Reclaiming the Citizen

The eleven-foot statue of Thomas Mott Osborne in the center of Auburn, NY, suggests the significant level of hope Osborne left behind. At least a decade after his death almost exactly a century ago, imprisoned and formerly imprisoned men raised much of the $700,000-some cost, adjusted for inflation, to commission an artist to design the statue and a foundry to mold it. To donate, one prisoner gave up his three-cents-a-day pay for a year, the Associated Press reported. It added that a former convict postponed his wedding for a year to save up a donation.

Creating the Cornerstones of a Community

Even then, Osborne did very little, at least on the surface. He encouraged Auburn State Prison felons to build a social system they called the Mutual Welfare League. Most of them had been hostile since childhood toward others and society in general. Now there they were spending nearly all of 1914 working out the League’s initial formation. For that, about all Osborne allowed himself to lift was his encouraging finger. The men did the work. Variations of the League apparently turned many Auburn, Sing Sing, and U.S. Naval Prison denizens into hopeful citizens. 

We know the basics how those Leagues worked: In exchange for privileges, the prisoners in each institution drafted a constitution outlining League governance and its rules. In essence, the rules required peaceful and considerate behavior. At Sing Sing, they even banned cursing in public and blowing smoke in another’s face. An inmate judiciary had one simple power, for a term to expel rule-breakers from the League and its privileges. Suddenly, most members stopped breaking rules. 

It is less clear, however, why members stopped breaking rules. Even Osborne was unsure. For instance, at the end of a naval lieutenant’s first day on Osborne’s team running the naval prison, the pale and panicked young man whined that he “can’t stay here.” He saw way too few guards overseeing hundreds of swarming Navy and Marine prisoners and physical barriers insufficient to hold them. Sit down, Osborne told the young officer; the inmates needed little supervision. But why, asked the bewildered lieutenant, didn’t they just run away? Osborne answered: “I’ve been trying to understand it for six years — ever since I got into this prison game. And I haven’t succeeded yet. We know, as a fact, that they do not run away. ... I don’t understand it either.” 

The Auburn Experiment

This controversial idea takes some unraveling. To believe that a convict’s conscience can be quickened — roused, that is — he must have a conscience to quicken. Not everyone believed such a thing; it was common to think that criminals were evil by nature and must be scared straight. But from Osborne’s perspective, felons were naturally “sound at heart,” so his job was to help them restore their consciences to “good working order.”

From Community to Democracy

  Still, Osborne wrote, freedom alone could not give inmates hope to be virtuous husbands, fathers, brothers, friends, neighbors, and citizens. They needed also to be part of a community that instills a sense that they have a role to sustain trust and good will intrapersonally, interpersonally, locally, and globally — in a word, democratically. In the Mutual Welfare League, each shop elected representatives to a governing body whose stated aim was to make prison life safe, secure, sociable, and for each man after prison, thriving. Osborne wrote that “the practical effort” of the Mutual Welfare League was “to operate the prisons on the basis of the Golden Rule; and it works.”

  Osborne called the Mutual Welfare League system a “training in democracy.” He complained, in fact, that Americans as a whole had “not yet realized” the power of their own democracy. The country had made only “a very small beginning in the work of translating” the Founders’ “glorious vision into practical reality.” It was Americans’ duty “to learn to apply the greatest underlying principles of democracy to all social problems: the family, the school and college, the factory — and even the prison.” 

  For Osborne, then, what worked naturally to sustain hope was freedom of conscience and a democratic community aiming for peace and personal growth.

For Osborne, then, what worked naturally to sustain hope was freedom of conscience and a democratic community aiming for peace and personal growth.