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 years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)