Enoch Wines Reform

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The Age of Reform was a time period in the history of America that included many social and political changes to the government. This was in the middle of the 19th century, when issues like slavery, women's rights, and prison reform needed attention. For many of the serious crimes that were committed, the sanction was usually something along the lines of the death penalty or confinement. Many of the prisoners' families had to pay for the costs of food and lodging. Prior to the 1830s, inmates would be regularly caged and chained up in places like closets and even cellars. For other mentally ill people, they were put together with other inmates with no extra treatment or anything to help them. One of the biggest movements was the attempt to abolish …show more content…
While it was a little corrupt because the political leaders of the states were made up of white men who owned their own plantations, they used their political power to have the prison laborers work on the plantations. An important individual who was the face of the reform movement was Enoch Wines. Wines was born on February 17th, 1806, and lived a remarkable and successful life. Wines were called from the newly founded City University of St. Louis. This was cut short because of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. He returned east, accepted a position as secretary of the Reviving Prison Association of New York at age 56, and began his life's work. When Wines inspected state prisons, it revealed to him that they were “desperate, overcrowded, and other unsatisfactory results of a politically unstable administration” (Enoch Cobb Wines). Accompanied by Theodore William Dwight, Wines visited all the prisons in all of the states in the north and was preparing to write a monumental report on the prisons and reformatories of the United States as well as …show more content…
There were a lot of roles and actions that people needed to do in order for there to be a substantial amount of change. In the prison reform area there was a group of people that were a part of this group called the American Correctional Association (ACA). “The American Correctional Assn. played a crucial role in the implementation of prison reforms during the second half of the 19th century” (Travisono and Hawkes). This group included Wines, Zebulon, Brockway and others. Wines founded this group at a conference in Cincinnati in 1870. The American Correctional Association made movements to have prisons move away from the death penalty and other methods like corporal punishment as a consequence, to make incarceration a more desirable and a more humane system that prisons could survive. Wines, who was dedicated to this movement, tried to get political and other interested reformers involved in his ideas and to help him with the movement. He prepared himself for the National Congress on the Reformatory and Penitentiary discipline. Motivated by his religious training, philosophical, and political beliefs, he issued the following
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