Sing Sing Prison: Cross-Section of American Criminology
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I wrote in, asked the warder, why they call the jail "Sing Sing",
I wrote in, asked the warder, why they call the jail "Sing Sing",
He said, "Stand here by this rock pile and listen to them hammering" – Porter Granger, Bessie Smith & Freddie Johnson, “Sing Sing Prison Blues”
In archeology and geology, it is possible to take a layer of rock or material and look at it vertically, examining the changes over time and making determinations as to the general environment around it using that sample. A well-chosen cross-section throughout history can tell one a lot about the past even beyond that sample. Criminology has gone through many stages: From phrenology and eugenic thinking to sociological thinking like Merton to a resurgence of conservative social and criminological ideology, the way that Americans and the world have conceptualized, imagined, and proposed solutions to criminals and to the problem of crime has changed tremendously over a mere century. Sing Sing Prison is a unique cross-section, the equivalent to the slice of bedrock, for understanding 19th, 20th and 21st century criminology.
19th century criminology focused on an admixture of punishment and rehabilitation efforts, but the rehabilitation efforts were not psychiatric; rather, they tended towards Puritanical norms (Gado, 2011). 19thcentury criminology tended towards trying to find a “single cause of crime”, while realizing the ultimate futility of this effort (Cote, 2002, xvii). This was also the period of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who would end up designing the panopticon as a method to humanely control prisoners without needing any force or even any cages (Cote, 2002, xvii-xviii). According to French post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault, whose work focused on disciplinary power, this was the period where a sharp gap between the criminal or the mentally ill and the general population emerged, borrowing from earlier conceptions (1969; 1975). “A distinctive feature of modern power (disciplinary control) is its concern with what people have not done (nonobservence), with, that is, a person's failure to reach required standards. This concern illustrates the primary function of modern disciplinary systems: to correct deviant behavior. The goal is not revenge (as in the case of the tortures of premodern punishment) but reform, where, of course, reform means coming to live by society's standards or norms. Discipline through imposing precise norms (“normalization”) is quite different from the older system of judicial punishment, which merely judges each action as allowed by the law or not allowed by the law and does not say that those judged are “normal” or “abnormal”. This idea of normalization is pervasive in our society: e.g., national standards for educational programs, for medical practice, for industrial processes and products” (Gutting, 2008). Similarly, in early colonial America, particularly the Puritanical states to the North, crimes were punished harshly, but the idea of prison, of taking people out of the social fabric, was inexcusable: The harsh punishments, including public shaming, were designed to deter and to rehabilitate, not for revenge. “For all the crimes the colonists committed, there were plenty of punishments to choose from. Most of the punishments were public, where heavy use of shame and shaming was included. Through the method of shaming, the criminal justice system meant more to teach a lesson than simply punish the offender. The “criminal” was almost always male. However, punishment for such crimes as witchcraft, infanticide, and adultery fell heavily on the women...Imprisonment was uncommon in colonial America since the budding colonies did not have people to spare to keep the community in order. Every person was valuable for their working ability, and losing even one worker to lawkeeping was neither reasonable nor an efficient use of resources. In addition, colonial communities rarely had enough extra money to build a prison and feed prisoners” (Padhy, 2006). It was only in the nineteenth century that conceptions changed from returning the temporarily wayward citizen back to the fold if possible to segregating them from society. Mumia Abu-Jamal, among others, has argued that the timing of this change was due in no small part to the need to exact disciplinary control on newly freed blacks (2009). The same logic applied then and now to restrictions of voting rights upon convicts: “No they [restrictions of voting rights to felons] did not and do not just apply to black felons, but because blacks are overcharged with felonies (especially for drug crimes, which they do not commit more often than whites), they end up bearing a [disproportional cost, and this was the plan from the start. If you follow the legislative history of the states that did this with exfelons who have paid their dues, you will see that they had blatantly racist reasons for doing it: they knew that blacks would get charged more often with felonies, no matter who did the most crime. So it’s racist, much as literacy clauses for voting were. They applied to “everyone” in theory, but everyone knew that in practice, the people to whom it would be applied were black, because of the unequal application of the law” (Wise, 2010). Race and racism were thus always part of the history of 19th and 20th century criminological practice.
