On Independence Day, I stood on some sand and thanked a spider.

The understated beauty of Matianuck Sand Dunes Natural Preserve, defeated the odds by being allowed to continue, as is. Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers flit from tree-to-tree. A hawk screamed from just inside the wood’s edge. A swamp filled with Eastern spadefoot frogs croaked into the night. Signs of deer and coyote could be seen in the sand which once belonged to Glacial Lake Hitchcock.

There was a failed attempt to annihilate this rare inland sane dune and all its related endangered birds and insects by leveling the land and installing a medium-security prison.

Image courtesy of The Hamilton Project

It’s startling how many people the United States has decided to lock up, yet not surprising when we look at how few resources are put into prevention and rehabilitation. Having worked for an organization that connects mentors with children and teens, I have seen how successful that type of program can be, yet it does not receive even 25% of the funding needed to make a widespread impact in the community and there are never enough adults volunteering who live near the enrolled youth and/or have similar interests. Rather than invest — with our money or time — in youth, we spend garish sums to put them in juvenile detention, and later, prison.

Reducing the incarceration rate is not as simple as merely encouraging young people to make healthier, prosocial choices, but mentorship programs, which can only benefit society, struggle to find support.

We can’t only get rid of what doesn’t spark joy. What do we want in its place?

Many readers understand the rise of mass incarceration, but there are just as many who don’t, who may believe we need lots of prisons because we have lots of criminals and that the way to discourage crime is to keep warehousing people. There are whole books written about this stuff, but here’s a taste of what went on close to home.

By 1985, tensions were rising over the conditions in Connecticut’s prisons. Overcrowding was blamed, and though considered cruel, attention was focused, with few exceptions, on alleviating the symptom rather than preventing the disease. You don’t even have to be liberal to understand that imprisonment — a shunning from larger society with limits on personal movement — does not need to dive into mistreatment. What kind of people do we want re-entering society after they’ve done their time — those who have atoned and built themselves up, or those who have been broken down? What type of person do we want as our neighbor after he has exited prison?

It seems embarrassingly obvious now, but those alive and grown at the time are forgiven for being gullible, then — the internet (as we know it today) was not there to make plain the patterns of a political ploy, though I would argue that more questions could have been asked at the time by those with the most access to information: journalists.

The prison population across the country had already been growing, but under Reagan, it was rocketing. An editorial in the Courant advocated for a women’s prison and a medium-security prison in 1985, thinking this would be the way to alleviate crowding. Though prisons, like highways, seem to suffer from induced demand: the more space that exists, the more people work to fill it.

Another piece from the same paper that year asserted that “As the Baby Boom generation ages, the problem [overcrowding] is expected to fade. The number of people in the prime crime-committing age group — 16 to 35 years old — will peak in about two years, then gradually decline, population predictions show. If they prove accurate, the prison population will drop to its 1982 level by the year 2000.”

That prediction seems laughable now that we have seen Reagan’s series of “tough on crime” acts, like the racist AF mandatory minimums that punished those in possession of crack cocaine more severely than those in possession of powdered cocaine. That policy alone lasted from 1986-2010, and does not even account for what went through in 1984 or what would come later. (The crack-to-powder disparity was not entirely eliminated under Obama, but became much less significant)

Most of what made it into print in 1985 built the administration’s case for more prisons, with claims of lawlessness ruling the land. One piece by Joel Lang, offered a contrary perspective: “What Price Punishment? Four years ago, Connecticut decided to get tough on crime. It got tough, all right. Maybe too tough for its own good.”

An article titled “Racist System Fills Connecticut’s Prisons, Expert Says” managed to get published the following year. In it, the ACLU is quoted: “In Connecticut, there are more minorities imprisoned than in Alabama, Texas, South Carolina, and Georgia. Those are states with more minorities than Connecticut.” In 1985, 63.6% of Connecticut’s inmates were identified as Black or Hispanic. Think on that. Unless you live in a city or “city” in Connecticut, pause and search up your town’s and “demographics.” Assume that whatever percentage White it is today, it was even more so 35 years ago.

Carl Robinson Correctional Institution (Robinson CI) opened in August 1986 as a minimum-security prison in Enfield, with the capacity of housing 650 inmates. By the end of 1986, the State of Connecticut announced its plan to build a medium-security facility. They had only a few conditions: within 30 miles of the prisons in Somers and Enfield, accessible by public transit, and enough acreage to accommodate a facility that would house 800 inmates.

In 1979, Bertha Pilgard put her estate on the market, and that is where it stayed. Her 100+ acres in Windsor, hugging the Hartford and Bloomfield lines, attracted no interest. Years back, the property housed a pig farm. One time, it served as a timber salvage station. A combination of woodlands, wetlands, and sand barrens, the parcel was zoned for agriculture.

Just two years before listing her property, she published in the Courant a long, rosy piece in which she claimed that Champs-Élysées was no more beautiful than “Hartford’s Ann Street, from Church Street to Main Street” when she lived on it as a child, where “in the Spring and Summer, the trees formed an archway with their large and fragrant blossoms.” She went on to say how she was “saddened” when “they tore down the fine old houses of Ann Street.” Thick with nostalgia, you might imagine its author to be one who would contest the demolition of every historic building and mourn the destruction of terrain in the name of industry.


In March 1987, her property at 200 and 210 Pershing Street becomes the only private land offered to the State for its prison. This appears to be one of nine prison construction or expansion projects Connecticut wants to get rolling in the next few months.

Initially, for one moment, it seems that this Windsor is going to give it a green light, with an assistant to Windsor’s town manager making a bizarre remark: “You could almost make a case that, psychologically, it’s viewed as part of Hartford.”

The parcel’s address is Bloomfield. Access to the property was through Bloomfield only.

If anything linked it psychologically to Hartford, it was the family’s ties to the city.

Bertha’s father, John, was what we would call a joiner. He served on various boards and committees. As a young person he worked as a butcher in Hartford, opening several markets. The Pilgard Building, a 7-story structure at Main and Morgan, was his. He would go on to head up various banks. He adored horses, racing them in Riverside Park and on Albany Avenue near Blue Hills Avenue. He was an active member of the Keney Park Riding Club, which had stables and a riding ring on eleven acres spanning from 355 Barbour Street to the park, not far from the parcel on Pershing Street. He named several of his horses after his children. After leaving downtown’s Ann Street, the family would move to Vine Street. When he died, he died as mayor-elect of Hartford.

Within a month of the psychologically-Hartford property being offered as a sacrifice to the Connecticut State Department of Correction, opposition began brewing. The location, described by the paper as being “near a middle-class, integrated neighborhood of single-family homes,” was one source of resistance. Who wants to live next to a prison? Who can sell their home once everyone knows what is planned for the site?

The State tried to claim it had only been interested in purchasing this as a buffer zone around a nearby property already owned by the State (which used to contain a go-cart track) though looking at the acreage they were after and what they possessed, that explanation does not add up. Ultimately, Bloomfield, Hartford, and Windsor all came out against this proposal.

Somewhere in all of this, there was a report compiled for the Department of Environmental Protection (now DEEP) which noted the presence of the rare inland sand dune, endangered birds, and indigenous artifacts. A big sand tiger beetle and ghost dune tiger beetle — both still present today — were noted as residents of the land. But what slammed the door in the DOC’s face was a rare spider, described as a burrowing wolf spider, turret-building spider, and trapdoor spider in separate accounts.

Although this spider did not greet me on Independence Day, I thanked it for its service in preserving the land around Meadow Brook and keeping a dreadful institution out.

Matianuck Natural Area Preserve is accessible from several points for those who care to take the time to search for entrances.