Wheeler, Truman

Howard B. Gill and daughter Joan at State House hearings on Norfolk Prison Colony

In the late 1920s, the sociologist and prisoner reformer Howard Belding Gill proposed building a "model community prison" at Norfolk, Mass., that would represent a radical new approach to dealing with the issues of crime and punishment. A noted efficiency expert who had been educated at Harvard and Harvard Business School, Gill was working on a study of prison industries for the federal government when he became convinced that prisons of the future could become something more than a place for retribution and punishment. By integrating social work and sociological theory into the workings of the prison system, he reasoned that that it would be possible to diagnose and treat the root problems that led to crime and redirect inmates toward constructive behaviors.

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