7 - American Bastille: Sing Sing and the Political Crisis of Imprisonment

Summary

Come up her (sic) and write us up. … They are starving us. Give it a good write up in your paper.

Unidentified Sing Sing prisoner, to reporters, 1913

In the early 1910s, the mounting internal crises of New York's prisons fused with the escalating struggle over the structure and purpose of government to produce a highly combustible alloy. That alloy exploded at Sing Sing in the summer of 1913. When Sing Sing's convicts threw their inedible rations through the windows of their cellblock, they catapulted the internal crisis of imprisonment over the walls of the institution and into the public sphere. Conscious of the presence of the press just beyond the prison walls, the defenestration of the “bastille” amounted to a disciplined, if spontaneous, protest against the conditions of imprisonment. Making emissaries of the reporters, prisoners effectively broadcasted an ultimatum to the prison bureaucrats, state legislators, New York's Governor, William Sulzer, and the free citizens of New York: Prisoners would not cooperate with a regime that had been progressively malnourishing, overcrowding, and sickening them. The act of breaking hundreds of windows with missiles of bread so stale it could shatter thick glass rudely punctuated the prisoners' point: The state would have to provide its convicts with edible food and ameliorate living conditions at Sing Sing or face collective, and quite possibly spectacular, acts of defiance.