Newjack (32 page)
Authors: Ted Conover
Levi Burr, an inmate imprisoned for perjury, published a detailed memoir in 1833. Sing Sing, he charged, was a “cat-ocracy.” The cat-o’-nine-tails was generally made of six strands of hard, waxed cord, sometimes metal-tipped, that were attached to a hickory handle about a foot and a half long. The cords were “almost as hard as a piece of wire,” Burr wrote. While Beaumont had speculated that the fear of upsetting the inmate population would make keepers moderate in their use of the cat, Burr wrote,
It would be an endless task to attempt to enumerate the many applications of this instrument of discipline, or tell the number of blows that are generally applied at one flogging, as they vary according to the will and temper that the keeper happens to be in at the time. The number may, however, be estimated at from twenty to fifty, seventy, eighty, ninety, or an hundred and more. On one occasion I counted an hundred and thirty three; and while the afflicted subject was begging upon his knees, and crying and writhing under the laceration, that tore his skin in pieces from his back, the deputy keeper approached, and gave him a blow across the mouth with his cane, that caused the blood to flow profusely; and then, as if conscious of my
feelings at beholding so barbarous a spectacle, turned and faced me with an agitated stare. I averted my head and continued my labor, and directly he walked away without speaking.
In 1841, according to one legislative report, “More than a hundred blows were struck daily… . The whipping post was never dry.”
Men ate in their rooms, which were a claustrophobic seven feet high, six feet seven inches deep, and three feet three inches wide. There were no windows, no heat, and no running water. A small amount of light and air passed through the pattern of one-inch-square holes in the doors. Inmates slept on straw mattresses atop iron bed frames attached to the wall. (One hundred years after its construction, the original cellblock was still in use. Bank robber Willie Sutton wrote that in 1926, it “had uneven jagged stone walls that sweated moisture all day and all night.”) Inmates ate with their fingers; food was doled into a small bucket, called a kid. They were issued a single set of striped clothes, regarded as a humiliation (as well as a visual aid to assist the pursuit of escapees) and washed once a week. From Saturday evening until Monday morning, inmates were locked in their cells; this was the keepers’ only time off. Every morning, the keepers marched each gallery’s prisoners to an outdoor latrine to dump their tall iron slop cans, or night buckets, which each man carried in his left hand. This march had a special character. It was the lockstep, an Auburn innovation, in which the prisoner’s right hand rested on the shoulder of the man in front of him; his footsteps were short and synchronized, and his gaze was straight ahead—upon penalty of the lash.
“There are daily about twenty men on guard,” wrote Burr,
with gun, bayonet, cartridges, &c. They form a chain around the quarries, and keep a look-out that none escapes… . The guard, as well as the keepers, generally, are in the daily habit of using tobacco; but the prisoners are not permitted to use it, and if seen to have any, they are flogged without mercy… . But whenever it was possible, without detection, the men would pick up old quids of tobacco that had been thrown away by the keepers or guard. To prevent this, [the guards] uniformly tread upon [it], and stamp it in the dirt; yet if any part of it can be recovered,
the prisoners secure it as quick as possible. … I saw a man by the name of Knight, flogged for picking up an old quid of tobacco, and when his shirt was pulled off, the scars of a former flogging for the same thing, were not healed.
Slabs and chunks of marble were transported on carts that were pushed and pulled by prisoners up and down the steep hillside. “Several men grab a chain to pull a cart uphill,” wrote Burr, “two men hold ropes to guide it downhill.”
But man, who has but two legs, was never made to perform the service of four footed beasts. They cannot hold the cart from running, and are compelled to let it go, and trust their skill in guiding and their speed in running, to keep out the way, until it reaches the bottom of the hill. If a wheel strikes against a stone or other impediment, while in quick motion, it turns the cart with a violent jerk, and often throws them down with more or less injury. Two men have had their thighs broken by this means. They were unable to guide or hold the cart, and the wheel came in contact with a stone … [One] will always be a cripple.
The sight of men being whipped as they struggled to move carts prompted consternation among a legislative committee convened to examine the prison in 1832, with particular attention to the system’s harsher aspects. Starvation of men as another means of breaking them, and the floggings for which Lynds had been famous, were viewed by the legislative panel as less innocuous than he pretended.
