Sing Sing

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This article is about the maximum security prison. For the Papua New Guinean tribal gathering, see Sing-sing. For the English band, see Sing-Sing (band).
Warden T. M. Osborne in older facility.
Warden T. M. Osborne in older facility.

Sing Sing Correctional Facility is maximum security prison in Ossining, New York. Sing Sing “reaches back almost to the beginning of the state prison system in New York.”[citation needed] It is located in Westchester County approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. The name comes from the original name of the village of Ossining, though the penitentiary was first called "Mount Pleasant" when it opened in 1828.

Today Sing Sing houses more than 1,700 prisoners. There are plans to convert the original 1825 cell block, which still stands, into a museum.[citation needed]

Elam Lynds
Elam Lynds
Cell in older facility.
Cell in older facility.
Sing Sing electric chair - Old Sparky
Sing Sing electric chair - Old Sparky

Contents

[edit] History

In March of 1796, legislation was passed requiring the building of two state prisons in New York: one in Albany and the other somewhere in downstate New York. In addition to the plan for the building of the two prisons there was to be appointed a "Board of inspectors" whose job was to "statedly visit the prisons, purchase clothing, bedding, raw materials for manufacturing purposes and to keep an account of the earnings and expenses of each prison"; the law also provided that the Governor and Council were to appoint a "Keeper, who was to be of some mechanical profession." No prison was in fact built in Albany but one was constructed in Auburn, beginning in April 1815 and opening a year later.

In 1825, the New York state legislature gave Elam Lynds the task of constructing a new, more modern correctional facility. Lynds was both the warden of Auburn Prison and a former Army captain. He spent months researching possible locations for the prison, considering Staten Island, The Bronx, and Silver Mine Farm, an area in the town of Mount Pleasant, located on the banks of the Hudson River. By May, he had finally settled on the Mount Pleasant location and selected 100 convicts from his own prison for transfer. When the state appropriated $20,100 to purchase the 130 acre site, Lynds transported the 100 prisoners by barge along the Erie Canal to freighters down the Hudson River. 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.

Lynds' plan was to use prisoner labor to excavate marble from a nearby quarry and use it to construct the prison, a practice Lynds had seen used in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Once the prison was built, the prisoners would continue excavating marble to be shipped down the Hudson to New York City. Beyond the initial sum required to purchase the land, the prison was to be self-supporting, not requiring taxpayer funding. Some of the marble went into the construction of New York University, the United States Treasury building, New York City's Grace Church, and the New York State Capitol building in Albany.

When it was completed, Sing Sing was considered a model prison because it turned a profit for the state. Lynds employed the Auburn system, which imposed absolute silence on the prisoners; the system was enforced by whipping and other brutal punishments. Visitors found the silence of the up to 900 prisoners, even as they worked, eerie. After Lynds left in the wake of a scandal involving the pregnancy of a female prisoner, conditions at the prison began to deteriorate. Fires and disease became common, and in 1861, the governor called in the army to quell a riot.

Another notable warden besides Lynds was Lewis E. Lawes. He was offered the position of warden—a position which had been filled by nine separate people in the last nine years, one only for three weeks—and accepted in 1920. What he found was a facility that had lost any semblance of order through decades of neglect and abuse. Records documented 795 male and 102 female prisoners at Sing Sing. A head count turned up only 762 and 82 actually present. "How these missing prisoners had left the prison or when, could not be ascertained," he said. Worse still, for one prisoner who had been incarcerated for five years, there was no record of admission or retention history. He was declared a "volunteer" and released on the spot. More than $30,000 in cash was missing from prison bank accounts when Lawes became warden, and there was no trace as to where the money went. Documented punishments were brutal and described a long history of abuse by both prison guards and wardens.

Sing Sing has its own cemetery, and among those buried there is serial killer Albert Fish.

[edit] Punishments

Punishments for the prisoners were at times harsh and merciless. Punishments included freezing showers that consisted of a prisoner having a tight hollow basin around his neck that catches water around his mouth and chin area and that is very uncomfortable, and then a burst of freezing water would drop from the ceiling onto his head. The amount of water that was poured onto the inmates head depended on the severity of the prisoner's violation(s).

Throughout the century one of the most common and regularly used forms of punishment was solitary confinement. This was where a prisoner would be locked in a dark cell with a highly limited supply of food for a certain amount of time. Certain changes were made during the end of the century ("1880's") that took away the "solid steel doors and replaced them with barred cell doors and a bathroom", due to the time they served in the cell without coming out. Another regularly used form of punishment was the paddle. Prisoners would receive three to four hits with a hickory or leather paddle. The beatings would only cease if the prisoner would promise to behave. This type was overly used since a prisoner would "receive hits from minor complaints such as poor or short work on contact". Also, the beatings would be administered by "individual keepers" rather than the principle keeper himself ("up until 1876 where only the principle keeper" was allowed to do such a thing).

From 1914 until 1971, only the electric chair at Sing Sing was used for executions. The last execution at Sing Sing was in August 1963, two years before New York first abolished capital punishment.

In addition to an end of the brutality, the facility was slowly modernized. In the 1920s, several new buildings were built, including a chapel, a mess hall, two administration centers, a hospital and a library.