All of these forces can be observed clearly in the creation of Sing Sing prison, in its conceptualization and design from the very beginning. Elam Lynds, then-head of Auburn Prison, decreed in 1824 that “They [convicts] are not to exchange a word with each other under any pretense whatever; not to communicate in writing. They must not sing, whistle, dance, run, jump, or do anything that has a tendency in the least degree to disturb the harmony...or regulations of the prison” (Gado, 2011). “Such was the guiding wisdom of 19th century penologists who were convinced that the "silent system" was the path to righteousness and a return to normal life” (Gado, 2011). This stemmed from ideas present at the time in criminology: The belief that the prisoner needed to be taken away from toxic environments that created their criminality. “Only after an inmate confronted his criminal past and acknowledged his guilt could a convict rebuild his shattered life. One penologist of the era said that this separation from society had to be so complete, that a prisoner had "to be literally buried from the world!” (Gado, 2011). This is why Sing Sing Prison's walls were so foreboding, and where many modern prisons' design came from. However, the idea was never to lock them away and throw away the key. The modern super-prison is the lineal descendant of Sing Sing, but for very different reasons: There, the goal was a complete break from society for the benefit of the prisoner; now, the goal is to completely shut away the convict from society, no matter the known harms to the prisoner, for the benefit of citizens (who are presumed innocent in this ideology).
These concepts came to a head and achieved their practical apotheosis when Lynds was asked to build a prison in line with the contemporary notions of criminological practice in 1825. “Lynds spent months investigating possible locations for the facility including Staten Island, the Bronx and an area called Mt. Pleasant on the shores of the Hudson River. He also visited New Hampshire where a prison was successfully constructed by inmate labor using stone that was available on site. For this reason, Lynds selected Mt. Pleasant, located near a small village in Westchester County with the unlikely name of Sing Sing” (Gado, 2011). The name came from “Sint Sinks”, local Indian words meaning “stone upon stone”, referring to the notion that the imposing walls would be a protective barrier against the outside world built brick by brick. The initial design was of marble stones produced by 19th century inmates (Gado, 2011). However, convicts ended up explaining the name very differently, from the ominous songs that workers would try to sing in defiance of Lynds' rules to Granger, Smith and Johnson's song, “Sing Sing Prison Blues”, imagining the name came from the sound of hammers at work. The prison was completed in 1828, with eight hundred cells (Lienhard, 1997).
Prisons prior to Sing Sing were a failed attempt at complete isolation not only from society but from other convicts; and, of course, there were the small and iconic jails in sheriff's offices and small towns across the country, immortalized by the Western cliché of the bad guy behind bars a mere few feet from the sheriff busily working. Sing Sing was trying something new: “[P]risoners doing hard labor together in silence” (Lienhard, 1997).
Sing Sing was one of the first places to use Edison's electric chair, which was in part an attempt to discredit Tesla: Tesla had backed alternating current while Edison had chosen direct current, and Edison's design (ironically a faulty one) used AC (Bellis, 2011). Six hundred fourteen people died in the chair before the state of New York chose to use lethal injection instead (Lienhard, 1997). Because of the increasing association of Sing Sing with imprisonment and death, the nearby town sharing the same named changed it to Ossining, which is its current name (Lienhard, 1997).
The design of cells was spartan. “The 1828 prison was a stark gray stone box -- no trace of ornamentation. The cells were 7 feet high, 6½ feet long, and 3¼ feet wide. They were equipped with a new device invented by an inmate. It was the lever locking mechanism -- a 150-foot-long bar that locked or unlocked 50 cells at once” (Lienhard, 1997).
Eventually, Sing Sing would ascend to the same presence in the American consciousness as Attica, Alcatraz, the Devil's Island, the Tower of London and Leavenworth in terms of recognizability and importance (Lienhard, 1997). “When I was a child, Sing Sing meant prison the way Gillette meant razor blade” (Lienhard, 1997). Even as late as the 1930s, the conception of the prison was still rooted in reform and in returning the fundamental humanity back to the convicts. Lewis Lawes, warden of Sing Sing, wrote his 1932 book Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing and dedicated it to “those tens of thousands of my former wards who have justified my faith in human nature” (Lienhard, 1997). The prison became the source of numerous phrases popular in American culture even into the 21st century, such as “up the river”, referring to being sent up the Hudson to Sing Sing (Associated Press, 2011).
