Corrections_Today_Winter_2025-2026_Vol.87_No.4

CORRECTIONAL CHAPLAIN PERSPECTIVES

incarcerated. Sing Sing’s first chap lain, Rev. Gerrish Barrett, joined the management staff in 1827. To soften the punitive treatment of the prison population, he offered inmate education and compassionate and spiritual consolation. His career in Sing Sing was short lived. The penal reform movement reached Sing Sing in 1914 when Thomas Mott Osborne, a prison reformer from Auburn, became warden of Sing Sing prison. Until 1901, female prisoners, about only five percent of the total prison population compared to men, were housed in different sections of male prisons. In 1901, the New York State Reformatory for Women opened at Bedford Hills, NY. The reformatory was part of the progres sive-era penal reform movement, which emphasized rehabilitation, moral reform and training over punishment. The first director of the reformatory was Katherine Bement Davis, a recognized social reformer and the first woman to lead a major correctional institution in the U.S. The New York State Reformatory is now the Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional Facilities for Women. The penal reform movement reached Sing Sing in 1914 when Thomas Mott Osborne, a prison reformer from Auburn, became

Photo courtesy University of Warwick/The Library/Modern Records Centre Reformatory inmates involved in the construction of a stairway to the “upper campus” of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, New York.

warden of Sing Sing prison. “Within Prison Walls”, is his book which best reflects his style of change by describing his voluntary six-day incarceration at Auburn prison under the alias of Tom Brown. This stint allowed him to experience the ordinary treatment of inmates, and earned him national recognition, as he resigned in 1916. An especially dark period in Sing Sing’s history is the era of the electric chair. From July 1891 until August 1963, a total of 614 people were exe cuted there. When adding executions at Clinton and Auburn correctional facilities, the total number of New

York executions added up to 695 and gave New York a foreboding image across the country. Some of that negative image changed when Hol lywood discovered Sing Sing in the early part of the 20 th Century and it became one of the first prisons to be used in popular movies about crime, punishment and justice.

Quiet before the storm

In the late 1960s, an almost forgotten development took place in neighboring Greenhaven Correction al Facility in Stormville, NY when the head of NY Prison Chaplains,

Winter 2025-2026 | Corrections Today

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