How progressive good intentions failed at Coxsackie, once a model New
York State prison for youth offenders.
Should prisons attempt reform and uplift inmates or, by means of
principled punishment, deter them from further wrongdoing? This debate
has raged in Western Europe and in the United States at least since the
late eighteenth century.
Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New
York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for
young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve "adolescents adrift,"
Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the
start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prison's mission was
overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to face--drugs,
gangs, and racial conflict.
Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind
bars in which "ungovernable" young men posed constant challenges to
racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the prison was unstable
from the start; the politics of punishment quickly became the politics
of race and social exclusion, and efforts to save liberal reform in
postwar New York only deepened its failures. In 1977, inmates took
hostages to focus attention on their grievances. The result was stricter
discipline and an end to any pretense that Coxsackie was a reform
institution.
Why did the prison fail? For answers, Spillane immerses readers in the
changing culture and racial makeup of the U.S. prison system and borrows
from studies of colonial prisons, which emblematized efforts by an
exploitative regime to impose cultural and racial restraint on others.
In today's era of mass incarceration, prisons have become
conflict-ridden warehouses and powerful symbols of racism and
inequality. This account challenges the conventional wisdom that
America's prison crisis is of comparatively recent vintage, showing
instead how a racial and punitive system of control emerged from the
ashes of a progressive ideal.