[edit] Carola

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During the inmates' stays at the prison their lives were constantly filled with hardships and sometimes no rest. A normal day consisted of working for "ten hours and forty-five minutes starting at six in the morning and ending at six" in the evening. The other hour and fifteen minutes were spent eating and walking to and from work. "This work schedule was set during the summer days from May 15th to September 15th." As time passed from the summer days to colder winter type days the work hours were cut down to "eight hours and forty-five minutes or nine hours and forty-seven minutes" approximately. The hours they were not working they were locked up in their cells for the most part. It was hard for inmates to develop good work habits since there were no incentives or rewards such as good behavior time given to them.

The inmates would march directly from work to the cells where they would receive bread and coffee. In the morning they would receive hash and coffee; the hash was made up of the left over meats from the previous day and potato. Time and time again the inmates would receive this same food for breakfast and dinner unless instructed by a physician that it be changed for sick inmates to mush and molasses. Due to the type of food the men would get, during the winter many of the men would become sick. More than 100 men would suffer from scurvy and eleven died from Asiatic cholera and fifteen from tuberculosis in the year of 1854. Those sick and mentally unstable men were segregated in a completely different section of the prison called the "outer Ward". The "insane men were transferred to the Utica State Hospital but this practice was prohibited by the Legislature in 1854, because of the objection to mixing both citizen and criminal insane."

The weekends seem just as painful as the punishments they would receive when they behaved with misconduct. As soon as they would finish work on Friday afternoon until Monday morning they were locked in the cells. The only time that they would not be locked in the cells is when they would attend the chapel for a short amount of time. "In 1912 the first Sunday dinner was served in the mess hall. A year later soup or some other inexpensive dish was added to the daily supper of bread and coffee, and the meal served in the mess hall rather than in the cells, terminating at last a practice that had governed the evening meal for 90 years. Columbus Day, 1912, was the first holiday the men spent out of their cells."

[edit] Popular culture

  • In 1997, author and journalist Ted Conover became a New York State correctional officer because he found it the only way he could write about being one. He was assigned to Sing Sing and worked there for about ten months. The resulting book, Holding the key, was published in 2000 to critical acclaim, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The state's Department of Correctional Services soon declared it contraband, requiring that several pages be redacted from any version sent to inmates.
  • Gangster movies helped make the prison a legend far beyond New York; they included The Big House (1930), Castle on the Hudson (1940), and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), the latter based on a book by Warden Lawes. 80's Spanish Band Los Nikis has the song "10 años en Sing Sing" which means "Ten years in Sing Sing.
  • "The expression "sent up the river" refers to Sing Sing.[citation needed] Other than Alcatraz, it is the most famous prison in American popular culture.
  • Pop/R&B singer Mariah Carey has referred to her home with ex-husband Tommy Mottola as "Sing Sing" in order to highlight the fact that she felt imprisoned and was forced to "sing" endlessly, often in a pop style she felt uncomfortable with. Carey lampooned Mottola and her married life in the 1997 video for the song "Honey."
  • The 2005 film adaptation (Constantine) of the John Constantine comic character features one of the electric chairs used in Sing Sing, in a scene where the protagonist uses it to interact with the occult.
  • Sing Sing is the maximum security facility that held the Punisher imprisoned during earth's apocalyptic era.
  • La cárcel de Sing Sing is a song written by Bienvenido Brens, about a prisoner who was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife and her lover. The song was made famous by the Colombian singer Alci Acosta.
  • Sing-Sing was mentioned in the Wu-Tang Clan single Triumph by U-god who raps' "I sing a song from Sing-Sing, sippin on ginseng"
  • The protagonist from Driver: Parallel Lines, TK, is sent to prison in Sing Sing after being framed for murder.
  • The television franchise Law & Order often refers to Sing Sing, either current prisoners or threatening suspects with ending up there.
  • In the 2005 remake of The Producers, Max Bialystock, Leo Bloom and Franz Liebkind are all sent to Sing Sing. They are released for "bringing through song and dance joy into the heart of every murderer, rapist and sex maniac in Sing Sing".
  • In P.Diddy "lets Get It" featuring Black Rob Sing Sing is mentioned in his lyrics "Act like yo goin to pull that thing thing, you the only one that always gets stuck for bling bling, I represent A Block in Sing sing

[edit] Notable prisoners

The book Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown references Sing-Sing

[edit] Fictional prisoners of Sing Sing

[edit] Resources

[edit] Further reading

  • Barnes, Harry Elmer (1926) The Repression of Crime, Studies in Historical Penology. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.
  • Brockway, Zebulon Reed (1912) Fifty Years of Prison Service. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.
  • The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism by James McGrath Morris (2003)
  • Crash Out : The True Tale of a Hell's Kitchen Kid and the Bloodiest Escape in Sing Sing History by David Goewey (2005)
  • Miracle at Sing Sing : How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners by Ralph Blumenthal (2005)
  • Sing Sing: The Inside Story of a Notorious Prison by Denis Brian (2005)
  • Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House by Scott Christianson (2000)
  • Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover (2000), ISBN 0-375-50177-0


New York State Department of Correctional Services prisons
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Coordinates: 41°9′6″N, 73°52′8″W

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