Welcome to Sing Sing

Sing Sing is different from other prisons. Let’s start with its history. Sing Sing was constructed on the eastern bank of the Hudson River – by prisoners. In 1825, 100 convicts in striped suits and shackles cut the marble to build their own new prison. 

The name Sing Sing derives from the Native American nation present on the land that supplied the marble. The tribe’s name “Sinck Sinck” actually means “stone upon stone.” 

The big house

The history of Sing Sing, “The Big House,” is a curious mix. Initially, the prison was famous for hard labour and hard discipline. The first inmates had to keep silence, for instance. Later, under new wardens, from the 1920s onwards, Sing Sing became the most progressive prison in the US. Education and rehabilitation was the new motto. Prison life became more pleasant, with more facilities: gardens, a library, sports activities. The football team, the Sing Sing Black Sheep, was coached by professionals. 

The memoirs of one warden, who started work at Sing Sing at 19 and spent two decades there, were made into a movie in 1932, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, starring Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis.

men at work

Unlike the famous Alcatraz prison in San Francisco, Sing Sing is a working prison, with some 1,500 inmates, and cannot be visited by tourists. All you can see at the moment is an exhibition at the local Community Center. It shows photographs from the prison archives, cells, confiscated weapons, and a replica electric chair made by convicts. There are plans to establish a real museum on site.

Supporters of the plan for the museum want to boost employment, but they also want to make Sing Sing part of a larger discussion about penal justice. New York State no longer has the death penalty, but well over two million Americans are currently behind bars. In per capita terms, the USA’s prison population is the second highest in the world. Curiously enough, the Seychelles has the world’s highest prison population rate.

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Interview: rehabilitation

Sing Sing may sound like the name of a musical, but it’s actually a maximum security prison in upstate New York. It’s located on the River Hudson in a village called Ossining.  

The Sing Sing Correctional Facility, which was built by the prisoners themselves, first opened in 1826 and over the years it has had some famous inmates. They include Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed there, after being found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union, and David Berkowitz, or “Son of Sam,” a New York serial killer of the 1970s. Berkowitz was born in June 1953, the same month that the Rosenbergs were executed.

The prison is still in operation today, but many members of the local community would like to turn the original building into a museum. One of the people leading the campaign is a local politician, Sandy Galef. She is a member of the New York State Assembly and represents the district that includes Ossining. She is a Democrat. As she explains, attitudes to crime in the United States often change: 

Sandy Galef (Standard American accent): And we’ve been back and forth in America on what we do with prisoners, I think. There was a period of time, when I first got elected – ‘92  – it was called “We don’t want to educate them, we just want to put them in the cage, the cell, put a lock on, nothing more. We don’t want them to get up and stretch and run and whatever, play basketball in the courts, we don’t want them to do that.” But that was the ‘90s, and we go back and then we rethink it and say, “I think we’d better educate these people, they’re going to be out, a lot of them are going to serve their 10 years or 20 years, and they’re going to be out. Do we want them to know nothing more than when they went in?

father Christmas 

And she believes that getting prisoners to do useful work is good for everyone:

Sandy Galef: We had work programmes. We sent out a lot of the correctional officers with prisoners that were pretty much on their way out of prison, they were, you know, maybe they had six months left and they figured they’re not going to run away, they got six months, they’re not going run away. And they would train them, the church across the way here, but I remember them going in and redoing and painting the church. I also remember them taking an old recreation building in Tarrytown, which is a little south of here, and turning it into a daycare centre. And the prisoner who worked on the woodworking, which was fantastic, came back as Santa Claus, and, you know, I guess everybody was in tears. It’s like, “Here’s this prisoner, when he was here, he was still a prisoner, and now he’s out, he’s a very competent person in woodcrafting and now he’s come back as Santa Claus.” It was like, “Oh my goodness!” You know, good story.