Lawes' tenure is particularly fascinating for the student of criminology, as Lawes introduced many innovations that were more in tune with a gentler treatment of prisoners that was being advocated by many in the 1930s. “Warden Lawes took charge of Sing Sing in 1920. He appears, for a while, to have made the old hellhole into a model prison with a band, sports teams, educational programs, and more. It even had a little brick aviary on the grounds. Lawes's book detailed his penal philosophy. Reform was clearly his first priority, and he viewed the death penalty as a useless deterrent” (Lienhard, 1997). The 1920s and 1930s included horrible crimes against blacks, the rise of the KKK, the Great Depression... and yet, in criminology at least, there seemed to be an honest and authentic hope about the ability to improve people (Lienhard, 1997). Even more interesting, the hope that Lawes expressed and his seemingly authentic desire to
But it was not just leadership that beatified and beautified the prison: Inmates like Charles E. Chapin, the legendary “Rose Man”, also made the prison a better and more human place to live. Chapin confessed to murder, a former New York City newspaper editor and a sixty-year-old man by the time of his conviction (Cheli, 2003). Lawes met Chapin first in 1919, then again in 1920, this time on what looked to be Chapin's deathbed (Cheli, 2003, 105). Lawes gave Chapin editorship of the prison newspaper, and soon the newspaper became “one of the best prison newspapers in the country”; however, it “was eventually discontinued because of administrative circumstances” (Cheli, 2003, 105). Yet Chapin under Lawes' influence was tenacious. He asked to be allowed to take over the lawn. Before he began his work, it was a sand pit. Chapin and Lawes agreed that the lawn needed to be made beautiful, Chapin himself insisting on roses. Chapin, now known throughout the prison as the Rose Man, and the men working under him cleared refuse, brought in and turned in topsoil, working from dawn to sunset, Chapin himself seeming to have a “new lease on life” (Cheli, 2003, 105). Chapin studied horticulture books and became an accomplished botanist himself. A gardener from a nearby town visited the garden and, impressed, shared tips with Chapin, bringing in “truckloads” worth of flowers and other plants (Cheli, 2003, 105). Almost as if a karmic adjustment had occurred to the entire prison, birds began to come by 1926, roosting in the flowers and trees Chapin and his men had planted, and Chapin became the master of the aviary. Chapin's story, among many others in the prison, illustrates that it was not just idealistic reformers puffing up their chest or exaggerating their accomplishments; rather, there was a real transformation at work for many prisoners, and real opportunities being given.
But the winds of change blew to the modern “tough on crime” approach. The Willie Horton scandal, “three strikes”, California having built nearly two dozen prisons and only one new university... these elements have made modern treatment of prisoners and the conception of them in the public very different from the reform-oriented notions of the 19th and 20th centuries (Education not Incarceration, 2004). Again, the “tough on crime” concept can be traced in part to underlying race relations dynamics: With the end of segregation and the ascension of civil rights, it was necessary to have mechanisms to control the black population. Presently, in Sing Sing, 89% of prisoners are Black or Hispanic (Moller, 2004). This is despite the fact that the underlying crime rate has not changed that markedly, and in fact crime in most indices has declined (Wise, 2010). “By '94, and still today, about two-thirds are people of color and a third are white. That's not because people of color went on a crime spree and white folks, as my mama might have said, shaped up and flew right. It was because the resources of the justice system were deployed in a disparate way, and so some things have gotten better, some things have stayed similar, and some things have even gotten worse” (Wise, 2010). There is simply a war being waged on the underclass and black (Wise, 2010; Leighton and Reiman, 2009; Chomsky, 1995).
Similarly, there is also a class and economic dynamic. Leighton and Reiman make clear in their The rich get richer and the poor get prison that the change towards a “tough on crime” position is riddled with class concepts that are absurd: They outline how corporate malfeasance, industrial accidents, and many other actions either not imagined as crimes or given such ludicrously low punishments (indeed, often no jail time) are far more dangerous to the economy and to people, yet these crimes are overwhelmingly committed by the upper-middle class and rich (and therefore overwhelmingly white and disproportionately male). Social critic Noam Chomsky connects this phenomenon to the issues of race and imperialism thusly: “The surplus population has to be kept in ignorance, but also controlled. The problem is faced directly in the Third World domains that have long been dominated by the West and therefore reflect the guiding values of the masters most clearly: here favored devices include death squads, "social cleansing," torture, and other techniques of proven effectiveness. At home, more civilized methods are (still) required. The superfluous population is to be cooped up within urban slums that increasingly resemble concentration camps, or if that fails, sent to prisons, the counterpart in a richer society to the death squads we train and support in our domains” (1995). The horrible conditions of slums, the neo-liberal changes to the economy that have denied industrial jobs to the poor in America while hyper-exploiting the poor abroad, the need to exact disciplinary power upon a much-feared black and poor populace... race, class and empire intersect at Sing Sing today (Chomsky, 1995).
There has also been a change in the level of quality of treatment of prisoners. Human Rights Watch has documented a horrific history of widespread rape and sexual abuse and victimization among American prisons (2007). “4.5 percent of the state and federal prisoners surveyed reported sexual victimization in the past 12 months. Given a national prison population of 1,570,861, the BJS findings suggest that in one year alone more than 70,000 prisoners were sexually abused” (Human Rights Watch, 2007). Torture is also widespread (AFSC, 2005). Bonnie Kerness of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker human rights and peace organization, finds that she “receive[s] testimonies of brutality, humiliation, physical and sexual abuse from men, women and children in prisons...We receive reports from people being forced to live in prolonged isolation for ten, even twenty years, being abused with devices of torture such as stun belts or restraint chairs... We hear from women being forced to engage in sexual acts. We hear from children as young as 12 being placed in isolation, saying that 'if they don't beat you physically then they mentally abuse you” (AFSC, 2005). One California inmate had thirty percent of his skin boiled off in a too-hot bath; others have seen chain gangs (AFSC, 2005). The United Nations Committee on Torture has declared the US a violator of standards for torture (AFSC, 2005).
