By the starting of World War 2, huge prisons were the order of the day. Many state prisons held more than 1,000 inmates. San Quentin, suffering the effects of California’s explosive growth and rampant crime problems, had more than 1,300 prisoners as early as 1880. New York’s three prisons and one reformatory each held over 1,000 prisoners, as did Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, which maintained its facade of solitary confinement even though more than half of its 732 “solitary” cells held more than one prisoner. The Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus, built in the 1830s, had 1,800 cells by the end of the century. It was by far the largest prison in the world at the time, confining more than 2,000 inmates. But the most populous prison in America—and by many accounts the most wretched—was the Missouri Penitentiary at Jefferson City. Built in 1836 to confine forty-six convicts in forty cells, by the end of the century it held more than 2,300 convicts in 500 old cells.
The abrupt demise of the industrial prison went virtually unnoticed for a time. In the 1930s, recovery from the Depression was the great national concern. Then came growing international conflict that resulted in World War II and that engulfed the United States in December 1941. The war had several major effects on prisons. Prison populations declined as many young men in trouble(including convicts who were paroled to work in war industries) were allowed to choose between military duty and prison. Active military service provided strong social control over young men, the demographic most likely to commit crimes, and the new rules against prison labor were relaxed to put prisoners to work in the war effort.
The Prison Industries Branch of the War Production Board was established in December 1941 to manage the industrial and agricultural output of state and federal prisons. The chairman of the War Production Board said in late 1942 that only about 10 percent of convicts were working in prison industries, which were producing at about a third of their estimated potential. As state political officials got more involved and federal restrictions were modified, prison production increased. By 1943, industrial and agricultural production in state prisons was estimated at about $25 million each. Prisons in Alabama, Michigan, and Oklahoma led in industrial production, while Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas led in agricultural production.9 Prisoners manufactured assault boats, shell cases, bomb crates, bomb noses, truck bodies, submarine nets, cargo nets, Navy shirts, bush shirts, boiler suits, stretchers, flags, and leather insignia. Federal prisons led the penal war effort. Inmates at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary built Army patrol boats. Women at Alderson Reformatory sewed flags and bandoliers by day (working forty-eight hours per week) and volunteered to prepare Red Cross surgical dressings at night. Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania turned out thousands of bomb fins and steel mess trays. Atlanta Federal Penitentiary produced $4 million worth of defense materials annually by the middle of the war period. State prisons in the West, South, and Midwest were also recognized for their productivity.
The principal goal of the penitentiary was to achieve the kind of spiritual transformation in a criminal being that was associated with the religious beings of the medieval monastery. World War II had many effects on the prisons. Prison populations declined as many young men in trouble were drafted into the army, as another form of punishment, to shape adolescents into responsible young men. Judges would also give the men a choice, either join the military or go to jail.
After the war, prisons faded from public view. Their populations went up again, industrial and agricultural production declined, and restrictions on interstate shipment of prison-made goods were restored. Prisons became institution of idleness where growing numbers of prisoners were confined by penal officials who had nothing for them to do. Politicians who had advocated greater involvement of prisoners in the war effort turned a blind eye to prisons after the war. Prisoners, many of whom had exchanged military uniforms for prison gray, discovered that they were invisible once again. Inside prisons, tensions built up between inmates and prison officials had no way of relieving that stress.
Violence had been a problem in American prisons going back to the Colonial era. In the twentieth century, as prisoners were gradually allowed more freedom of movement, inmate attacks on guards and other prisoners increased, as did escape attempts. Prisons had much smaller guard forces than they have now, and escape attempts, often on a large scale, were commonplace and frequently successful. Guards and wardens were taken hostage, injured, or killed by prisoners armed with guns, knives, or homemade weapons. Prison riots were infrequent until after World War II, when several circumstances—relaxed controls over prisoners, idleness, inattention to grievances, and deteriorating buildings—combined to create an atmosphere ripe for explosion.