Thomas Mott Osborne
The Osborne Association
History and Major Accomplishments
"It is liberty alone that fits man for liberty."
- Thomas Mott Osborne
In 1915, Thomas Mott Osborne, a Harvard graduate and wealthy industrialist, entered New York's Auburn prison disguised as inmate "Tom Brown," #33,333x. His experience of living as any other inmate committed him to the goal of turning America's prisons from "human scrap heaps into human repair shops," and his work led him to become a progressive warden at Sing Sing prison. He later founded the Mutual Welfare League, which assisted discharged prisoners to obtain employment, and the National Society of Penal Information, which studied federal and state prisons to obtain information on housing, administration, discipline, industries, educational facilities, recreation, parole and cost. Through this work, Mr. Osborne became known as the "pioneer and prophet of prison reform."
The Osborne Association, founded after his death in 1931, continues to pursue his goal of a criminal justice system that "restores to society the largest number of intelligent, forceful, honest citizens." The agency has remained effective and relevant through decades of great change by continuously re-inventing itself, creating new responses to meet the new challenges in our clients' lives.
The criminal justice system fails where it perceives and responds to people involved in crime as isolated atoms, rather than as parents, children, members of extended families, and citizens in communities that are often the hardest hit by poverty, joblessness, substance abuse, and AIDS and other illnesses. Similarly, "crime prevention" fails where it neglects to place crime in the context of poverty, racism, joblessness, educational failure and the consequent damage done to families, particular the children soon to become adults. At Osborne, therefore, we define our constituencies not only as criminal defendants, prisoners, and parolees, but as their children and other family members, and the residents of the neighborhoods in which they live. With a staff that is 45% Latino/a, 40% African-American and at least 15% ex-offenders and/or persons living with HIV -- and with a corps of 20 former prisoner volunteers -- the agency is composed of members of these constituencies.
The Osborne Association's greatest accomplishments are the programs it has designed and implemented to address emerging problems affecting prisoners, former prisoners, their children and other family members, several of which have either been adapted by other organizations or used by governmental agencies to shape their own programming. These include: (1) the first collect-call AIDS Hotline for prisoners in the nation -- a resource now at the center of HIV services for prisoners and parolees throughout the state; (2) an original case management model for HIV-positive parolees that has since been adopted by the state for AIDS funding for this population; (3) the first (and still leading) day treatment alternative to incarceration for crack users; (4) a low-threshold harm reduction treatment program at our Bronx site and for defendants at the Brooklyn Treatment Court; (5) the first parenting education and family support program at a men's state prison, targeting inmate fathers; (6) a youth entrepreneurship program for teenagers arrested for delinquent activity in Brooklyn; (7) vocational training for inmates of Rikers Island, and post-release job placement assistance and support services, and (8) a 12-year-old program of individualized case planning and court advocacy for lawyers assigned to represent criminal defendants.