N ew Y ork ( A uburn) Prison System

Abstract

Abstract The New York, or Auburn, system was a distinctive plan for prison organization developed early in the nineteenth century. Under this plan, prisoners worked in factory‐like settings during the day and retreated to solitary cells at night. The collection of prisoners in large rooms led some commentators to call it the “congregate system,” in contrast to its main competitor, the Pennsylvania System, which kept prisoners in solitary or “separate” confinement for the duration of their sentence. Other commentators called the Auburn System the “silent system” because prisoners were forbidden from talking with, or even looking at, one another during the work day. Emerging in the early 1820s in response to a rash of prison riots and chaos, the Auburn system came to dominate American prisons by the time of the Civil War. Although the postwar period experienced some fracturing of penal facilities, some version of the Auburn System continued to dominate and even formed the basis for the Big House prisons of the 1920s and 1930s, forever shaping America's imagination of what prisons look like until, perhaps, recently.