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Walpole State Prison/MCI-Cedar Junction at Walpole

2405 Main Street, South Walpole

Walpole State Prison inmates at rally for better conditions, September 29, 1971. Source: Boston Public Library Arts Department, Digital Commonwealth.

In 1970, Walpole State Prison was considered one of the most violent prisons in the United States. That same year, Francis Sargent, a liberal Republican dedicated to prison reform, won the Massachusetts governorship. In the aftermath of the prisoner rebellion and its bloody suppression at Attica in upstate New York in 1971, prison reform took on greater urgency in Massachusetts.

In this context, Sargent’s administration allowed members of the National Prisoners Reform Association (NPRA), a union of the incarcerated founded at a prison in Cranston, Rhode Island, to contact inmates at Walpole. Around the same time, two inmates, Ralph Hamm and Robert Dellelo, one Black and one White, were working to build a cross-racial alliance of Walpole prisoners. The pair would become the key organizers of a NPRA chapter at Walpole. The union was dedicated to racial justice, nonviolence, and prison abolition, and was effective at building alliances with political progressives outside the institution. Eventually, Walpole’s NPRA chapter won the right to engage in collective bargaining with the prison administration over labor issues as well as prison conditions.

In the face of growing prisoner power and an expansion of programs that lessened the incarcerated population, the guards’ union rebelled and walked off the job on March 14, 1973. For the next two months, the NPRA and its members—with the help of civilian observers—ran almost the entire prison, managing everything from the hospital to the kitchen while establishing a school and a conflict resolution process. One result was that levels of violence in the prison plummeted. Under political pressure, however, state authorities eventually and violently reasserted control of Walpole with returning guards aided by the state police, bringing an end to unprecedented experiment in prisoner self-determination.

Prisoners searched after cell block riot, Walpole State Prison, circa 1969. Photo by Spencer Grant.
Source: Boston Public Library Art Department, Digital Commonwealth.

Opened in 1956 to replace Charlestown State Prison, Walpole, a maximum-security facility, is today called MCI-Cedar Junction. It serves as the Massachusetts Department of Corrections’ “reception and diagnostic center” and, as such, receives all entering male prisoners in the state before they are assigned to another institution.

Getting there:

MBTA Commuter Rail to Walpole. The prison is 3.7 miles away.

To learn more:

Jamie Bissonette with Ralph Hamm. Robert Dellelo, and Edward Rodman, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2008.

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Charlestown State Prison/Bunker Hill Community College

250 New Rutherford Avenue, Charlestown

In late January 1955, four prisoners, following a botched escape attempt, held hostage five guards and numerous fellow inmates in the “Cherry Hill” section of the Charlestown State Prison. With the prison surrounded by police and National Guard troops, the armed prisoners surrendered after three-and-a-half days. However, they succeeded in having their grievances about the institution’s inhumane conditions and the state-wide penal system heard by a “citizens committee” charged with negotiating with them. The committee’s seven members agreed to work to improve prison conditions across the state, thus helping to bring to a peaceful end to what was then the second-longest prison insurrection in U.S. history.

Charlestown State Prison, 1900. Public domain.

In its report on the 85-hour stand-off, Time described Charlestown State Prison as “a cramped compound of blackened granite and dilapidated brick buildings” The newsweekly went on to characterize it as “the oldest, most disreputable prison in the U.S.”—it opened in 1805—and as a place “damned for 80 years as a verminous pesthole, unfit for human habitation.” Condemned by the state in 1876, it had replaced the state’s prison at Fort Independence on South Boston’s Castle Island, standing on a five-acre site in what then known as the Lynde Point section of Charlestown. In 1946-1948, Malcolm Little (later known as Malcolm X) was incarcerated there.

Over its years, the prison was the site of 61 executions, employing, beginning in 1901, the electric chair. Sacco and Vanzetti, who spent their last days in the same Sugar Hill cell block that saw the 1955 insurrection, were its most famous victims, executed on August 23, 1927. On May 9, 1947, the last state executions in Massachusetts took place in Charlestown State Prison: those of Phillip Bellino and Edward Gertso.

Police guarding the entrance to Charlestown State Prison. 22 August 1927, in anticipation of protests of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Source: Boston Public Library/Digital Commonwealth.

In 1955, Massachusetts closed Charlestown State Prison, moving the incarcerated men to facilities in Norfolk and Walpole, and tore it down. Since 1973, the site has been the home of Bunker Hill Community College. There is no visible marker on the campus indicating what once stood in its place.

Getting there:

Take the Orange Line to the Community College station and follow the signs for Bunker Hill Community College.

To learn more:

“Citizens Committee Settles Charlestown Prison Riot,” Daily Boston Globe, January 22, 1955: 5.

“Oldest Prison in U. S., Condemned in 1876,” Daily Boston Globe, January 19, 1955: 11.

“The Siege of Cherry Hill,” Time, Vol. 65, Issue 5, January 31, 1955.

O’Neil, Helen. “Where Sacco, Vanzetti and Malcolm X Stayed in Charlestown.” Charlestown Patch. March 6, 2012.

“Past Events.” Charlestown Historical Society website.