When a petty criminal named Malcolm Little entered the Norfolk State Prison Colony west of Boston in 1948, he found "the most enlightened form of prison" he had "ever heard of." The prison, recalled the man who later became known to the world as Malcolm X, was an "experimental rehabilitation jail" where "there were no bars, only walls" and the "penal policies sounded almost too good to be true." The transformation of Malcolm Little is only the most famous example of a life changed --directly or indirectly--by the work of Howard Belding Gill '13, M.B.A. '14, first superintendent of Norfolk Prison Colony and one of the era's more influential advocates for "salvaging society's seconds," as he put it, in the nation's prisons.
It was not a lifework Gill planned. He had attended Harvard on scholarship and initially embarked on a business career. "Personally I find life rather keen," he wrote in the decennial report of his Harvard class, noting jauntily that "we now own a Ford and a pup." Yet Gill's most vivid memory from his undergraduate years was of hearing a classmate declare, in a passionate speech in Sanders Theatre, "We pour no Standard Oil on the troubled waters of society." Gill's involvement in reform causes found expression in 1923, when he and his wife, Isabelle Kendig, Ph.D. '33, joined the unsuccessful campaign for U.S. participation in the newly formed World Court. In 1924 they campaigned actively for Progressive Party presidential candidate Robert La Follette.
After the election, Gill opened an office in Washington, D.C., as a consultant in "industrial and commercial research." His first commission was a study of prison industries for the federal Commission on Prison Labor under then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Further prison studies for federal and state governments led to his appointment at Norfolk, then in the planning stages, in 1927. During the next seven years, Gill helped design the facility, oversaw its construction, and put in place the penal policies later praised by Malcolm X.
From the start, Norfolk was to be not a warehouse for miscreants, but a model prison community. The interior buildings were laid out much like a college campus: a school with an unusually well-stocked library, a community center, and dormitory-style residences arranged around a quadrangle. Inmates were to be given work in "shops for as large a variety of industries as practicable." They wore ordinary clothing instead of prison uniforms, and participated together with staff on an advisory council dealing with matters of community governance. A true believer in the Progressive gospel of social science, Gill envisioned a staff not only of guards but also of educators, psychiatrists, and social workers providing individual "treatment" programs for inmates willing to turn their lives around. A more conventional cellblock housed recalcitrant inmates who could not "be trusted to live decorously within the [prison] wall...."
Early newspaper reports lauded the Norfolk experiment. "Massachusetts Blazes Pioneer Trail for Prisons," one sanguine headline proclaimed. But with the advent of the Depression and the inevitable difficulties of administering a prison population, Gill's policies came under increasing fire. An escape by four inmates triggered a backlash against reform efforts similar to that produced when a much later Norfolk alumnus, Willie Horton, committed a crime while outside the prison on furlough. Opponents charged that criminals were "being pampered" at Norfolk. Supporters saw the prison as "the one creditable page in the history of penology in Massachusetts." Gill would write later that the "brickbats and the bouquets were about even," but those hurling brickbats held the balance of power. Despite support from numerous prominent figures, he was removed from his post in 1934 after a dramatic State House hearing. "It was," the feisty warden recounted to his classmates, "a grand scrap...."
The New Deal proved more hospitable to Gill's views. In the next 12 years he served in several prison-related posts in Washington, beginning as assistant to the director of federal prisons. "This work takes me into the prisons of many states, where I have so far unsuccessfully looked for members of the class of 1913," he reported wryly. In 1947 he turned to teaching criminology, mostly at George Washington and American Universities, where he established training programs that influenced a generation of prison managers. Reform efforts reflecting such programs peaked in the 1960s, then faltered again as public attitudes hardened.
The "first Community Prison" at Norfolk remained Gill's proudest achievement, he wrote in his fiftieth-reunion report. He continued to visit the facility into the 1980s, talking with older inmates who had become friends and counseling younger inmates who sought him out. "What have they done to my place?" he once mused aloud about the changed atmosphere. The intractability of prison problems has eroded faith in the power of good intentions or social science to bring about the kind of changes Gill sought. Yet his fundamental insight--the need to foster alternatives to destructive prison culture--is still widely seen as a starting point for rethinking the necessary role of prisons in society.