Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Conover opens Chapter 5 by describing the eeriness of the Sing Sing grounds, where “thousands upon thousands of lashings” (171) were meted out and hundreds of prisoners were executed by electric chair. Conover describes Sing Sing as a one-hundred-and-seventy-year-old “architectural hodgepodge” (172), where elements of older structures are scattered amongst the prison’s newer buildings.

In 1825, a group of inmates and their keepers travel by boat from the state prison at Auburn, under the supervision of Elam Lynds, a former Army captain. The United States is still devising the methods by which to enforce law and order; corporal punishments, such as hanging and flogging, are characteristic of the time period, but the nature of punishment in the Western world is undergoing a shift. Conover cites Michel Foucault’s observation that punishment has transitioned from torture and public spectacle towards more psychologically-oriented methods.

The Quakers are the first to establish the concept of the American penitentiary—penitence through isolation—and Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail serves as the first model. The penitentiary model leads to the creation of a separate holding units for the worst offenders, and in 1821, a new wing is built in New York City’s Auburn Prison that is comprised entirely of solitary cells. Meanwhile, Elam Lynds becomes the warden of Auburn, and Lynds’s draconian rules lead to the deaths of multiple inmates. Through modification, Lynds eventually creates the less stringent “Auburn system,” which becomes the leading prison model in the U.S. When the state of New York requires more prison space, Lynds is asked to build a new prison, and a group of inmates from Auburn is coerced to assemble Sing Sing, “stone upon stone” (174).

Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont, dispatched by the French government to examine American prisons, visit the Sing Sing construction site and witness the extreme surveillance and severe expectations that inmates are subjected to. De Tocqueville and Beaumont conclude that although the labor system is highly effective, the “safety of the keepers is constantly menaced” (176); they go on to write that “whilst society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism” (176).

Lynds is given free rein to exercise brute force over the prisoners, who live under the constant threat of the whip and live in rooms “a claustrophobic seven feet high, six feet seven inches deep, and three feet three inches wide” (178). Lynds’s rule is “never to forgive an offense, but always punish and with the lash” (180), with around fifteen hundred lashings per month meted out. Over time, the public grows wary of Lynds’s techniques, and Lynds is fired from his position in 1843.

In 1848, the use of the whip—known more specifically as the cat-o’-nine tails—is abolished by the legislature. New methods are devised, including the cold-water bath, a form of water torture. This punishment is outlawed in 1869 after a massive riot at the prison. In 1891, the electric chair arrives and marks Sing Sing as a globally-infamous center for executions.

The electric chair is at first seen as a more humane alternative to hanging or other means of execution, and in 1889 is established by New York as the official state method of capital punishment. The first-ever execution by electric chair takes place in Auburn, and inmate William Kemmler’s death is panned by the media as a “revolting exhibition” (188). The electric chair is gradually modified through torturous experimentation on inmates who are sentenced to death. From 1891 to 1963, over 600 people are electrocuted at Sing Sing. From 1914 to 1925, Amos Squire, M.D., works closely in the Death House with John Hulbert, who is a successor of Edwin Davis, Sing Sing’s first electric-chair specialist. Amos chronicles the steady decline of Hulbert’s mental health, which ultimately results in Hulbert committing suicide in 1929. Squire also experiences a deterioration of his mental capacities during his tenure at Sing Sing.

Thomas Mott Osborne and Lewis Lawes are considered the most famous wardens of Sing Sing. Osborne was a prison reformer who envisioned a total overhaul of the New York prison system. Osborne entered the Auburn prison as an “inmate” named Tom Brown for one week, and from there launched a campaign for prison reform. Osborne is a polarizing figure, appreciated by the inmates and disliked by the guards. After his stint as a prisoner, Osborne helps to establish the Mutual Welfare League, a form of self-government for inmates. Though Osborne is appointed warden in 1914, he holds the post for less than a year before he is faced with attacks on his character and the dissolution of the reforms that he championed. Four years later, former prison officer Lewis Lawes becomes Warden. Lawes believed in the “possibilities of prisons” (200), but he also felt that Osborne had given prisoners too much freedom too quickly. Lawes’s own stance was to “constitute himself not as an instrument of punishment but a firm, frank friend [...] to hold my men and, as far as possible, to win them over to sane, social thinking” (200). Lawes ran the prison in “a paternalistic way that had a warmth we would not recognize today” (202). He retired in 1940.

In the 1950s and 1960s, corrections became a career, which led to a heightened level of both professionalization and bureaucracy. Due to the growth of the town of Ossining, Sing Sing was not able to expand, and the prison aged poorly, due to neglect. At this time, there was a slow effort to re-emphasize rehabilitation within prisons, which was interrupted by the strict government response to the Attica uprising in 1971. Strict antidrug laws led to a booming prison population, and consequently an increase in prison construction. Meanwhile, Sing Sing became more of a relic and was racked by corruption and scandals, until it was reclassified as a maximum-security prison and de facto training facility in the 1980s. In closing the chapter, Conover reflects on the treatment of inmates during the mid-twentiethcentury, compared to inmates in the 1990s. Conover contemplates the deterioration of officers’ treatment towards inmates and the trend towards “supermax” prisons: “like a huge SHU, with 100 percent segregation cells” (209).