Introduction: The Grounds of Legal Punishment

Summary

In 1913, amid the oppressive humidity of a mid-summer's evening in the lower Hudson Valley, a crowd of men, women, and children from the village of Ossining joined a bevy of reporters and photographers on a hill overlooking Sing Sing Prison. Roused by rumors that a large-scale prison break was imminent, they watched as 1,500-odd convicts shuffled quietly across the prison yard and into the old stone cellhouse, each clasping his nightly ration of a half-loaf of bread in hand. The keepers, townspeople, and reporters may well have heaved a sigh of relief as the last few prisoners filed into the cellhouse and the heavy iron door swung closed behind them. With its thick granite walls, double-shelled construction, and centralized locking system, this “bastille on the Hudson” was all but immune to escape; once entombed within its gloomy masonry, even the most ingenious of prisoners stood little chance of emancipation.

But a prison-break is only one kind of trouble convicts can concoct; and, on that tense July evening, as the last few stragglers were secured in the cellhouse, the guards and the free citizens of New York were about to be rudely reminded that, even under the condition of lockdown, prisoners are capable of turning the tables on their keepers and throwing the state into crisis. As reporters from the New York Times would recount the evening's events, the trouble began as hundreds of convicts simultaneously hurled their heels of bread through the cellhouse's outer window panes, causing a great shower of bread and glass to crash into the yard and street below.