Zebulon Reed Brockway

Home > People > Social Sciences and the Law > Crime and Law Enforcement: Biographies

National Prison Association. The National Prison Association, founded in 1870, is today the American Correctional Association (ACA), the main professional organization of U.S. prison administrators.The ACA traces its origins to the National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline, an 1870 convention of prison reformers held in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many of these reformers were veterans of the antislavery movement; now they found a new cause in the improvement of prison conditions and prisoners themselves. The congress's chief organizer, Enoch C. Wines of the New York Prison Association, joined forces with Franklin B. Sanborn of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities and Zebulon Brockway, superintendent of the Detroit House of Correction, to write a Declaration of Principles, which the congress endorsed. This document articulated the rehabilitative approach that dominated prison administration (in theory, if not always in practice) for the next century.

Incorporated in 1871, the National Prison Association met sporadically through the 1870s and 1880s as it defined its membership, goals, and structure. It became the American Prison Association in 1907 and the ACA in 1954, at which time it also broadened its base to include noninstitutional members. By the late twentieth century the ACA was a multipurpose organization with numerous affiliates. It compiled guidelines for accrediting the nation's prisons and jails; formulated policy; and published a journal, Corrections Today, and an annual directory of all U.S. institutions and agencies dealing with adult and juvenile offenders.
See also Prisons and Penitentiaries.

Bibliography

E.C. Wines, ed., Transactions of the National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline, 1870, reprint 1970.
Anthony P. Travisono and and Mary Q. Hawkes , Building a Voice: The American Correctional Association—125 Years of History, 1995.

Nicole Hahn Rafter

Zebulon Reed Brockway 1827–1920, American penologist, b. Lyme, Conn. As superintendent of the House of Correction in Detroit, he tried to introduce in 1869 the indeterminate sentence for first offenders. His ideas were incorporated in a Michigan statute but were nullified by the courts. In New York, he organized the first state reformatory for adult males, built at Elmira, and was its first superintendent (1876–1900). He introduced a system of military training, physical training, education, and trade instruction, with incentives to good behavior. The success of his Elmira experiments led to the introduction of the indeterminate sentence in other states. He wrote Fifty Years of Prison Service (1912).