Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [403]
Vagrants too were set to hard labor, for up to six months, which took various forms. Some prisoners worked alongside almshouse inmates, making shoes or mending clothes, further blurring the line between poverty and criminality. Others were set to opening and improving city streets. Still others were assigned to the treadmill, or “stepping wheel,” another English import beloved by reformers, which was installed at Bellevue in 1822 at the urging of Mayor Stephen Allen. Housed in a two-story stone building erected for the purpose, the wheel was a cylinder, twenty feet long and six feet in diameter, attached to a grain-grinding millstone. Sixteen prisoners would mount the wheel and start it turning, trudge for eight minutes, then give way to another set of sixteen, their alternations paced by the inevitable bell. Mayor Allen—who preferred the term “discipline mill”—applauded it as a device for terrorizing “sturdy beggars,” those outside the walls as well as in.
New York City’s more serious offenders—those convicted of highway robbery, burglary, forgery, counterfeiting, or rape—were subject to terms ranging from three to twenty-one years (arson and murder were capital crimes). Such miscreants, overwhelmingly male, were sent not to Bellevue but to the state-run Newgate Prison, hulking on the Hudson’s edge at Greenwich. By the 1820s, however, Newgate’s viability was in serious question. Even dedicated supporters like Eddy conceded that the old prison had been an almost total failure. The place was appallingly overcrowded, stuffed to twice its capacity. After prisoners rioted in 1818, nearly destroying the jail, the legislature responded in 1819 by legalizing flogging—up to thirty-nine lashes per occasion—as well as reviving stocks and irons. In prereform days, a thief would have been whipped and then set free; now he could be held for years and flogged repeatedly if he didn’t conform to prison discipline.
The Stepping Mill, 1828. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Lengthy internments were the exception, however, as the state issued pardons to alleviate the crush. At the end of 1821 Newgate held 817 inmates, but it would have held over two thousand had it not been for repeated mass releases, sometimes of fifty convicts a day, which petrified the now burgeoning community of Greenwich Village. By 1826 the inmate population was down to 448—more than half of whom, sniffed James Hardie in his Description of the City of New York (1827), were miscreants from foreign countries or other states, many of them no doubt “attracted by the hopes of getting more abundant plunder in this metropolis than they could expect in any other place.”
Critics also condemned Newgate’s design because it allowed convicts almost unlimited interaction, letting them pool their experiences. As one Society for the Prevention of Pauperism lawyer pointed out, the place operated “with alarming efficacy to increase, diffuse, and extend the love of vice, and a knowledge of the arts and practices of criminality.” Some thought it might be worth trying to immure prisoners in silent isolation, as did Philadelphia’s celebrated Eastern State Penitentiary. Others thought that as stretches in solitary had been shown to drive many to madness and suicide, the system used upstate at Auburn might be preferable: isolating prisoners at night but setting them to (profitable) gang labor by day, under the rule of absolute silence, enforced by summary flogging. In the end, however, Newgate was deemed hopelessly beyond repair, and the legislature authorized a brand-new prison, on the Auburn model, at Ossining, near the large marble deposits discovered in Westchester County.
In 1828 the state closed Newgate and transferred its prisoners to Sing Sing, which almost instantly won an awesome reputation,