From Slate:
Massachusetts’ Norfolk Prison Colony was a bold experiment when it opened in 1928. The facility looked like a conventional prison, but reformers were excited by its innovative staffing model. Unlike other prisons, Norfolk was to have two completely separate sets of employees. The watch officers were to patrol the high wall that ringed Norfolk; they would have no contact with the hundreds of prisoners unless someone flagrantly broke the rules. The house officers were to develop relationships with the prisoners, counsel them, and prepare them for freedom.
Howard Gill, Norfolk’s visionary and warden, devised the staffing system to overcome the traditional hostility between guards and prisoners, which made rehabilitation impossible. By placing the watch officers at the wall and creating a new, friendly type of employee, Norfolk was to have both security and treatment.
But soon after opening, the watch officers and house officers were at loggerheads. The watch officers confiscated prisoners’ possessions that the house officers had approved. They locked doors that were supposed to stay open. Each staff believed the other was sabotaging Norfolk. By 1932, the watch officers’ interests decisively won out—security was paramount.
Norfolk quickly became a conventional prison. The lesson:
“Guards and would-be social workers could not coexist in the same institution,” David Rothman wrote in Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. “Norfolk … reveals the difficulty, even the impossibility, of a program that would once cure and coerce, that would discipline and rehabilitate.” Continue reading >>>
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