Once known as MCI Bridgewater and still earlier as the Massachusetts State Farm, the present correctional complex at Bridgewater was opened in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when progressive Massachusetts established a series of charitable institutions that were considered an example for the world. Yet Bridgewater’s subsequent evolution from almshouse to combined prison and hospital for the criminally insane was accompanied by deteriorating conditions that a century later marked it as among the worst in the nation.  Historian Michael J. Maddigan offers a riveting examination of the Bridgewater correctional complex’s troubled past including its origin as a model of state-sponsored welfare, the moral and legal challenges it has confronted and the experiences of the people that once worked there and lived there including Sacco and Vanzetti and the Boston Strangler.