Sing Sing Correctional Facility

Physical Layout

Sing Sing is located about 35 miles north of downtown Manhattan, in Westchester County. The entire facility, which began as a single cellhouse constructed from locally quarried stone, now covers 56 acres in a hillside on the east bank of the Hudson River.

The modern facility also houses the Tappan medium-security unit with a capacity of housing 550 inmates. Across a commuter railroad track and up the hill are maximum-security section A and B cellblocks and accompanying yards. They are classic rectangular, tiered cellblocks, stacked four and five stories high respectively, both more than 500 feet long. They hold more than 1,300 prisoners and are reputed to be the largest free-standing cellblocks in the world.

The complex has two exercise yards, a baseball field, chapel, gym, powerhouse, laundry, hospital, and a special housing unit for extremely dangerous inmates. Sing Sing's location on the river, and the dread the prison inspired, led to the use of if the slang phrase “up the river,” meaning a person was never to be seen again. Sing Sing is also thought to be the source of the euphemism “the big house,” referring to the massive A and B cellblocks but [Page 901]in wider parlance alluding to any maximum-security institution.

Photo 3

Warden examining mail in front of convicts in the Sing Sing State library.

History

Early in its history, Sing Sing used a variety of means to discipline its inmates, including floggings, solitary confinement, heavy weights, iron collars, and the ball and chain, as well as cold baths to punish unruly or recalcitrant inmates. Hard labor in nearby marble quarries, in addition to prison industries that produced textiles, tools, clothing, brushes, cooperage, prefabricated windows and doors, and mattresses, were fixtures until the Great Depression. The facility was always expensive to maintain and run, which required the inmates to produce marketable goods to help relieve the economic burden of their own incarceration. However, by the 1930s, businesses in New York began to complain that convict labor produced goods with an unfair cost advantage, and the state restricted production to items for its own consumption.

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