Sing Sing Correctional Facility

David Keys

Sing, Sing, meaning “stone upon stone” in a local Native American dialect, is the state of New York's maximum-security facility for men at Ossining (formerly the town of Sing Sing, New York). Construction by convict laborers from Auburn Penitentiary was begun in 1826, when the facility was originally named “Mount Pleasant State Penitentiary.” Sing Sing, as it came to be known after 1859, is one of several maximum-security units maintained by the state of New York, along with facilities at the Midstate Correctional Center in Auburn, Attica Correctional Center near Buffalo, and Clinton Correctional Center in the town of Dannemora outside of Plattsburgh, the last being the largest. As with all penitentiaries, Sing Sing was designed to rehabilitate and reform offenders. However, it soon became a social response to and a repository for the successive waves of immigrants who flooded into the New York City area beginning with the Irish ...

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