Henry Martyn Boies teaches how types of communication shape discussion of prisoners’ communication with their families and friends. From early in the nineteenth century, members of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons personally visited prisoners. Henry Martyn Boies became part of the top governing circle of Pennsylvania prisons late in the nineteenth century. Boies’ thinking on communication reflected new socio-economic developments and new currents in American intellectual life. Boies described prisoners as a separate class of persons and argued against communicating with them.
Boies was highly successful in public life. A graduate of Yale College in 1859, Boies joined his father’s gunpowder firm, Laflin, Boies & Tarck, in 1865. While Boies avoided service in the Civil War, afterwards he commanded the Thirteenth Regimental National Guard of Pennsylvania (1878-1883). He attained the rank of colonel. His first marriage, in 1861, was to Emma Brainerd, the daughter of a prominent Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia. She died in 1868. Bois’ second marriage, in 1870, was to Elizabeth L. Dickson, daughter of the president of the Delaware & Hudson Co. Boies was president of Moosic Powder Company (1869-1882), a founder and director of the Third National Bank (1872-1882), and president of the Dickson Manufacturing Company (1883-1887). All three companies were major businesses. He also was president of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), a charter member of the Second Presbyterian Church (1874), and one of the organizers and promoters of the Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia.^ ^ Boies, in short, participated in the highest ranks of public life in late nineteenth-century America.
Boies became a leading U.S. penologist. In 1887, the Governor of Pennsylvania, one of Boies’ personal friends, appointed Boies to the State Board of Public Charities. The Board’s responsibilities included overseeing penal institutions in Pennsylvania. Boies served on the Board through three successive terms, 1887 to 1902. Drawing on his public stature and his established expertise, Boies wrote two lengthy books on penology. A major New York press published both. Boies’ books were widely studied and acclaimed.
Boies’ first book, published in 1893, was entitled Prisoners and paupers; a study of the abnormal increase of criminals, and the public burden of pauperism in the United States; the causes and remedies. This book presented the then-fashionable perspective of biological evolution and Darwinian fitness. Boies favored exterminating the “abnormal and defective class,” but not directly. Instead, he advocated outlawing marriages with persons of this class, as well as their castration and sterilization. Boies explained:
We believe that the progress of medical and surgical science has opened up such a way entirely practicable, humanitarian in the highest sense, unobjectionable except upon grounds of an absurd and irrational sentiment. The discoveries in the use of anæsthetics and antiseptics have rendered it possible to remove or sterilize the organs of reproduction of both sexes without pain or danger. This is the simplest, easiest, and most effectual solution of the whole difficulty. It promptly and completely stops the horrid breed where it begins and obviates the necessity of permanent seclusion otherwise imperative.^
Beginning in 1907, sterilization laws were enacted in 33 U.S. states. More than 60,000 U.S. citizens were involuntarily sterilized.
In Prisoners and paupers, Boies also endorsed strictly repressing prisoners’ communication. Largely assimilating prisoners, paupers, and the “abnormal and defective class”, Bois declared:
Convicted prisoners should invariably be held in solitary confinement, and secluded from intercourse with the outside world. … Visits by friends and companions of convicts should be strictly prohibited, except by a member of the immediate family, at rare intervals.^
About a century earlier, leading public figure Jonas Hanway had strongly urged suppressing communication among prisoners. Unlike Hanway, Boies explicitly emphasized strictly constraining prisoners’ communication with the outside world. Boies’ primary concern was the effect of prisoners, understood as a specific class of persons, on others not of that class.
Boies’ second book, The Science of Penology (1901), did not specifically address prisoners’ communication. However, The Science of Penology largely translated the views in Prisoners and Paupers into an authoritative style useful in disciplined teaching. Boies’ work reads like modern college textbooks in a variety of disciplines:
Penology may be defined as the science of the protection of society from crime by the repression, reformation and extirpation of criminals. … It is the discovery, formulation, and explanation of the immutable laws which govern and regulate successful action for the defense of society against criminality. This knowledge is now sufficiently extensive and exact, and the consensus of intelligence concerning these laws and principles ample enough, to warrant the presentation of a distinct systems which will constitute a complete and independent science. …The science of Penology… is naturally divided into three departments or sections: Diagnostics, Therapeutics, and Hygienics. … It is a theorem of Penology that criminality is a diseased condition of human character. {italics in original}^
This type of writing readily generates test questions, e.g. 1) define Penology and state its three subdivisions, 2) true or false: criminality is a diseased condition of the human character. Occasionally, however, Boies slips into morally fraught normative analysis more characteristic of U.S. law reviews and women’s studies journals:
In America, the absence of caste and class exclusiveness, encouraging freedom of social intercourse, fairly invites the subtle microbe of degeneracy to infect all ranks and conditions and render legislation especially necessary. No family can be safe while the currents of intermarriage spread without let or hindrance over the whole people. The ferment of immorality and disease will naturally burrow upward and diffuse itself eccentrically until all are contaminated, and the nation becomes enfeebled and degenerate.^
Science of Penology was adopted as a textbook at Yale University, in both the academic and theological schools, and at other institutions of learning.^
Many persons and organizations eulogized Boies following his death in 1903.^ Among them was a penal scholar. He lavishly praised The Science of Penology:
Mr Boies is likely to exert an influence surpassing that of any of his contemporaries, in moulding the thought and inspiring the energies of future generations with correct views regarding crime and the treatment of criminals. Thus, the Science of Penology must be regarded as a really monumental work; and, while Mr Boies in many ways served his day and generation, this book is the crowning work of his life and a useful public service which justly claims for its author a grateful and lasting memory.^
Boies’ entry in the Dictionary of American Biography (1928-1936) describes his books on penology as taking “relatively advanced positions with respect to the humanitarian treatment and reformation of offenders.”
Boies work was not merely the expression of his class position and the now-discredited ideology of eugenics. What Boies wrote, and the way what he wrote was read, documents a public style of communication. Boies’ “humanitarian treatment and reformation of offenders” was intended for a course of authoritative education for persons of a different class from offenders. Offenders themselves Boies described as objects that “must be got rid of.”
