Sing Sing Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison operated by the
New York State Department of Correctional ServicesThe New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision or NYSDOCCS is the agency of New York State responsible for the care, confinement, and rehabilitation of approximately 63,000 inmates at 71 correctional facilities funded by the State of New York. The department employs...
in the town of
Ossining, New YorkOssining is a town in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 37,674 at the 2010 census. It contains two villages, the Village of Ossining and part of Briarcliff Manor, the rest of which is located in the Town of Mount Pleasant....
. It is located about 30 miles north of New York City on the bank of the Hudson River.
Ossining's former name, "Sing Sing," was derived from the name of a
Native AmericanThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
tribe, "Sinck Sinck" (or "Sint Sinck"), from whom the land was purchased in 1685.
The Sing Sing prison confines about 1,700 prisoners.
There are plans to convert the original 1825 cell block into a museum.
The facility
The prison property is bisected by railroad tracks. There are four bridges over the tracks which connect the two halves of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. The northernmost bridge is a pedestrian crossing for employees which is outside the secure perimeter; this bridge is currently closed due to structural deficiencies. The next bridge southward contains utility lines such as steam pipes and electric lines. The 3rd bridge is a secure pedestrian bridge which can be used to move inmates from one side of the prison to the other. The southernmost bridge is a vehicle bridge inside the secure perimeter, which allows maintenance vehicles, shuttle buses and delivery trucks to move between sides without having to be re-inspected.
Early years
Sing Sing was the third prison built by New York State. The first prison was built in 1797 in Greenwich Village and a second one in 1816 called Auburn State Prison.
In 1824 the
New York LegislatureThe New York State Legislature is the term often used to refer to the two houses that act as the state legislature of the U.S. state of New York. The New York Constitution does not designate an official term for the two houses together...
gave Elam Lynds, warden of
Auburn PrisonAuburn Correctional Facility is a state prison located on State Street in Auburn, New York, built on land that was once a Cayuga Indian Village. It is classified as a maximum security facility....
and a former
ArmyThe United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
captain, the task of constructing a new, more modern prison. Lynds spent months researching possible locations for the prison, considering
Staten IslandStaten Island is a borough of New York City, New York, United States, located in the southwest part of the city. Staten Island is separated from New Jersey by the Arthur Kill and the Kill Van Kull, and from the rest of New York by New York Bay...
,
The BronxThe Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is also known as Bronx County, the last of the 62 counties of New York State to be incorporated...
, and
Silver Mine Farm, an area in the town of
Mount PleasantMount Pleasant is a town in Westchester County, New York, in the United States. As of the 2010 census, the town population was 43,724.-Geography:...
, located on the banks of the
Hudson RiverThe Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
.
He also visited
New HampshireNew Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...
, where a prison was successfully constructed by
inmateIncarceration is the detention of a person in prison, typically as punishment for a crime .People are most commonly incarcerated upon suspicion or conviction of committing a crime, and different jurisdictions have differing laws governing the function of incarceration within a larger system of...
labor, using stone that was available on-site. For this reason, by May, Lynds had finally decided on Mount Pleasant, located near a small village in
Westchester CountyWestchester County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. Westchester covers an area of and has a population of 949,113 according to the 2010 Census, residing in 45 municipalities...
with the unlikely name of Sing Sing. This appellation was derived from the
Native AmericanThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
words "Sinck Sinck" which translates to "stone upon stone". The legislature appropriated $20,100 to purchase the 130 acre (0.5260918 km²) site, and the project received the official stamp of approval. Lynds hand-selected 100 inmates from his own private stock for transfer and had them transported by barge along the
Erie CanalThe Erie Canal is a waterway in New York that runs about from Albany, New York, on the Hudson River to Buffalo, New York, at Lake Erie, completing a navigable water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. The canal contains 36 locks and encompasses a total elevation differential of...
to
freightersA cargo ship or freighter is any sort of ship or vessel that carries cargo, goods, and materials from one port to another. Thousands of cargo carriers ply the world's seas and oceans each year; they handle the bulk of international trade...
down the
Hudson RiverThe Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
. On their arrival on May 14, the site was "without a place to receive them or a wall to enclose them"; "temporary barracks, a cook house, carpenter and blacksmith’s shops" were rushed to completion.
When it was opened in 1826, Sing Sing was considered a model prison, because it turned a
profitIn accounting, profit can be considered to be the difference between the purchase price and the costs of bringing to market whatever it is that is accounted as an enterprise in terms of the component costs of delivered goods and/or services and any operating or other expenses.-Definition:There are...
for the state, and by October 1828 was finally completed. Lynds employed the
Auburn systemThe Auburn system is a penal method of the 19th century in which persons worked during the day in groups and were kept in solitary confinement at night, with enforced silence at all times...
, which imposed absolute silence on the prisoners; the system was enforced by whipping and other brutal punishments.
20th century
Thomas Mott OsborneThomas Mott Osborne was an American prison administrator, prison reformer, industrialist and New York State political reformer...
's tenure as warden of Sing Sing prison was brief but dramatic. Osborne arrived in 1914 with a reputation as a radical prison reformer. His report of a week-long incognito stay inside New York's Auburn Prison indicted traditional prison administration in merciless detail.
Prisoners who had bribed officers and intimidated other inmates lost their privileges under Osborne's regime. One of them conspired
with powerful political allies to destroy Osborne's reputation, even succeeding in getting him indicted for a variety of crimes and maladministration. After Osborne triumphed in court, his return to Sing Sing was a cause for wild celebration by the inmates.
