#prison building

Prisons as we understand them today – places of long-term confinement as a punishment for crime – are relatively new developments. In the U.S. they came about in the 1780s and 1790s, after the American Revolution.

Previously, American colonies under British control relied on execution and corporal punishments.

Jails in America and England during that period were not themselves places of punishment. They were just holding tanks. Debtors were jailed until they paid their debts. Vagrants were jailed until they found work. Accused criminals were jailed while awaiting trial, and convicted criminals were jailed while awaiting punishment or until they paid their court fines.

Consequently, early American jails were not designed for long detentions, even if people sometimes stayed for months or longer.

The physical structure of these unregulated local facilities – often run by sheriffs or private citizens who charged room and board fees – varied. Jail could be a spare room in a roadside inn, a stone building with barred windows or a subterranean dungeon.

Fear of disease

Disease, violence and exploitation were rampant in these squalid American colonial and British jails.

John Howard, a British aristocrat whose ideas influenced American penal reformers, became concerned about living conditions in these “abode[s] of wickedness, disease, and misery” when he became a sheriff. In a 1777 book, Howard recounts smelling vinegar, a common disinfectant of the era, to protect against the revolting smell of the jails he visited.

Howard warned readers that jails spread disease not only among inmates but also beyond, into society. He recalled the so-called Black Assize of 1577, in which prisoners awaiting trial were brought from jail to an Oxford courthouse and “within forty hours” more than 300 people who had been at court were dead from “gaol fever” – what we now call typhus.

He also wrote of infected prisoners who, once released, brought diseases from jail into their communities, killing scores.

Disease also shaped Howard’s understanding of how criminality spread.

He described how young “innocents” – the children of people jailed for debt or those awaiting trial for a petty offense – were seduced by dashing bandits’ stories of crime and adventure. Thus “infected,” they went on to become criminals themselves.

America’s first prisons

Howard’s ideas, particularly the realization that jails posed a threat to the public, were brought to the U.S. by Philadelphia reformers like Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Following the recommendations in Howard’s book, American penal reformers pushed for new jails designed to ward off disease, crime and immorality of all kinds.

Howard envisioned new facilities that would be well ventilated and cleaned daily. Clothing and bedding should be changed weekly. There would even be an infirmary staffed by “an experienced surgeon” who would update authorities on the state of prisoner health.

American reformers followed Howard’s advice that “women-felons” should be kept “quite separate from the men: and young criminals from old and hardened offenders.” Debtors, too, should be kept “totally separate” from the “felons.”

Prisoners should be separated from one another, ideally in cells. Crowding should be avoided. All this would prevent the spread of disease and enable the prisoners’ repentance – and thus their rehabilitation.

“By the mid-1920s Hulbert could boast that over 75 percent of the prisoners at Jackson were gainfully employed, half of them on projects outside the prison walls. The mainstay of prison industry at Jackson was the binder twine plant, originally established in 1907 as an experiment in state-account production. A new mixture of sisal, manila, and hemp made the quality of Jackson twine extremely competitive in the early 1920S, and Hulbert ran the plant "night and day" to produce 14 million pounds a year. Most of this was sold out of state, through agents and consignments across the northwest, and, while there was significant annual variation, profits averaged around $90,000 a year. Hulbert expanded the brush shop, producing over fifty kinds of brushes and brooms for sale to hardware stores and wholesale suppliers; he started up a tombstone and marker shop, expanded production in the chair factory to over three hundred kinds of furniture, and added a cot factory, manufacturing the steel frames for folding beds. He developed an aluminum stamping operation, making utensils for sale to institutions across the country; he started up a brick and tile works at Onondaga and took over control of the Chelsea Cement Plant, which with the boom in highway construction was earning a profit of $180,000 by 1925; he expanded the output of the cannery, marketing over four hundred thousand cans of vegetables a year to groceries and institutions, and added a cider works that made vinegar for commercial sale. Under Hulbert's hand Michigan took a lead in that new, now universal staple of prison production, the manufacture of license plates and road signs for the state; he invested over $60,000 in new stamping and enameling equipment, and, while output was largely for "state use" in Michigan, he stood ready to take orders from states as far away as Vermont. But it was the textile plant upon which Hulbert lavished most hope, attention, and capital. After a visit to Pennsylvania in 1922, Hulbert convinced his superiors of the potential for making cotton cloth and turning out shirts, sheets, toweling, and other staples both for state institutions and for sale on the open market. He even explored the possibility of a direct trade between Michigan and prison systems in the South that raised cotton with convict labor, exchanging raw materials for finished goods. By the end of his tenure Hulbert had invested nearly $150,000 in plant and equipment for textile production. 

