Lynds’ Auburn/Sing Sing System Rejects Earned Releases

Capt. Alexander Maconochie (sketch).

A few years earlier, Lynds had told Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, the penal researchers from France: “One should never give a prisoner remission because of his good behavior in prison.” To begin with, Lynds regarded all prisoners as deceivers at all times. Therefore, their seeming good conduct could only be lies designed lull their keepers into thinking they had been reformed. Furthermore, he simply did not believe prisoners could be reformed, only intimidated and broken into submission to -- first the prison rules and later society’s laws -- through fear of yet more and even harsher punishment.

The Lyndsian Auburn/Sing Sing model erased as much as possible all individualization, classifications or gradations among prisoners. Less a case of one size fits all, it was more the case all would be made to fit the one size – that of a machine-like cog in a congregate but silent work force manufacturing goods whose sale would reduce the burden of prison on the taxpayers.

With almost prophetic irony, many of the same legislators who had written the nation’s first “good time” law voted two years later to re-introduce use of the whip on prisoners, a practice that had been dropped decades earlier. A ban on flogging inmates was one of the key reforms Newgate’s prime mover, reformist Thomas Eddy, had been able to establish at the state’s first penitentiary built in 1797. An original guiding principle behind the penitentiary movement in both Pennsylvania and New York had been to substitute moral force for physical force to achieve the prisoner’s personal reformation. Penitentiaries – institutions for penitence – were to replace whips, stocks, yokes, brandings, cripplings, gougings, and torture.

These legislators’ authorizing prison officials to grant good time remissions in appropriate cases and to administer 39 lashes in quite different cases appears to have been an attempt at “carrot-and-stick” penology. But as the Lyndsians refused even to offer, much less give the carrot, resort to the stick – with leather strips attached – became increasingly necessary. That appeared to suit Lynds’ seemingly boundless capacity for brutality.  But his excesses eventually led even some among his previous supporters to ask whether such extreme discipline might actually be counterproductive.

Philip King, born 1758 in Cornwall, joined the British navy at age 12 and served in America. Later he joined the fleet that in 1788 first colonized Australia with convicts, civilians and marines. As governor of New South Wales (1800-06), he made many improvements in penal management, agriculture, health, education, exploration and settlement while seeking peaceful relations with native peoples.

Lynds’ Supporter-Turned-Foe Founds Reform Movement

One such supporter-turned-foe was Sing Sing commission chairman John Worth Edmonds. He discovered that some keepers who quietly refused to resort to the whip to run their inmate shop crews had as good and sometimes better production from their prisoners than keepers who followed Warden Lynds’ lead in using the lash at every opportunity. But the warden who had demanded complete submission of inmates to his authority would not himself submit to the prison commission’s authority to reign in his flogging of prisoners. So his cruel yet vastly influential career belatedly came to an end.

The once-hardliner Edmonds, after his confrontation with Lynds, took on the role of penal reformer. He initiated formation of the New York Prison Association (NYPA) in 1844. He and it helped get a ban on prison whipping written into the 1847 state constitution.

Among its other goals, NYPA sought “support and encouragement of reformed convicts, after their discharge, by affording them the means of obtaining an honest livelihood, and sustaining them in their efforts at reform.”  Since 1844, the society -- today known as the Correctional Association of New York --and its auxiliary and later independent Women’s Prison Association (WPA) have continuously provided post-release support as a component of prisoner reformation, including job programs and transitional housing.

True, these post release or transitional services introduced by NYPA and like-minded reformers more than a decade before the Civil War had not yet connected in New York programmatically with early releases for good time served. That would await NYPA leaders – such as Hubbell, Wines, and Theodore W. Dwight (Columbia Law School’s first dean) -- and other reformers digesting and then propagating the ideas of Captain Maconochie and Sir Crofton.