Book Review: Sing Sing: The Inside Story of a Notorious Prison

• Author: Heather Schoenfeld
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016806295616
• Published date: 01 December 2006
• Date: 01 December 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

Still, this book, with its flaws, is among the precedent setters in methodology of how to

best study intellectual behavior, such as court cases, where there is reasoning, ideology, the

court’s own brand of politics, psychology, history, unusual facts, and a culture that says,

“This is all law, don’t look at it any way else.” These authors did.

Michael Israel

Kean University, Union, NJ

Brian, D. (2005). Sing Sing: The Inside Story of a Notorious Prison. Amherst, NY:

Prometheus Books.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806295616

Academics stopped writing “inside stories” on prisons after the prisoner rights movements

of the 1970s. Until very recently, those who wanted to understand contemporary life on the

inside had to rely on the accounts of prisoners themselves, officially commissioned reports on

prison riots, or the corrections literature on “how to” manage inmates. Most of these accounts

lack historical perspective, which is what Denis Brian, a biographer, journalist, and most

recently the author of Einstein: A Life, provides in this book about Sing Sing, the third oldest

prison in the state of New York. For this reason, academics, practitioners, and advocates will

find this book a useful starting point for historicizing their own work. However, as a history

in its own right, it lacks detailed source citations, necessary references to social and political

context, and any new information on prison life in the era of mass incarceration.

In the detached manner of a historian with no overarching thesis to promote, Brian relays

the history of Sing Sing from 1825 to 2000 through the succession of wardens, visitors,

executioners, attempted escapees, and death row inmates. The first three chapters chronicle

the first 60 years of Sing Sing, located in what is now Westchester County. Built by pris-

oners themselves under the direction of Elam Lynds, “Sing Sing’s first and most brutal

warden,” Sing Sing originally adopted the “Auburn system,” where inmates slept in individual

cells and worked in congregate, all in silence (p. 17). Brian characterizes Sing Sing during

this time period as a “grim, desolate, and dangerous place” with fleeting attempts at reform,

where inmates could only avoid the harsh conditions and brutal corporal punishment by

escaping or committing suicide (p. 38).

Death officially came to Sing Sing in 1890 in the form of the electric chair. Chapter 4

describes the advent of the electric chair as a means of execution, including the involve-

ment of Thomas Edison, the experiments on dogs and at least one horse, and the first prob-

lematic execution of William Kemmler, “a poor semiliterate laborer who had axed his

mistress to death” (p. 52). The book covers the banality of life on death row and the exe-

cution details for a handful of the 606 men and 8 women electrocuted at Sing Sing. Also,

Brian’s narrative reminds us that concerns about killing the innocent are not new: “that an

innocent man came so close to execution... persuaded Governor Rockefeller to abolish

the death penalty in New York State [in 1963]” (p. 186).

Chapters 5 through 8, which chronicle the first half of the 20th century, are full of inter-

esting stories and events—making them the most informative of the book. Unfortunately, the

reader cannot further investigate many of these anecdotes because they lack source citations.

For example, Brian does not cite his claim that had it not been for the opposition of Pierpoint

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