Elmira Reformatory

“Elmira” conjures up both the best and the worst of prison history in the United States. Though it is most commonly known for the reformatory that bore its name, Elmira, New York, was originally a prison opened to contain Confederate prisoners of war during the Civil War. It became known as a “death camp” because of the squalid conditions and high death rate in its few years of operation. Approximately one-quarter of the 12,000 Southern prisoners died there between summer 1864 and the war's conclusion in 1865. Today, only a large stone plaque in the current residential area marks the prison once known as “Helmira.”

The opening of New York State's Elmira Reformatory at a different site in 1876 marked an important shift in the history of U.S. penology. Built as the first rehabilitation-oriented institution in the country, the ideals of the early-19th-century's penitentiary model, which were embodied in the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems, were supplanted by the new ideals of the reformatory movement. Fixed sentences intended to fit the crime were replaced by the new indeterminate sentence designed to fit the criminal. Mass discipline and physical punishment would give way to individual classification, with privileges as rewards. Instead of releasing the criminal unconditionally after his debt to society was paid, the reformatory's “new parole procedure would assure he did not begin running up a new tab” (Elmira, 1998).