Today, an old prison raises old questions about
jails. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
In 1932, Lewis Lawes, warden
of Sing Sing prison, wrote a very popular book:
Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing. He
dedicated it to "those tens of thousands of my
former wards who have justified my faith in human
nature." Among the famous prisons -- Alcatraz,
Leavenworth, Attica -- Sing Sing is the oldest and
most deeply woven into our fabric. When I was a
child, Sing Sing meant prison the way Gillette
meant razor blade.
In 1825, the state of New York struggled with the
riddle: what to do with criminals? Two years
before, they'd tried complete isolation -- from
society, from one another, from all stimulation.
When that failed miserably, they switched to a
model that involved prisoners doing hard labor
together in silence.
New York finished an 800-cell prison that would
function in that style by 1828. They erected it by
a quarry on Mt. Pleasant, near the Hudson River
town of Sing Sing. Sing Sing's name comes from the
Indian phrase sin sinck. It means
stone on stone.
In 1901, three years after Edison introduced the
electric chair at Sing
Sing, the town changed its name to Ossining so
people wouldn't confuse it with the jail. Edison's
dynamos ran on direct current. He invented that
first electric chair to show how dangerous
alternating current was. And 614 people eventually
died in it.
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
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.
Today, the aviary is gone. Sing Sing is as grim as
ever. And we muddle hopelessly over the hard
question: is prison meant to reform, to punish, or
just to keep criminals out of our hair for a
season? I doubt anyone knows. What I find most
poignant about Sing Sing's long history is that it
brings back a time when we honestly wrestled with
that question. Lawes ends with an idea that's maybe
not so maudlin after all. He says,
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.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Lawes, L., Twenty Thousand Years in Sing
Sing. New York: A.L. Burt Company, 1932.
Panetta, R., The Design and Construction of Sing
Sing Prison, 1825-1828. The Westchester
Historian, Vol. 62, No. 2, Spring 1986, pp.
I am grateful to Fred Stahl, Wellington Systems,
Norwalk, Connecticut, for suggesting the topic and
providing materials by R. Panetta.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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