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Sing Sing Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison in Ossining, New York, USA. It is located approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. Ossining's original name, "Sing Sing", was named after the aboriginal Sinck Sinck tribe from whom the land was purchased in 1685. [1], though the penitentiary was first called "Mount Pleasant" when it opened in 1828.[citation needed]
Sing Sing houses approximately 1,700 prisoners.[2] There are plans to convert the original 1825 cell block into a museum.[3]
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In March, 1796, legislation was passed requiring the building of two state prisons in New York, one in Albany and the other somewhere in southern New York. In addition to the plan for the construction 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"[citation needed]; the law also provided that the state governor and Council were to appoint a "Keeper, who was to be of some mechanical profession."[citation needed] 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 Legislature gave Elam Lynds the task of constructing a new, more modern prison. Lynds was 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.
He also visited New Hampshire, where a prison was successfully constructed by inmate 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 County with the unlikely name of Sing Sing. This appellation was derived from the Indian words, "Sint Sinck" which translates to "stone upon stone".[citation needed] The legislature appropriated $20,100 to purchase the 130-acre (0.53 km2) site, and the project received the official stamp of approval[4]. Lynds hand-selected 100 inmates from his own private stock for transfer and had them transported 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.[citation needed]
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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.[citation needed] Once the prison was built, the prisoners would continue excavating marble to be shipped down the Hudson River to New York City. Beyond the initial sum required to purchase the land, the prison was to be self-supporting, not requiring taxpayer funding.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]
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[citation needed], 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 Lawes. He was offered the position of warden, a position which had been filled by nine separate people in the previous nine years, one for only 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.[citation needed] "How these missing prisoners had left the prison or when, could not be ascertained," he said.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] Also, more than $30,000 in cash was missing from prison bank accounts, and there was no trace as to where the money went.[citation needed] Documented punishments were brutal, and described a long history of abuse by both prison guards and wardens.
Sing Sing has its own cemetery; among those buried there is serial killer Albert Fish.
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 caught water around his mouth and chin area, and then a burst of freezing water would drop from the ceiling onto his head.[citation needed] The amount of water that was poured onto the inmates head depended on the severity of the prisoner's violation(s).
Throughout the 19th century, one of the most common and regularly-used forms of punishment was solitary confinement. A prisoner would be locked in a dark cell with a limited supply of food for a certain amount of time. Certain changes were made towards the end of the century (1880s) 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.[citation needed]
Another predominant form of punishment in use on the prisoners 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 properly.[citation needed] This type was overly used since a prisoner would "receive blows from minor complaints such as poor or short work on contact".[citation needed] Also, the beatings would be administered by "individual keepers" rather than the principal keeper himself (up until 1876, where only the principal keeper was allowed to do this).[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
In addition to the 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.
