page_title: Thomas Mott Osborne
section_title: Commander at Portsmouth
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Mott Osborne / Biography / Commander at Portsmouth
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Thomas Mott Osborne and his family from the Library of Congress American Memory Collection.
context_page_description: Thomas Mott Osborne was an American prison administrator, prison reformer, industrialist and New York State political reformer. In an assessment of Osborne's life, a New York Times book reviewer wrote: "His career as a penologist was short, but in the interval of the few years he served he succeeded in revolutionizing American prison reform, if not always in fact, then in awakening responsibility.... He was made of the spectacular stuff of martyrs, to many people perhaps ridiculous, but to those whose lives his theories most closely touched, inspiring and often godlike."
context_section_description: In 1916 Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy at the likely suggestion of Assistant Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an ally of Osborne from his years in New York State reform politics, commissioned a report on conditions at the Portsmouth Naval Prison in Kittery, Maine. Osborne again investigated conditions by living inside the prison like any other inmate. He found a facility in desperate need of his reforms. In a speech at the Twentieth Century Club in New York City, he denounced "degrading" uniforms and "absurd" procedures: "When the men return from working on the seawall, a place where they could not possibly obtain anything but sand, boulders and seaweed, they are stripped and searched."
  In July, 1917, now a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, he took up the position of commander of the Portsmouth Naval Prison, a post he held for two and a half years. It was during these years Osborne, as senior officer, met and mentored Austin McCormick. Austin MacCormick would continue after Osborne's death in 1928 to publish his seminal work, "The Education of Adult Prisoners" in 1931.  MacCormick would also become Dean of Criminology at U.C. Berkley and executive director of the Osborne Association, a prison reform organization still active to this day.
caption: Osborne (seated, center) with his four sons
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