A report from 1839 included the following testimony:
John S. Mattucks, assistant keeper from June, 1832, to May or June, 1836, says … he saw a black man punished severely by a keeper named Burr, and John Lent, for raising an axe towards Burr, in the cooper shop; thinks he saw
three hundred strokes of the cat at this time;
the convict was unable to labor in consequence of this whipping; was shut up in his room for several days, and kept on low diet;
says he appeared soon after to be deranged…
Lawrence Van Buren, one of the assistant keepers from September, 1835, to December, 1837, says “that in October,
1837, there was a … convict in the prison … who he believes was then insane; that this convict was in the habit of talking and making a noise in his cell at night; that for this offence the said convict was taken out, stripped and whipped several mornings in succession; that the said convict was whipped till he was much lacerated, so that his shirt adhered to his back, and his legs were badly swollen …”
Daniel W. Odell, assistant keeper for seven years previous to September, 1839, says he “knew a convict by the name of
Judson
, who made his escape, was brought back, tied up, and witness whipped him, he should think one hundred lashes, on the bare back, with a cat [of] six strands; this was on Saturday;
convict drowned himself on Monday morning”
[italics original].
Lynds resigned in 1830, returning to Auburn in 1838. But his aura of heroism had faded. He was asked to leave Auburn a year later, following the death of an inmate whom he had punished for feigning illness. The local coroner held that the death had resulted “from disease, the fatal termination of which was hastened by flogging, labor, and general harsh treatment, imposed by … Elam Lynds. …”
Still, Lynds was rehired at Sing Sing in 1843. By then, however, he seems to have been a wrecked man. He lasted only a few months before being fired following several escapes, including one in which inmates built their own boat (whose existence had been reported to him) and then sailed away in it. The public had also grown skeptical of the brutality of the Lynds regime. By his own accounting, around fifteen hundred lashings were inflicted per month, not including those he meted out himself. (“His rule was never to forgive an offense, but always punish
and with the lash
.”) And there was growing disapproval of his reluctance to allow relatives to visit or to exchange letters with inmates, his conviction that inmates should have no books other than a Bible and a prayer book, and other such harsh measures. One of his own assistants wrote the legislature to say
there is evidence so abundant to establish the fact of the Captain being an inebriate, a tyrant, abusive to the Assistant
Keepers, oppressive and contradictory in his order, of his having cursed both the Board of Inspectors and his Excellency the Governor; and also of his having appropriated the property of the State to his own use …
I find the decline of Lynds particularly interesting in light of a letter from a former doctor at Auburn, Blanchard Fosgate, who around 1851 wrote legislators a letter to share his observation that the practice of whipping had been wounding to more than just the prisoners.
[The cat-o’-nine-tails] was a means so brutal in its nature that both he who used it, and he who bore its stripes were alike brutalized in its employment. … In its application the familiarity it causes with suffering destroys in the breast of the officer all sympathetic feeling, until each ennobling quality of his nature is lost; and the fierce bursts of passion he is often forced to contend against, enkindle, and being oft repeated, strengthen in him a like element only to be appeased in vanquishing all opposition; while in the bosom of the enraged convict, feeling keenly his own degradation, is deeply implanted a spirit of revenge there secretly to corrode until every higher feeling is obliterated.
Lynds’s belief that it was impossible to govern a prison without the cat was disproved in 1848, when use of the cat-o’-nine-tails was abolished by the legislature and the prison continued to operate much as it had before. Corporal punishment in general was not renounced, however; other punishments increased in frequency to fill the gap, and the keepers invented new ones: They often attached recaptured escapees to a ball and chain, and might shave half their heads as a humiliation. Others were punished with the yoke, a flat iron bar weighing thirty-four to forty pounds, to which both outstretched arms were attached behind the neck; the pressure against the cervical vertebrae, even to a strong man, quickly became unbearable. (“I think that not one man in a thousand could stand up under the 40 pound yoke for four hours,” a keeper named John Ashton told the inspectors. A legislative committee in 1851 learned of one Sing Sing inmate who, punished for poor work with four hours of the yoke, was in such pain that he couldn’t leave his cell for two weeks; when he did return to the
shop, he promptly cut off the fingers of one hand.) The iron cage, another means of physical punishment, was a round metal construction that the keepers placed over the inmate’s head and locked around his neck; it made movements of the head increasingly painful and rest impossible. Darkened cells were a frequent penalty. But the most common, and most feared, new punishment was the cold-water bath.
