes, which reflected a social zone of toleration evolving prior to Confederation, though strikes by canallers did not fall within that zone. Even had they, most meaningful action towards achieving their goals left strikers liable to prosecution. 

At the heart of official efforts to protect strikebreakers was the belief that most labourers would be content to accept the wages and conditions offered if they were properly instructed concerning their responsibilities to their employers, the government, and God and if the few troublemakers could be weeded out.

The board also threw the resources of the state into policing. In 1843 it took the initiative in creating a constabulary to serve along the Welland, and during 1843 and 1844 from ten to twenty constables were on duty at any one time, their numbers diminishing as the workforce decreased after 1845. The board also wasted no time in creating an armed constabulary of twenty-two officers on the Williamsburg Canals under the command of Captain Wetherall, and in the wake of the labour unrest on the Lachine and Beauharnois, it reinforced its commitment to routine policing of the canals in Lower Canada. The 1845 Act for the Preservation of the Peace near Public Works committed the state more deeply to enforcement of the law through mounted police stationed on the public works wherever the government considered them necessary, not on a piecemeal basis as had been the case to that point. At a time when even the larger communities in the Canadas, along with most communities in North America, still relied on only a few constables working under the direction of a magistrate, the size of these police forces, frequently reaching over twenty officers on any one canal, demonstrated the government's commitment to labour control. The board also set out a model for state intervention in labour unrest which would be emulated, though hard to match, in subsequent decades.

Canal police forces worked closely with existing magistrates, whose responsibility it was to ensure the police acted within the law, though official investigation into the conduct of the Welland Canal force revealed that magistrates did not always keep constables from abusing their powers, exceeding their authority, operating outside the law, and increasing sectarian tensions by expressing open hostility to Catholicism. Along the Williamsburg Canals inhabitants provided additional details of mounted police who, far from generating respect for the law, made fools of it and themselves and endangered local citizens by carrying out their responsibilities recklessly and while drunk. Inhabitants of Williamsburg Township petitioned the governor general concerning the conduct of Captain James MacDonald and his men during a circus at Mariatown, when

through the misconduct of the police on their duty two persons have been maltreated and abused cut with swords and stabbed, taken prisoners and escorted to the police office that all this abuse was committed by having the constables in a state of intoxication on their duty when the Magistrate who commanded them was so drunk that he fell out of a cart. A pretty representative is Mr. MacDonald.

Their conduct provoked the priest on the canal to warn the labourers:

They are like a parcel of wolves and roaring mad lions seeking the opportunity of shooting you like dogs and all they want is the chance in the name of God leave those public works.

While the forces fulfilled various functions, in the eyes of the Board of Works their primary purpose was to ensure completion of the works within the scheduled time. Even protection of contractors from higher wages was not in itself sufficient reason for increasing the size of one of the forces. When, in December 1845, Power asked for accommodation for a superintendent of police at the Welland Junction, the board answered that the old entrance lock was the only place where a strong force was necessary, since no combination of labourers for wages on the other works could delay the opening of the navigation, "the paramount object in view." A later communication expressed more forcefully the board's general approach to funding police forces, stating that the only circumstances under which the expense of keeping the peace could be justified were those in which the availability of the canals to trade was in jeopardy.

Despite this apparently strict criterion for funding police, the board usually intervened to protect strikebreakers, probably because any strike threatened to delay opening of the navigation in the long, if not the short, term. Indeed, in their 1843 report to the legislature, the commissioners argued that it was part of their responsibility to help contractors meet deadlines by providing adequate protection to those labourers willing to work during a strike. In meeting this responsibility the board at times hired as many as sixteen extra men on a temporary basis. When it was a question of get ting the canals open for navigation, the government appears to have been willing to go to almost any lengths to continue the work. In the winter of 1845, the governor general finally gave Power the authority to hire whatever number of constables it would take to ensure completion of construction by spring.