In all of this Hulbert was quite in step with national trends. Binder twine, textiles, and license plates emerged, along with commercial farming, as the leading lines of prison production across the country by the early 1920s. Hulbert took to attending national conferences as an expert on prison industry, extolling-at times rather incoherently-the innovations and successes of the Michigan system. As he described them, the problems he faced were familiar ones to his colleagues in the American Prison Association: finding product lines that did not compete too openly with local or state industries but for which there was a good market; developing operations that did not require complex machinery or skilled labor; and establishing a method of bookkeeping that covered the cost of mate- rials and equipment, provided for the upkeep of the labor force, and paid some sort of wage to inmate workers as well as salaries to super- visors, guards, and sales staff-without dissolving all profits into overhead. There were tricky trade-offs here, which Hulbert, for the most part, finessed with various kinds of accounting fraud and legerdemain. His "main thought," he said, was "to put inside of prison walls factories that would be a profit to the state."

But there was a good deal more: "My dear Governor," he wrote in making his case for a textile plant, 

there is a great possibility of expansion in this industry and at any time that you want to talk with me, I would be very glad to go over the situation with you as I think we can put Michigan's prison industries on the map so that when you leave office the state will look up to you as doing something that no other Governor ever did.

What Hulbert had in mind was to insure that Jackson prison was able to pay for itself. As we have seen, the dream of self-sufficiency was widely shared among early advocates of prison industrialization in the 1920s; their model was the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, which was the other leading producer of prison-made binder twine in the country, as well as of farm equipment, and which made claims of profitability that were legendary in the profession, though never adequately documented. There was nothing particularly outrageous in Hulbert's ambition; Jackson prison had managed to cover expenses from industrial profits off and on for years and, most recently, during Simpson's wartime administration. The trick that Hulbert had to turn was to sustain a rapid expansion of profits in step with a burgeoning inmate population. Groesbeck was apparently always skeptical of Hulbert's lavish promotions and blatant ambitions, but he had no reason to refuse Hulbert enough leeway to chase his dream of a self- sustaining penitentiary. In 1921 the governor struck a deal with his warden: the state would provide $300,000 from the General Fund for operating Jackson prison in each of the next four years (1922-25), and Hulbert agreed to meet the balance of operational expenses from the profits of prison industries. 

This gave Hulbert, briefly, in 1922, 1923, and 1924, a virtual carte blanche to pursue his dreams. His superiors on the commission, knowing that he had the governor's endorsement, made him head of Michigan Prison Industries in 1923, a post that doubled his income and expanded his powers, and they approved all the equipment purchases and improvements of facilities that the warden recommended. There was no sign in these years of an impending move to a new prison, as Hulbert invested $450,000 in developing the plant and equipment of the old prison facility, actually spending more on industrial buildings than on additional dormitories for the growing inmate population. And there was a general inclination in Lansing to ignore a rising chorus of complaints about Hulbert's energetic efforts to boost sales. A former warden of Stillwater prison was hired as sales manager for binder twine, earning $25,000 a year in salary and commissions to develop markets out of state. Although the man was clearly an "expert" in the field, not a few Michigan Republicans felt they had been cut out of a lucrative post. More troublesome was the grumbling of businessmen around the state as they ran across the new competitor in town: food and hardware wholesalers complained that Prison Industry salesmen were undercutting their markups by going straight to retailers with lower prices; grocers complained that some competitors were being allowed to carry extensive credit (including the husband of one of Hulbert's secretaries, who opened a grocery in Jackson on what amounted to a subsidy from prison industries); two hard- ware stores in one small town protested that they had both been given "exclusive" rights to prison-made utensils and brushes on con- dition that they place a large order.129 There was nothing illegal in any of this: the state was in business, and good business often involved deals at the expense of loyal taxpayers and Republican voters. Thus, when Mack and Company of Ann Arbor made inquiries about furniture prices from Prison Industries, in connection with a big sale to a  fraternity house, and then found that a salesman from the prison had gone straight to the fraternity house and sold the furniture at a better price, Mack and Company could not complain about the business practices of Prison Industries, but it could insist, through political channels, that the prison keep out of its business. 

