Howard Belding Gill founded the Institute of Correctional Administration (ICA) at George Washington University in 1952. It relocated to American University in 1958. Just prior to Gill’s retirement from American University in 1970, the Institute was subsumed into American University’s Center for the Administration of Justice, overseen by law professor Dr. Nicholas Kittrie. The Institute provided training to correctional officers and administrators both in Washington D.C. and at various off-campus locations such as military bases and other universities.

Howard Belding Gill (1890-1989) was a nationally renowned penologist and prison administrator for over six decades. He is perhaps best-known as the first superintendent of the pioneering Norfolk Prison Colony, which aimed to prepare inmates for life in the outside world with vocational training and dormitory-style living arrangements. Gill was born in Lockport, New York, and graduated from Harvard University in 1913. He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1914, and for the next ten years pursued a career in business, working in real estate development in the Larchwood and Coolidge Hill sections of Cambridge and serving as the Executive Secretary for the Massachusetts Board of Trade, and on the Board of Trade in Cambridge. A political Progressive, he campaigned with wife Isabelle Kendig for U.S. participation in the League of Nation’s World Court in 1923 and in 1924 campaigned for Progressive presidential candidate Robert La Follette. After the election, he remained in Washington D.C. and opened a consulting business specializing in research for commerce and industry. The federal Commission on Prison Labor commissioned a study of prison industries from Gill’s firm in the early 1920s. Although Secretary of State Herbert Hoover was reportedly displeased with their findings, Gill had attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and in 1927 he was appointed the superintendent of the Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts. From 1927 to 1934 Gill served as superintendent, overseeing the design, construction, and innovatory social policies of the prison. Norfolk deviated from the usual radial cell-block design and instead featured dormitories around a quadrangle, with its own library, community center, hospital, chapel, and workshops. In April 1934, amidst charges that he was unable to maintain discipline and coddled prisoners, Gill was ousted from his position by Governor Joseph Ely and Corrections Commissioner Frederick J. Dillon.

Gill returned to D.C. as the assistant to the Director of Federal Prisons and continued to advocate for prison reform, serving as the Superintendent of Prisons in Washington D.C. from 1944 to 1946 and establishing the Institute of Correctional Administration (ICA) there in 1952. He led the ICA as director from 1952 to 1970 and published widely on the subjects of penology and criminology, which he also taught at George Washington University, American University, the University of Wisconsin, and others. Gill frequently guest lectured at Boston College, where his longtime friend Benedict S. Alper was Professor of Criminology. Gill was a consultant on prison architecture and programming for Panama and Puerto Rico, as well as for the U.S. Department of Corrections, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. He received the Presidential Citation of the American Society of Criminology, the Corrections Conference Award of the Welfare Council of Washington, and the Austin McCormick Award from the National Jail Association. In 1984, the American Correctional Association established the Howard B. Gill Award to honor his legacy. Gill died at his home in Chestnut Hill in 1989.

Isabelle Virginia Kendig (1889-1974) was a psychologist known for her work with social issues. She received her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin in 1912. Kendig and Gill married in 1915. In the 1920s, Kendig was a key organizer for the National Woman’s Party and spent six weeks in Mississippi in 1922 promoting women’s suffrage legislation. She was research secretary for the National Council for Prevention of War in 1923-1924 and also served in an administrative capacity for the League for Preventative Work.

After receiving her Masters and PhD from Radcliffe in 1933, Kendig used her maiden name professionally while working at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, and as a lecturer at George Washington University, Catholic University, and the Washington School of Psychiatry. When Gill taught at the University of Wisconsin in 1948-1949, Kendig served as the Chief Psychologist at the Veterans’ Administration hospital in Tomah, Wisconsin. She became Chief Clinical Psychologist of the VA hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in the early 1950s. From approximately 1959-1964, she worked as a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health. She and Gill had four children. Kendig died in Nantucket in 1974.

Sources

Fry, Amelia R. “Conversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment,” Suffragists Oral History Project, 1976. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6f59n89c (accessed August 18, 2012).

“Howard Gill, 99, Dies; Authority on Prisons.” New York Times, April 12, 1989.

Isabelle V. Kendig Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990025124050203941/catalog (accessed August 18, 2012).

Johnsen, Thomas C. “Vita: Howard Belding Gill: Brief Life of a Prison Reformer: 1890-1989.” Harvard Magazine (Sept.-Oct. 1999). https://harvardmagazine.com/1999/09/vita.html.

Prout, Curtis, and Robert N. Ross. Care and Punishment: The Dilemmas of Prison Medicine. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988, 21-40.

Taylor, Jerry. “Obituaries: Howard Belding Gill, Pioneer in Modern U.S. Penology; at 99.” Boston Globe, April 12, 1989, 55.