This procedure, whose contrast with the famously subtle Chinese water torture shows that American justice was perhaps still more interested in punishing the body than the mind, involved stripping the offending inmate and seating him on a bench, with his hands and feet secured in stocks. About four and a half feet above his head sat a barrel, filled completely or partially with cold water, depending on the offense and the mood of the keeper. In the early years of this punishment, the water—which could be icy cold in winter—was released all at once upon the naked inmate, delivering a terrible shock. In later years, it was released with less violence but was often collected in a wooden hopper placed around the inmate’s neck, in which it could rise to a level above the inmate’s mouth and nose. The keeper controlled the water’s release from the hopper, and used it to produce a sensation of drowning. The punishment was popular among prison officials because inmates so feared it and because it left no disfiguring marks.
Auburn physician Blanchard Fosgate attested that while the cold-water bath seemed hardly to affect some inmates, others showed damage both lasting and profound.
Convict number 4,565, aged thirty-eight years … and in good health, was showered with three pails of cold water. He was taken from the stocks in convulsions which lasted some thirty minutes, when he was conveyed to the hospital. When I saw him, about an hour afterward, he had congestion of the brain, accompanied with severe cephalgia [headache]; he was laboring under great derangement of mind, and recollected but little of what had transpired. He said he had been struck on his head, but there were no external signs of violence… . He said he felt as though his head was “bound with a band of iron.”
In my presence, convict number 5,458 was showered with one and a half barrels of water. During the operation,
the muscles of the chest and abdomen were severally exercised. When taken out of the stocks his skin was cold and shrivelled; there was no perceptible pulsation in the temporal or radial arteries, and he complained of severe cephalgia …
Convict number 5,066, aged about thirty years … was brought to the hospital in a perfectly unconscious state and with convulsive twitchings of the muscles. His mouth filled with frothy saliva; no perceptible pulsations in the radial artery; but little external heat and very imperfect respiration. He had been showered, I was credibly informed, with about two pails of cold water. His body was rubbed with stimulants and warmly covered with blankets … brandy and other stimulants were administered. In four hours after entering the hospital his consciousness returned.
This individual was so nearly destroyed that he had passed into that calm, quiet mental state that immediately precedes death by drowning. He said that at last he had the delightful sensation of sailing, and then it was all over. He suffered from cramps in his lower extremities for about three months after.
In 1851, Sing Sing’s administration reported giving 138 coldwater baths. In 1869, after a huge riot involving several hundred inmates in which many inmates and one officer were killed, a law was passed prohibiting its further use.
Certainly, outlawing barbaric punishments was evidence of progress in penal practice, and perhaps of progress in American civilization as well. But Rev. John Luckey, a Protestant minister who spent at least fourteen years as Sing Sing’s second chaplain, saw how it was eclipsed in importance by the character of the guards. Luckey, who has been called “the first social worker” for his research into inmates’ family backgrounds, wrote in 1860 that “much more depends upon the sound judgment and humane feelings of the disciplinarian than upon the instrument of punishment which he employs;—hence, a
cruel
man should never enter within the walls of a prison, except as a convict.”
The strict disciplinary measures of the nineteenth century served not only order, but profit. Previous systems had been—as they are today—a huge strain on taxpayers; from its beginning, Sing Sing
had been conceived of as a moneymaking venture. After the establishment of the marble quarry came the construction of a wharf and of several buildings that housed industrial and craft shops. Over the years the prison shops produced toys, buttons, woven items including carpets and tapestry, cooperage (wooden barrels and tubs), brass, saws and files, boots, saddles, cast iron, cigars, furniture, hats, brushes, windows and doors, printing, knitting and hosiery, mattresses, and, as late as the 1980s, plastic bags. “A big business enterprise,” a prominent journalist called it; until 1884, a handful of contractors paid the state set sums for the labor of a certain number of men and then endeavored to get everything out of them they could.
