The resolutions needed to form The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice were passed unanimously, and an Executive Committee met on May 31, at 4:00 p.m. at Boston's Park Street Church and called for the first Annual Meeting to be held March 27, 1879. The objectives of the organization: to suppress vile publications and manufacturers, and to promote public morality.
Without notice or explanation the cover of the 1890-1891 annual report read, New England Watch and Ward Society formerly New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. According to the notes of the twentieth anniversary meeting, the new name was chosen because the "old Watch and Ward Society was a volunteer police force which, here in Boston, patrolled the streets at night protecting citizens from peril, from disorder, and from vice." The organization would bear the honored name and the "watchward" would be prevention. There were advisory committees in each New England state.
According to the minutes of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, dated October 8, 1787, british reformer John Howard promised five hundred pounds to the permanent charity, if it was formed during his lifetime or within three years of his death. (There is no record to show if he kept his promise.) This very first American prison reform group inspired by John Howard and his work changed its name to Pennsylvania Prison Society in 1887. Boston established its ownJohn Howard Industrial Home in 1890. The John Howard idea spread to Chicago in 1901.
The first public notice of the birth of a new organization was found in the proceeding of the Annual Congress of the National Prison Association, held at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1889. "For a long time, need has been felt in Massachusetts for a prison society with a broader scope, and a strong movement is now afoot for the establishment of such a society; fifty prominent men and women having already promised to join." And so the Massachusetts Prison Association was organized, December 9, 1889, opened an office in February, 1890 at No. 1 Pemberton Square. Edmund A. Whitman was secretary until he resigned in May and Warren F. Spaulding assumed the duties of secretary.
In 1938-1939 the Boston Council of Social Agencies made a survey of agencies providing services to the ex-prisoner and found none devoted exclusively to providing casework service, while working for penal reform. This study provided the final impetus for merger of the John Howard Society, Friends of Prisoners, Inc,. and the Massachusetts Prison Association, to create the United prison Association, incorporated January 1, 1940, with offices at 51 Cornhill.
Beginnings in 1964
It is not surprising that Massachusetts Half-Way Houses, Inc. resulted from conversations among an inmate at Walpole (Cedar Junction), Murdock W. McDonald; the prison chaplain, Robert E. Burt; and a visiting clergyman, Rev. Sidney J. Menk, Executive Secretary of the Missionary Society of Boston.
Rev Menk met with George F. McGrath, Massachusetts Commissioner of Corrections; William A. Coolidge, National Research Foundation; and Daniel J. Finn, Director of Massachusetts Civil Defense, to form a halfway house provisional committee in February 1963. Frederick Nader, a doctoral candidate at Boston University’s School of Education, was hired to design a research component to develop criteria for selection of offender residents and later, a continuing study of the effectiveness of the project.
Massachusetts Half-Way Houses was incorporated on September 28th, 1964.