200 Years Inside Sing Sing Prison

American History Hit

History Hit

America, History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In May 1825, a group of prisoners arrived on the banks of the Hudson, thirty odd miles up river from New York. They began to build what would become their own jail — Sing Sing.

Don talks about the history of Sing Sing with Professor Lee Bernstein, historian of the American prison system and author of “America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s”.

Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Freddy Chick. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the year 1831.
0:07.0	Alexis de Tocqueville, the aristocratic French politician and future author of the classic
0:12.0	Democracy in America, stands on the deck of the Ohio, a steamboat set out from the New York
0:18.0	waterfront heading north on the Hudson River. He and a colleague,
0:22.0	Gustav de Beaumont, have been dispatched by the French government to submit an investigative report
0:27.2	on American prison systems. A few hours upriver, as the vessel steers towards the eastern bank,
0:33.4	what to Tokvil spies is astonishing. There, seemingly carved from its own quarry,
0:39.9	is a massive stone structure. Named for the nearby village, Mount Pleasant Prison
0:45.5	is one of the largest penitentiaries in the world, built only a few years prior by men incarcerated
0:51.5	within it. It is a prison built by its own prisoners.
0:55.0	Over the next week, De Tocqueville and Beaumont will study convicts working under uniquely intense conditions.
1:02.0	Complete silence, no talking aloud. If prisoners moved, they did so in groups walking in lockstep.
1:09.0	De Tocqueville witnessed harsh routine beatings and observed
1:13.0	prisoners isolated in tiny seven-by-three-foot cells, where they took their meals and slept on
1:19.0	straw bedding until labor resumed the following day. It was a place of hopelessness, less
1:24.7	reform than retribution. And though the prison's name would eventually be changed, it remained one of the roughest places on
1:32.7	earth to serve time. Two centuries later, it's still in operation. Welcome to Sing Sing.
1:44.1	Music Welcome back to American History Hit, the podcast that explores the people, places, and events that make our heritage such a fascinating legacy.
2:01.1	We do our best to explain it all here with new episodes twice a week, every week, right here,
2:05.5	Mondays and Thursdays. There was a time when being sent up the river, being dispatched to prison,
2:12.4	was more than just a metaphor. It referred to a very specific prison today and for about 200 years,
2:18.8	located on the banks of the Hudson River, in a village once called Sing Sing, New York,
	...

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