Rehabilitative Education: Elmira Reformatory

Changes in correctional education impelled broader prison reform in the middle of the nineteenth century. Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York offered the most successful program of approaches since the eighteenth-century origins of American correctional education. Zebulon Reed Brockway, who established the Elmira prison program, served in prison reform for fifty years. He constructed a coherent structure for prison education as offering varied kinds of instruction and as framed by secular rather than religious views. Brockway’s Elmira model yielded strong results for inmates.

After graduating college in 1848, Zebulon Brockway immersed himself in prisons, beginning as a clerk at Wethersfield Prison in Connecticut.  There he composed records for each individual prisoner. He believed that each convict had potential to conquer this incarceration circumstance.[1] Brockway continually acknowledged individuality. In 1861 he traveled to Michigan and became superintendent of the Detroit House of Correction, intending to experiment with reformist projects according to his beliefs. He believed Detroit offered “a better opportunity. . .to accomplish useful reformation of the prisoners to be confined in that new institution.”[2] One of Brockway’s novel ideas was gender inclusion. He developed this notion after traveling to Massachusetts and seeing the first state industrial school for girls.[3] When the Civil War erupted, women increasingly took up industrial occupations to fill the roles of absent men. In this context, Brockway founded a female annex to the Detroit House of Correction called the Detroit House Shelter.[4] This facility offered the first formal instruction for female prisoners in the United States. Brockway’s work gave women the opportunity to receive industrial training instead of domestic skills development.

Brockway became superintendent at Elmira Reformatory in 1876.[5] His appointment was instrumental in the ongoing development of new educational programs there. Brockway believed that inmates should have the opportunity to meet people in the community. He built relationships between incarcerated persons and those outside the walls of confinement, but his efforts were met with resistance from within the prison.  The secretary of the institution remarked that criminals “would not be anxious about their own self-improvement or submit themselves to the strenuousness of the Elmira Reformatory training” if they had this opportunity.[6]  As for Fry and Dwight earlier, however, community involvement was important for Brockway in order to show inmates that they were a part of society at large. His programs at Elmira aimed towards prisoner’s release not only into the workforce, but into social relations in the outside world.

Elmira’s prison housed the Elmira Institute, a dedicated building within the prison with twenty-eight classrooms, a library, a trade school, a gym, a military drill hall, and a six hundred- seat lecture hall.[7] Each program there was open to prisoners whether they were “old, young, men, and women, short and long sentenced.” [8] The Elmira facility’s education program succeeded at appealing to a larger audience of inmates than had previous prison reformers’. Brockway’s focus was on the lives prisoners led once they were released, and he believed that religion had a lesser role than economic realities in their futures. Elmira’s education prepared prisoners “socially, academically, and vocationally—for their return to society.”[9] The Institute’s physical facilities contributed to inmates’ self- expression through choice. Rather than being required to study religion, convicts had options within the reformatory’s school: academics, moral instruction, and military training.

Brockway believed that “[i]n administering a prison system, the intellectual education of all classes must take more prominent place, and the education of adult prisoners must not be neglected.” [10] He understood that in order for personal reform to be achieved, inmates needed stimulation through education so that not only did the prison run smoothly, but so did the lives of individuals inside its walls. Brockway addressed the educational needs of adult prisoners through separate departments offering standard education to literacy and numeracy and, separately, a special education program. Classes at the high school level had the overall aim of prisoners enrolling in college upon release. Special education was intended for prisoners with learning disabilities. Prisoners who required remediation were provided a tutor in general studies. The scope of education courses extended from “the lowest stages: reading, writing, arithmetic, then went to English, geography, law,” and other challenging subjects.[11] The purposes of this broad program were to spark intellectual curiosity in prisoners as well as to teach prisoners basic skills for society.

Morality, in Brockway’s school, was addressed in both vocational training and religious studies. Brockway defined morality as “firmly a set of habits acquired by long patience and severe discipline.”[12] Elmira developed a trade school designed to rigorously teach prisoners for the workforce after release. At these trade schools, inmates learned carpentry and construction under Brockway’s supervision.[13] Employment resulted from prisoners’ learning the value of work rather than crime. Religion intersected with secular education but was not central. Brockway mentions in his published reflections that the ethics class was not meant for prisoners to absorb morals and accommodate them into society, but to create the habit of “qualitative moral discrimination.”[14] Inmates were encouraged to make decisions based on the establishment and interrogation of moral values. Moral education was constructed as a context for actions rather than judgment upon them.

Obedience and discipline were enforced at Elmira through military education for prisoners with an interest in armed service after being released. The military program was begun in 1888 by Joseph F. Scott, who believed it cultivated traits of character essential to rehabilitation.[15] Prisoners practiced physical fitness and military drills. Each inmate who enrolled in this program learned the basics of military responsibility through parades, uniforms, drills, tactics—all critiqued and graded by Scott.[16] Brockway remarked, “by education the whole man is stoned up, and not only are the habits improved but the quality of the mind itself.”[17]

Correctional education at Elmira looked beyond prisoners’ sentences to their lives outside of the walls of confinement. It molded their lives’ by structure and organization so that they were able to function successfully after their confinement in their employment and social relationships.

[1] Thom Gehring, “Zebulon Brockway of Elmira: Nineteenth Century Hero,” Journal of Correctional Education 33(1982): 4.

[2] Zebulon Reed Brockway, Fifty Years of Prison Service: An Autobiography (New Jersey: Patterson Smith), 68.

[3] Gehring, 4.

[4] Ibid., 5.

[5] Brockway, 161.

[6] Ibid., 431.

[7] Ibid., 300.

[8] Ibid., 76.

[9] Michael Welch, Corrections: A Critical Approach (New York: Routledge, 2011), 66.

[10] Brockway, 402.

[11] Alexander Winter, The New York State Reformatory in Elmira (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1891), 61.

[12] Brockway, 256.

[13] Ibid., 164.

[14] Ibid., 246 and 247.

[15] Ibid., 374.

[16] Ibid., 374.

[17] Ibid., 407.