In the following decade, no special force was created for either the Junction or the Chats Canal; perhaps the expense did not appear warranted, given the number of labourers employed at any one time and the relatively sparsely settled area of the country in which the projects were located. That left policing to local magistrates. Magistrate Cook, responsible for the area around the Junction, complained that he could not provide the additional time and money necessary to respond to disturbances on the canal, particularly since he could not afford the help of special constables. Were the department able to help cover his expenses and the cost of a sufficient number of special constables, he would do his best to maintain the peace. Inhabitants along the canal also believed they were in need of protection from the disturbances in their immediate area and requested appointment of a stipendiary magistrate and police force. Superintendent Page advised the department that a stipendiary magistrate and what he called "a sort of reserve police," along the lines suggested by Magistrate Cook, might ultimately be required, but it does not appear to have been created."

On the European and North American Railway, the special railway police force created by the New Brunswick government included in its mandate protection of the work and those who wished to continue work during a strike. It expanded from an initial four permanent constables to nine by the end of the first year, and the head of the force argued that more were always needed, particularly on the thirty-two miles between Sussex and Salisbury, where the "facilities for the protection of the settlers [were] anything but good." The force was large enough, however, to protect those labourers who wished to return to work when the contractor refused to accede to strikers' demands in May 1858, and all of the labourers were soon back on the job. The force was also buttressed by twenty special constables drawn from contractors and their foremen.

On the canals of the Canadas in the 1840s such direct involvement of employers in law enforcement had been questioned as undermining the image of the law as an impartial force and perhaps promoting trouble as much as controlling it. But questions of image and propriety aside, cloaking contractors with the authority of the law had the advantage of drawing into law enforcement men with the most immediate interest in order on the public works and the type of relationship with labourers which allowed them to exact their own harsh forms of punishment such as docking pay, firing, and blacklisting.

A special constabulary was not created to police the Nova Scotia Railway, though the desirability of such a force was debated in the press. Both those papers critical of government officials and those politicians most directly responsible for prosecuting the work argued that all along the line the state of lawlessness had reached such extreme proportions that it would be difficult to find men willing to accept the role: "Constables come out here and go home scared to death." The result? Only "a mad fool" would take a position as railway magistrate in Nova Scotia."

- Ruth Bleasdale, Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. p. 233-237.

"Through the 1870s and 1880s, recurring debate over weapons control reveals both concern that guns were too readily accessed by the wrong individuals and concern that the state tread carefully in restricting that access. Perceptions of increased gun violence in the streets of large communities, escalating sectarian violence, and fears of civil unrest, particularly during the depression years, provoked calls for the protection of innocent citizens but at the same time warnings against restricting citizens' liberties. The year in which the act to control weapons on public works came into effect, members of Parliament registered concern that a different act, this one directed at the public at large, threatened to infringe on citizens' liberty when it made it a misdemeanor to carry offensive weapons such as pistols and knives unless they were being used at work. The act was considered unenforceable largely because of this infringement on citizens' liberty." Other legislative efforts to combat gun violence in particular ran up against similar concerns to preserve the citizens' ability to carry arms in self-defence and to not be subjected to unreasonable and unwarranted searches of their persons or premises.

In 1877 when Minister of Justice Edward Blake introduced his Bill to Make Provision against the Improper Use of Firearms, he struggled against clearly articulated fears that the rights of law-abiding citizens would be trampled by an unjustified extension of state power in the hands of magistrates given too broad discretion to infer intent. Blake insisted the proposed law would be used to target only two specific groups: "the rowdy and reckless characters" becoming all too common in the streets of major urban centres like Montreal and the boys and young men for whom carrying revolvers had become something akin to a rite of passage, "almost part of their ordinary equipage." Those with legitimate reason to fear for their safety would not be prohibited from carrying weapons, only those with reckless or criminal intent. In the end, however, safeguards to protect the law-abiding from prosecution weakened the bill, and the resulting act was considered by many unenforceable.