Hulbert's business antics were the result not only of his personal ambition and braggadocio but of his deal with the governor. Ultimately, this proved his undoing. While his efforts to foster jobs made him, in the eyes of the Prison Commission, an ideal warden -"the discipline of the prison has been excellent. No outbreaks, mutinies or riots have occurred" - his financial arrangement with Groesbeck forced him into a heedless expansion, committing more and more resources to prison industry in order to boost output and sales. Yet he could never keep up with his obligations. The rapid increase in prison population after 1922 drove up the annual cost of maintenance, from $675,000 in 1922 to $840,000 in 1925. At the same time, Hulbert poured nearly $300,000 into new equipment and another $150,000 into structures for his expanding industries. Perhaps inevitably, start- up delays plagued the textile plant, which lost $63,000 in its first three years of operation, while a statewide boycott of bricklayers, responding to appeals from private manufacturers, brought production at the Onondaga facility to a standstill in 1925. Hulbert met his obligations in 1922, but, thereafter, industries at Jackson failed to come up with its share of operating costs until 1926, when it paid $148,000 against an accrued deficit to the General Fund that now totaled over $1.3 million. This was the biggest operating debt the prison had ever sustained. Hulbert's financial difficulties angered the governor, who wrote the resident commissioner at Jackson, Mark Merriman, that "the business end of this institution has not been properly looked after." Under political pressure from his enemies, as we have seen, Groesbeck was forced to conduct an audit of prison industry books. What the accountants found was a "real mess," and, while nothing was ever said officially or publicly, Robert Davidson, the accountant in charge, attributed the mess to a "willful manipulation" of the accounts. After meetings with the auditors in Detroit and several heated exchanges with Hulbert, Groesbeck let his warden know that "his resignation was looked for." The governor was engaged in a salvage operation, trying, as we saw, to protect his political position against the sniping of his enemies; by removing Hulbert as warden, he prevented a legislative investigation or legal proceedings and probably salvaged Hulbert's reputation. But the warden had him- self also been engaged in a cover-up; he had launched an ambitious expansion of prison industries and promised great profits, yet he was unable to meet his obligations under the operating agreement with the governor. Trying to show a profit while explaining his inability to pay forced the warden to "cook" his books, and in a prison it was not hard to find experts skilled in juggling accounts and fixing the books. The inmate in charge of industrial records, an accountant by profession and a convicted embezzler, could of course explain the elaborate ploys of double bookkeeping-twine sent out on consignment was designated "sold" and entered as profit, the nonexistent cash was entered as accounts relievable or unpaid, and merchandise recovered from the jobber was then logged as inventory on hand-but, on balance, he had to admit "the whole accounting system was a fraud and a delusion."

Always running just ahead of the game, Hulbert carved out a good career for himself and made his contribution to three Groesbeck electoral victories. When he finally tripped up, it was not because the goal itself was discredited but because Groesbeck had lost faith in Hulbert's methods, or, more exactly, was no longer able to shield those methods from hostile scrutiny. Locked in a close primary fight, the governor had to avoid the taint of corruption or waste. But he still needed Hulbert and so transferred him down the road to the new prison project that the warden had begun in 1924 largely as an extension of his efforts to keep his retainers and charges fully employed. The scale of this project, and its annual budget, was a good deal larger than Prison Industries, and, while Hulbert took a cut in salary when he gave up his posts as warden and director of Industries, he had, as we saw, ample scope in the construction project for his rest- less energies and ambitions. From what we know of his activities on the site, Hulbert did not slow down or change his habits in the least. His instincts for empire building were fully engaged on the building project and quite in step with, and of use to, Groesbeck in his battle for political survival during 1925-26. 

