Early Massachusetts State Prison Labor and Finance Report Recording Convict Labor and Manufacturing, a Predecessor of the For-Profit Prison System, 1816

Massachusetts State Prison

Pamphlet

Massachusetts State Prison administration, labor, and discipline report,1815-1816 . Printed booklet, with two folding tables. An unusually detailed early account of the Massachusetts penitentiary at Charlestown, outlining the prison’s finances and convict labor, with detailed discussion of the institution’s manufacturing arrangements and the costs of maintaining prisoners. The accounts record payments for provisions, clothing, salaries, fuel, repairs, raw materials, and other prison expenses against income derived from convict labor and manufactured goods. The text addresses prison labor in frank financial terms, calculating the relationship between the expense of confinement and the proceeds generated by prisoners' work. Massachusetts had abolished chattel slavery by the time this 1816 pamphlet appeared, but the Commonwealth continued to compel labor from incarcerated people; after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment expressly preserved involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime,” and states subsequently exploited criminal law and convict leasing to extract labor disproportionately from Black Americans.

Description and Historical Sketch of the Massachusetts State Prison: With the Statutes, Rules and Orders, for the Government Thereof. Published by Order of the Board of Directors,Charlestown: Printed by S. Etheridge, Jun., 1816. 38 pp., with two folding letterpress statistical tables, Table No. 1 and Table No. 2, originally bound with the pamphlet and now detached. The Massachusetts State Prison had opened at Charlestown in 1805 following legislative authorization in 1803; it became the Commonwealth’s general penitentiary for male offenders sentenced to solitary imprisonment or confinement at hard labor.

The pamphlet presents statutes governing the prison, the duties of the warden, keeper, deputy, turnkeys, watchmen, military guard, directors, and visitors, and the penalties attached to escapes or breaches of custody. The legislation distinguishes prisoners sentenced to solitary confinement from those committed to “hard labour,” making labor not an incidental activity but part of the judicial sentence itself. The text specifies provisions and regulated meals and sets out the responsibilities of officers charged with maintaining custody and order. Prisoners could be assigned according to trade and productive capacity, while the institution maintained workshops and equipment for manufacture. A later history of the prison describes the Charlestown workshops and the use of convict labor in stone cutting and other trades; the prison’s location also facilitated the transportation of the stone worked by prisoners. In the nineteenth century, prison labor would become increasingly integrated with private manufacturing throughout the North, leading to the for-profit prison structure now common in the U.S. Contractors supplied materials or supervision and paid states for access to incarcerated workers, while prison authorities supplied the confined labor force and enforced discipline. Scholarship on northern prisons identifies Massachusetts as part of this larger development, and later Massachusetts mechanics protested the competition created by convict labor in the free labor market.
The two surviving folding tables supply numerical records. Table No. 1, for the year ending September 30, 1815, and Table No. 2, for the year ending September 30, 1816, arrange monthly prison statistics in columns. They record the number of convicts in the prison and divide prisoners according to employment, as well as statistics on discharges, deaths, expenses, and receipts. The tables permit month-by-month comparison of the prison population with the labor and financial accounts presented in the report. The booklet and both folding tables with age-toning, scattered foxing and staining, and handling wear as shown. Tables detached; retaining original folds and creases. Overall intact but fragile. Fair condition. This booklet illuminates the early history of the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown, opened in 1805 as the Commonwealth adopted imprisonment and penal labor in place of a number of older criminal punishments.

Item #23787

Price: $480.00