Sing Sing in the modern era is thus unsurprisingly drab, and often brutal.”Today, the aviary is gone. Sing Sing is as grim as ever” (Lienhard, 1997). It is easy to forget Lawes' moving words when looking at the depravity that characterizes the prison now: “We may never produce a world with "Men like gods," but we can at least implant a social consciousness that shall make each of us in truth and in fact his brother's keeper” (Lawes, 1932; Lienhard, 1997). The brutality stems in no small part from unpreparedness and fear on the part of the guards. Ted Conover in Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing examined Sing Sing from the perspective of a guard, finding that inmates were treated horribly but that guards themselves faced danger and apathy. “Conover sought out a work assignment that would maximize his opportunity to observe prison life. Most of his time at Sing Sing was spent in close contact with the inmates, in dining halls and housing galleries, doing strip searches, searching cells, writing disciplinary infraction reports, and confiscating inmate contraband. Because they live in an enforced state of near helplessness, responding to inmates who required assistance with an apparently endless array of personal problems filled much of Conover’s time... [V]irtually all serious, firsthand accounts of correctional work describe a gap between the training and the reality of the job, official policies and procedures that require routine circumvention, poor relations between line officers and administrators, and the corrosive influence of stress on professional conduct and personal life” (Riley, 2000; Conover, 2000). It is unsurprising that untrained, ill-equipped, overstressed guards express sentiments like the notion that they “wouldn't piss them if they were on fire” and reminesce over the “good old days” when they could “beat the shit out of” inmates (Riley, 2000; Conover, 2000). Violations of prison rules against contraband are constant, and Conover found himself not only bringing in cigarettes but finding a gleaning of comfort in the beating of an inmate. Sing Sing is like most other prisons in America now: Brutal, with widespread rape and abuse.
Changing social norms have also enacted forcefields upon the prison: Homosexuality, openly transsexual and transvestite inmates, and other non-traditional gender norms have been reported (Conover, 2000; Riley, 2000).
Today, Sing Sing faces deep political unpopularity, particularly in Ossining. “Several politicians representing the area around Sing Sing are asking the governor to close the famous old prison...[S]tate, county, town and village officials say the Sing Sing Correctional Facility is unwanted in Ossining. They say it contributes little to the local economy... [and that] selling the riverfront site could make a profit for the state and bring tax revenue to Ossining”(Associated Press, 2011). Hugh Carey, former Governor of New York, pledged in 1975 to close the prison (Scott, 2011). The current plan is to turn it into condos. Already, aging guards such as Richard Plaskett live in Sing Sing proper, renting for $100 (Furman, 2010). The building could be repurposed or simply demolished.
Sing Sing is again a barometer for much of the rest of the country, where prison shrinkage or closing in response to crisis-level conditions and a growing anti-prison movement that argues that prison expenditures are far less effective than investments into rehab, education and other more socially liberal methods (Melzer, 2011; Education Not Incarceration, 2004). The Michigan governor, for example, is trying to close a prison by releasing eight thousand prisoners who have served minimum sentences on parole (Melzer, 2011). Unfortunately, it seems that these efforts are motivated more by cost-saving and political calculation than honest concern for inmates. Without authentic support programs, it is very likely that these felons are likely to relapse (Office of the Legislative Auditor, 1997). Devah Pager's famous sutdy found that felons find it immensely difficult to get a job, though white felons (a minority of the present prison population) find it easier to get a job than black non-felons (Pager, Western and Bonikowski, 2009). Without educational support, job development support, protection for former felons against employment discrimination, housing support, etc. a wave of crime and relapse into now-even-more crowded prisons seems inevitable.
In any respect, whatever Sing Sing's ultimate fate, as one of America's most important prisons it remains a fascinating case study for understanding American criminological development. It seems that America could do worse than to return to Lawes' conception of a prison as a place to ennoble the human spirit and attempt to return goodness and decency to people, rather than as a concentration camp in a war against the poor and black.
Works Cited
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Bellis, Mary. “Death, Money, and the History of the Electric Chair”. About. 2011.
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Chomsky, Noam. “Rollback Part II”. Z Magazine. January-May 1995.
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