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:
“But she is early up and out,
To trim the year or strip its bones;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)