Monday, May 28, 2012
Early Days at Sing Sing, 2: Studying a Society and Its Prisons
LOWER HUDSON VALLEY
In
1797, the first
state prison opened in New York City .
Although officially named the State Prison of the City of New
York , it was more commonly known as Newgate, after an infamous
prison in London .
From its opening, it was plagued with thorny
problems. Built to house 432 inmates in 54 eight-person cells, it soon became overcrowded,
dirty and violent. Women made up about 20 percent of Newgate’s prisoner population.
So
common were riots and jailbreaks, the city formed a special squad of armed
watchmen to patrol the neighborhood around the prison at night.
In 1824, a state commission
recommended abandoning Newgate and building a larger prison farther from New York City , the source
of most prisoners. The legislature appropriated $20,100 to buy the 130-acre Silver Mine Farm near
the village of Sing Sing
Elam
Lynds, warden of the state prison at Auburn ,
was selected to set up the prison at Sing Sing. A strict disciplinarian, Lynds
had developed the harsh Auburn system. Arriving
from the upstate prison with one hundred convicts, he found himself "without
a place to receive or a wall to enclose them."
After
erecting temporary barracks, a cook house, and carpenter and blacksmith shops,
they leveled the steep hillside on which to erect the first cell block. Under
the twin disciplines of silence and the whip, prisoners cut the gray-white
dolomitic limestone in a nearby quarry by day and slept in tents at night.
Working
11-hour days as stone masons, carpenters and painters, the inmates literally
built their own penitentiary. By the winter of 1826, 60 of the proposed 800
cells were completed. Modeled after Auburn 's
north wing, this first cell block would grow to be 476 feet long, 44 feet wide,
and four tiers high. Each cell was seven feet deep, three feet three inches
wide, and six feet seven inches high.
The first cell block was completed
by October of 1828. With Sing Sing officially open, male inmates were transferred upriver from
Newgate. (This
historic building still stands within the prison walls and can be seen from
Metro-North trains. An empty shell, it was gutted by fire on February 5, 1984,
during a snowstorm.)
On May 29, 1831, French visitors
Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont packed their bags in New York City and headed
north to Sing Sing, where they found lodging at a large house not far from Main Street . This
was the country home of James Smith, a New
York lawyer. Still standing on State Street , it would later become part
of the Printex Building
The idyllic Hudson Hudson , where Tocqueville taught
Beaumont
Shortly after arriving in Sing
Sing, Tocqueville described it in a letter to his father as “a town of 1000 to 1200
souls that has been rendered famous by its prison, the largest in the United States
“We have come here with the intention of examining it from
top to bottom; we have already been here a week, and we experience a well-being
you cannot conceive. The extreme agitation in which we were obliged to live in New York
"Here we have the best employed and most peaceful
existence. We live with a very decent American family that holds us in great
consideration. We have made the acquaintance in the village of several persons
whom we go to see when we are free."
Sing Sing Prison
Turning their attention to the prison, Tocqueville and
Beaumont pursued their investigation. Elam Lynds was gone, and the pair asked
questions of new warden Robert Wiltse on every aspect of the prison: its administration,
the keepers' salaries, what food was served, what work was done, how many
floggings were administered. The latter number turned out to be five or six a
day.
They pored over archival records,
examined architectural plans, poked into every corner, and quizzed everyone
they could find. They even sat in classes at the prison school and attended
Sunday religious services. They were amazed to discover that 34 keepers
controlled hundreds of convicts. The prisoners were "free" during the
day. They wore no chains and no walls kept them in, yet no one tried to escape.
Tocqueville's diary entry for May
30, 1831, reads:
"We have seen 250 prisoners working under a shed cutting
stone. These men, subjected to a very special surveillance, had all committed
acts of violence indicating a dangerous character. Each . . . had a stone
cutter's axe. Three unarmed guards walked up and down in the shed. Their eyes were
in continuous agitation."
