Early Years
Elmira was the site of a prison camp for Confederate prisoners of war from 1864 to 1865. In 1869, the New York state legislature voted to use the site to build a new prison which would receive male first-time felony offenders between the ages of 16 and 30.
The prison, which officially received its first prisoners from Auburn Prison in July 1876, began a new era in the science of penology as the first "reformatory". The harsh methods of the "Auburn" and "Philadelphia Systems" including corporal punishment, striped uniforms and lockstep marching, were rejected along with the earlier reforms fostered by the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Under its warden Zebulon Brockway, imprisonment was designed to reform each inmate by an individualized program. Brockway rejected pointless hard labor, a regime of silence, religious and morality lectures, and strict obedience enforced by brutality.
Read more about this topic: Elmira Correctional Facility
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)