When Parliament revisited gun control the following year, with an eye to creating legislation applicable only to designated troublemakers in specific parts of the country as the need arose, and not to the general citizenry, Blake reminded members that the 1869 act to preserve public works provided a Canadian precedent and a template for legislation which could target just one group and thus allay peace on concerns about general disarming of the citizenry on the one hand, while offering an aggressive assault on problem groups and problem areas on the other. In introducing his 1878 Crimes of Violence Prevention Bill, Blake underscored the value of the special law which allowed for extraordinary measures to disarm those who presented an extraordinary threat: in the case of the act to preserve peace on public works, public works labourers in

certain districts in which it was thought possible that owing to the congregation of fluctuating bodies of labourers there might be increased danger to the public peace, and consequently the necessity of increased precautions, increased rigour, and diminution of the ordinary liberties of the subjects of this country.

In backing Blake's proposed legislation, Prime Minister Mackenzie warned that its enforcement would run into the same difficulties as those encountered by the act targeting public works labourers. Those who needed to be controlled would least appreciate and likely oppose attempts at control, as experience with the act to preserve peace on public works had demonstrated:

[W]here there were vast masses of workingmen assembled, who were not, perhaps, as well informed as the other classes of the community, and not perhaps so much above the reach of excitement, which might be brought on by imprudent acts committed by a few persons, it was not easy to obtain that sympathy which was necessary for the observance of the law.

But that made such legislation all the more crucial. In committee, members continued to debate the bill's violation of individual liberties. But the majority agreed with Langevin, who concluded that the violation of liberty was necessary "in order to avoid a greater evil," and they concurred with Devlin, who, as an MP for Montreal, could claim to speak with authority on the situation in that community and who argued that not to pass such legislation "would, in his judgment, be criminal, in fact, on the part of the House."

- Ruth Bleasdale, Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. p. 206-207.

"The sorting of patients into disruptive and calm was an important separation principle in psychiatry. In general, the hospitals were divided into four or five types of wards that each had a particular purpose. The newly arrived patients were admitted to the first of these wards, a “reception and observation department,” which consisted of several large interconnected bed wards where the admitted patients could be constantly observed. The reception wards were divided in two, with calm and disruptive patients kept separately. If the patients’ condition improved, they were often moved to a “transition ward,” where the conditions were a little freer. If there were further improvements, they could be transferred to a “reconvalescence ward,” where the patients were to regain their strength, were active throughout the day, worked and were prepared for discharge. The patients whose illness made slow progress were placed at the “care wards,” which were divided into calm and disturbed. Finally, there were special “sick or invalid departments” that housed hospitalised patients with physical illnesses and the elderly, infirm or senile patients. These wards were also divided the same way as the others. The total number of beds for wards with disturbed patients was 40–50% of the hospital’s beds. The committee whose task it was to investigate the most appropriate layout for a psychiatric hospital believed that this, together with the outdated hospital buildings, was a serious problem.

The committee highlighted that the disturbed wards at some hospitals had become so large, with up to 36 patients on one ward, that it was, among other things, difficult “to create calm in the departments and give the patients a differentiated treatment.” In particular, at the psychiatric hospitals in Viborg and Middelfart the situation was stark, while other institutions such as Aarhus and Vordingborg were better positioned, since modernisations had been carried out a few years earlier. In addition, a number of the hospitals were characterised by being built years ago and were often in buildings that had previously been used for other purposes. The committee emphasised that extensive work lay ahead in which the psychiatric hospitals “to the greatest extent should be designed with the possibility for carrying out modern forms of treatment and examinations."

- Jesper Vaczy Kragh, Lobotomy Nation: The History of Psychosurgery and Psychiatry in Denmark (Springer: 2021) p. 138-193.

Part of Chang Tso-Lin's Army, Tientsin, April 13, 1922. Bain News Service. Soldiers of the Northeastern Army 东北军, also known as the Fengtian Army 奉系军 of warlord Zhang Zuolin 張作霖, invading Tianjin on the way to Beijing during the First Zhili–Fengtian War 第一次直奉战争. Library of Congress, LC-B2- 5607-15. hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.33489

"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

"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.

"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

"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.

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

"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.]

"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.

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

"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.

"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.

"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")