Yet, while Hulbert's conduct at the new construction site expressed both his continuing personal ambitions and his determination to serve his longtime political mentor, his drive to build a bigger and better prison may have also been an effort to solve the problems of profitability that he had encountered at the old prison and that had wrecked his deal with Groesbeck. Hulbert forged ahead with his dream of a completely industrialized, self-sufficient penitentiary. Indeed, to his way of thinking the failure to meet his obligations under the pact with Groesbeck had been due entirely to the rapid rise in the operational costs of the old prison. The growing number of inmates had strained the capacity of the old facility and had forced him to distribute his population to the farms, dormitory annexes, road camps, and factories outside the walls, thus greatly increasing the costs of guarding and feeding his charges. Moreover, the effort to expand productive facilities and jobs within the old main prison had run up against limitations of space and antiquated structures, raising at every turn the start-up costs for new operations. Even with these impediments to success, and despite the rigidities of his deal with Groesbeck, Hulbert could claim that Prison Industries had managed to make a total profit of nearly one million dollars under his direction and, from these proceeds, to finance entirely the purchase of new plant and equipment for expansion. Such a return from an old, dilapidated prison gave fair promise that a new prison might be able to sustain itself, provided enough land, labor, and machinery could be brought together and used effectively. There was no necessary limit to the size of such an operation. Indeed, in an era when Henry Ford was achieving notable efficiencies and highly publicized economies of scale at his mammoth new River Rouge plant, it was not difficult for Hulbert to conclude that a larger facility and greater concentration of men and equipment might serve the ends of economy and even, eventually, of self-sufficiency. Reasoning in this way made the grandiose seem practicable.

It was also politically persuasive. We may consider Hulbert foolish or blindly ambitious to commit himself to creating a self-supporting, industrial prison. But, ultimately, as the terms of his deal with Groesbeck make clear, he never claimed that the prison did, or even would, pay for itself, only that it ought to try. It was (if the word is not too solemn to apply to Harry Hulbert) his aspiration to make the prison a productive enterprise, and it was this that resonated politically. His goal was entirely in step with the role of punishment in the prohibition era. What, after all, was prohibition all about, if not to salvage and harness the energies of labor for production, to steer the shiftless into the orderly and disciplined ways of industrial life? What better use could prison make of the rising number of convicted bootleggers and mobsters, tavern keepers and moonshiners, than to put them to productive work? Correction or reformation was not the crux of the matter here, although Hulbert could talk a progressive line when called upon; at issue was the creation of a carceral practice that affirmed, through punishment, the social priorities of sobriety and industrial discipline and anchored the legitimacy of authority not in the policing of drunkards but in the construction of orderly and productive institutions capable of serving the people with efficiency and the most up-to-date methods. Cost-effective and businesslike administration were the perennial slogans of Groesbeck's campaigns. 

The new prison at Jackson was thus, in many ways, a monument to Harry Hulbert's persistent ambition and Alex Groesbeck's needs of the moment. The dreams of self-sufficiency, which served so well the ideology of punishment under prohibition and which seem to em- body the presumptive links between profit and uplift, and the requirements of patronage, which continually expanded outward the networks of obligation necessary to sustain competition for power at the center, joined to fashion this white elephant of corrections. Even the fiercest critics of Hulbert and Groesbeck had to admit that "the taxpayers of Michigan need not fear faulty design, workmanship, or  construction, as the work built to date is superfine." It was easy enough to complain that the single-man cells with hot-and-cold running water and "push button control vitreous china water closets" sported "more conveniences than in the rooms of some of our finest hotels." And the terrazzo floors and glazed brick walls seemed unnecessarily ostentatious for a penitentiary. Yet critics waxed wistful before the enormous walls that, however grandiose, would "be admired by those who know a beautiful piece of work when they see it." Ambition and self-aggrandizement had combined with the calculations of patronage and the pressures of political competition to produce high quality from great waste. As with some great enterprise of the ancien regime, the corruption that surrounded the construction of the new prison reflected, on the one hand, the expanding resources of the state and, on the other, the inadequacy of its institutional apparatus to control or manage the tasks it had undertaken. Graft and venality filled the gaps of incomplete state formation, and, while Fred Green might attack the corruption of the Groesbeck administration and Harry Jackson might shake his head at the heedless and high-handed ways of Harry Hulbert, the epigoni were not essentially different from their predecessors, reapplying the same appeals for efficiency and administrative accountability and replaying the same rules of political combat with, perhaps, a little more caution and a little less flamboyance.”