After a week of prison visits,
Tocqueville decided he would not recommend the Sing Sing system. Beaumont wrote to his
mother that he, too, was surprised:
“So many inmates were all around the unfinished cell block,
unrestrained by chains and all engaged in hard labor, and yet, despite the
absence of a wall (a few guards were stationed around the perimeter), they
labor assiduously at the hardest tasks. Nothing is rarer than an escape. That
appears so unbelievable one sees the fact a long time without being able to
explain it."
Nevertheless, Tocqueville saw
portents of trouble:
"The system at Sing-Sing seems in some sense like the
steamboats the Americans use so much. Nothing is more comfortable, quick,
and--in a word--perfect in the ordinary run of things. But if some bit of
apparatus goes out of order, the boat, the passengers and the cargo fly into
the air."
In their subsequent report, the
two Frenchmen concluded ominously:
"One cannot see the prison of Sing-Sing and the system of
labor which is there established without being struck by astonishment and
fear. Although the discipline is perfect, one feels it rests on a fragile
foundation.
“The safety of the keepers is constantly menaced. In the presence
of such dangers, avoided with such skill but with difficulty, it seems to us
impossible not to fear some sort of catastrophe in the future."
American Idiosyncrasies
The two French visitors were also intensely interested in every
aspect of America
life: the structure of its free society, politics and the court system, its
vast geography, and its cruel treatment of Indians.
Tocqueville
described a state dinner in their honor as representing “the infancy of art:
the vegetables and fish before the meat, the oysters for dessert. In a word,
complete barbarism.”
Commenting on Americans’
attitude toward nobility, he wrote, “In this republican country they are a
thousand times fonder of nobility, of titles, of crosses, and of all the
inconsequential distinctions of Europe than we are in France .”
In a letter home, Beaumont described the peculiar
tendency of American women to break into song:
"They haven't the taste for it, it's only a matter of
fashion; they sing in a screamingly funny way. There is in their throat a
certain gentle cooing that has a particular character that I could never
render, but which has nothing in common with the laws of harmony. If one says
to them, 'You sing wonderfully,' they reply with rare ingenuousness, 'It's very
true.'
“They study piano for three months, then they play without the
least reluctance, admitting always with good grace they are mad about music and
they have a real talent.
"What's more, this love of praise crops up everywhere with
the Americans, and one could never praise them enough to satisfy them."
On June 7th, Tocqueville and
Beaumont returned to New York City by steamboat,
stopping briefly at Greenburgh (an alternate name for Tarrytown ,
according to Washington Irving). They remained in the city until June 30th,
when they took a sloop to Yonkers , starting
their epic journey across the length and breadth of America .
Tocqueville and Beaumont later
investigated penitentiaries at Auburn , N.Y. , Charlestown , Mass. , Wethersfield , Conn. , Philadelphia , Baltimore and Washington .
At Philadelphia 's
Eastern State Penitentiary, they took the unusual step of interviewing each
prisoner.
The Aftermath
By the time they returned to France
in June of 1832, Toqueville and Beaumont had become ardent admirers of America ’s
democratic institutions. Tocqueville found himself unable to concentrate on
writing their joint report on prisons. In the end, that task fell to Beaumont,
who is listed as the principal author. Tocqueville's contribution was limited
to the statistical notes in an appendix.
Du Système Pénitentiaire aux États-Unis, et de Son
Application en France France
to copy one of the two American penitentiary systems.
Translated into English by
Francis Lieber and published in Philadelphia
in 1833, On the Penitentiary System in
the United States and Its Application
in France remains the single best study and description of the two
contrasting American penitentiary systems of the 19th century.
Tocqueville's failure to
contribute much to the prison report is understandable. His eyes were on
distant horizons of memory. And he was turning over in his mind the treasure
trove of information he had gathered about the larger themes of American
society and institutions.
Two years later he would publish
the first volume of his remarkable two-volume Democracy in America, today regarded as one of the great books of
the western world. But the story of that enduring work will have to wait for
another day.