Another notable warden was
Lewis LawesLewis Edward Lawes was a prison warden and an outspoken proponent of prison reform.-Biography:He was born on September 13, 1883, the only child of Henry Lewis and Sarah Abbott...
. He was offered the position of warden in 1919, accepted in January 1920, and remained for 20 years as Sing Sing's warden. While warden, Lawes brought about reforms and turned what was described as an "old hellhole" into a modern prison with sports teams, educational programs, new methods of discipline and more. Several new buildings were also constructed during the years Lawes was warden. Lawes retired in 1941 after 21 years as warden and died six years later. In 1943, the old cellblock was finally closed and the metal bars and doors were donated to the war effort. In 1989, the institution was accredited for the first time by the American Correctional Association, which established a set of national standards by which every correctional facility should be judged.
21st century
Today Sing Sing houses more than 2,000 inmates, with about 1,000 people working there and 5,000 visitors per month. The original 1825 cellblock is no longer used and in 2002 plans were announced to turn this into a museum. In April 2011 there have been talks to close the prison in favor of real estate.
Executions
Four inmates under federal death sentences were executed at Sing Sing. On June 19, 1953,
Julius and Ethel RosenbergEthel Greenglass Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union...
were electrocuted for espionage. On August 12, 1952, Gerhard A. Puff was electrocuted for murder. The last prisoner to be executed in the electric chair was
Eddie Lee MaysEddie Lee Mays was convicted of murder and robbery in 1962 and executed by the State of New York in 1963. He was the last person executed by the State of New York....
who was convicted of murder and executed on August 15, 1963. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled in
Furman v. GeorgiaFurman v. Georgia, was a United States Supreme Court decision that ruled on the requirement for a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. The case led to a de facto moratorium on capital punishment throughout the United States, which came to an end when Gregg v. Georgia was...
that the death penalty was unconstitutional and the chair was no longer used. Altogether, 614 men and women were executed at Sing Sing. The electric chair was later moved to Greenhaven Prison in working condition but was never used again.
Educational programs
In 1996, Katherine Vockins founded Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing. RTA works in collaboration with theater professionals to provide prisoners with a curriculum of year-round theater-related workshops. The RTA program has put on a number of plays at Sing Sing open to prisoners and community guests. The program has shown that the use of dramatic techniques leads to significant improvements in the cognitive behavior of the program's participants inside prison and a reduction in recidivism once paroled. The impact of RTA on social and institutional behavior was formally evaluated by John Jay College for Criminal Justice, in collaboration with the NYS Department of Corrections. Led by Dr. Lorraine Moller, Professor of Speech and Drama at John Jay, the study found that RTA had a positive impact on prisoners who participated in the program, showing that "the longer the inmate was in the program, the fewer violations he committed.". The RTA program currently operates at 5 other New York state prisons.
Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, a not-for-profit organization was founded to provide college education to incarcerated people in an effort to help reduce recidivism and poverty, while strengthening families and communities. In 1998, as part of the get-tough-on-crime campaign, state and federal funding for college programs inside prison was stopped. Understanding the positive effects of education in the transformation and rehabilitiation of incarcerated people, inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility reached out to religious and academic volunteers to develop a college-degree granting program. Under the leadership of Dr. Anne Reissner, Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison was founded to restore college education at Sing Sing through private funding.
Museum
Plans to turn part of Sing Sing into a museum go back to 2005, when local officials sought to turn the old power house into the museum, linked by a tunnel to a retired cell block, at a cost of $5.0 Million. In 2007, the village of
OssiningOssining is a village in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 25,060 at the 2010 census. As a village, it is located in the Town of Ossining.-Geography:Ossining borders the eastern shores of the widest part of the Hudson River....
applied for $12.5 Million in Federal money for the project, expected then to cost $14 Million. The proposed museum will display the Sing Sing story unfolded over time.
Contribution to American English vernacular
The use of the expression "up the river" to mean "in prison" derives from the practice of sentencing people convicted in New York City to serve their prison terms in Sing Sing, which is literally "up the
Hudson RiverThe Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
" from the city. Its use dates from 1891.
Further reading
- Barnes, Harry Elmer. The Repression of Crime, Studies in Historical Penology. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.
- Blumenthal, Ralph. Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners. (2005)
- Brian, Denis. Sing Sing: The Inside Story of a Notorious Prison. (2005)
- Brockway, Zebulon Reed. Fifty Years of Prison Service. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.
- Christianson, Scott. Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House. (2000)
- Conover, Ted. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing is a non-fiction book by Ted Conover, published in 2000. In the book, Conover, a journalist and university professor, recounts his experience of learning about the New York State correctional system by becoming a correctional officer for nearly a year...
(2000) ISBN 0-375-50177-0
- Gado, Mark. Death Row Women. (2008) ISBN 978-0-275-99361-0
- Goeway, David. Crash Out: The True Tale of a Hell's Kitchen Kid and the Bloodiest Escape in Sing Sing History. (2005)
- Lawes, Lewis E.. Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing. New York: Ray Long & Richard H. Smith, Inc., 1932.
- Lawes, Lewis E.. Life and Death in Sing Sing. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1928
- Morris, James McGrath. The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism.(2003)
- Papa, Anthony. 15 to Life: How I Painted My Way To Freedom (2004) ISBN 1932595066
- Pereira, Al Bermudez. Sing Sing State Prison, One Day, One Lifetime (2006) ISBN 978-0805972900
- Pereira, Al Bermudez. Ruins of a Society and the Honorable (2009) ISBN 978-0578043432
- Weinstein, Lewis M. A Good Conviction. (2007) ISBN 1595941622 (fiction)
External links