"$17 MILLION PROJECT AT MISSION: Work starts on new penitentiary," Vancouver Sun. June 12, 1970. Page 5. --- Sun Staff Reporter MISSION - Preliminary work has started here on a 817 million federal prison.

It is being cleared and graded on a sprawling 310-acre site, tucked away ina valley three miles north of here.

Tom Hall, western region director of federal penitentiaries, says: "The Mission penitentiary complex, as we call it. won't be anything like the grey bastille we now have in New Westminster."

He said federal public works department officials are presently examining 14 bids from Lower Mainland contractors to construct the roads and other below-ground services.

Solicitor-General George Mellraith has released a general summary of a five-year plan to complete the proposed $17 million (based on today's prices) penitentiary complex by 1975.

Hall warns the construction timetable is tentative, subject to spending approval from the federal treasury board and the B.C. labor situation.

But Hall thinks the recent on-the-spot visit to B.C. prison institutions by members of the House of Commons justice committee will likely spur Ottawa into maintaining schedule.

"The worst maximum security prison in Canada." was the verdict of some committee members after their tour of the New Westminster penitentiary.

Work on the main prison structure in the new complex here is expected to start in 1971, with the B.C. Reception Centre as one of the major buildings scheduled for completion by January. 1973 at an estimated cost of $2.65 million.

The big project - construction of the maximum security unit at an as yet undetermined cost is due to start some time in 1972.

Tentatively planned to hold 430 prisoners that unit is expected to take in its first inmates and put the old New Westminster pen out of business sometime in 1974.

Mission Mayor Neville Cox sees the penitentiary complex as a major economic boon to Mission district.

"It's not only the many jobs that its construction will prov ide. The completed and operating penitentiary complex. we have been advised, will ultimately provide more than 600 steady jobs," Cox said.

"It has always concerned me, too, that so many of our young people have to leave for other places to work once they've graduated. A modern penitentiary complex with its requirements these days for technical and more sophisticated type of operations, is going to provide some very worthwhile jobs for Mission's young men and women."

Am I the only idiot that researches what components are needed for a build?

Like- I'm making a whole-ass prison for HoneyHive Kingdom (bee-themed kingdom) and it's gonna be extensive af. Let's not forget that i'm employing my brother in helping me figure out how exactly to make the prison difficult to escape. I'm doing so on purpose bc I am specifically designing it to be one of the most hard-to-escape prisons

all so I can create a solitary confinement chamber for a villager named Beelon Musk, who has been found guilty of anti-bee crimes.

“Erecting Chapel at Collins Bay“Pen”,” Kingston Whig-Standard. March 22, 1932. Page 7. ---- Main Building Will Not Be Ready for Two Years It Is Stated --- The erection of new chapel at the Collin' Bay Penitentiary is under way at the present tine and it is to be expected that it will be completed and ready for use in the near future. The chapel is lasted at the northeast corner of the enclosure surrounding the temporary sleeping quarters, near the tailor shop and barber shop. It will be used by the Protestant and Catholic clergy who conduct the services at the prison. 

The chapel is quite a large building and is of frame construction, as are the other temporary buildings at the prison. At the present time, the framework is up and sheeted, and the openings of the windows are in. The roof is being put on, and when the building is enclosed, the interior work will be started. The interior of the chapel will not be elaborate, but it is the aim of Acting Warden M. R. Allen to make it as comfortable as possible. 

At the present time then are two hundred and two inmates at the Collin's Bay prism and they are all actively engaged. No construction work is in progress at present but as so on as the weather permits work will be resumed on the Administration Building. The stone cutting gang have been busy all winter getting stock piles of stone ready for use, but Warden Allen expresses as his opinion that it will be two years before the building is finished. 

Stone The stone, which is being used, is being token from a quarry on the prism property and the stone-cutters are working on a shack near the Administration Building. The quarried stone is hauled over and cut. The cutting to taking a long time and due to the constant changes in the personnel of the stone cutting gang, work is necessarily slow. The shops are all busy, the woodworking machine, and tailor shops, are carrying on, the first two getting a greet deal of material ready for use as soon as construction can be begun.