Sing Sing, Up the River to the Prison That Named a Phrase

When New Yorkers in the nineteenth century said someone had gone "up the river," they meant something specific. Sing Sing Prison sat on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, thirty miles north of New York City. Condemned men from the city's Tombs jail were transported upriver by boat. The phrase entered American English from that particular geography, that particular journey, and it stayed.

Sing Sing was built in eighteen twenty-five on the theory, popular among reformers at the time, that hard labor and enforced silence would rehabilitate criminals where the brutal jails of the colonial era had only brutalized them. Prisoners were forbidden to speak. They worked in workshops manufacturing goods for the market. They ate in silence. They slept in tiny cells. The reformers called it the Auburn System, after the prison in upstate New York where it was first developed, and for a time it was regarded as the most advanced approach to criminal justice in the world.

Then the disagreements began. A competing school of reformers argued that solitary confinement and enforced silence were not rehabilitation but torture. That debate produced a century of American prison reform literature and a century of American prison policy that alternated between the two positions without settling either. The debate is not settled today.

Sing Sing also became a site of spectacle. Executions there, by electrocution after nineteen twenty-two, drew attention from journalists and reformers alike. The electric chair at Sing Sing ended the lives of several hundred people between nineteen twenty-two and nineteen sixty-three, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in nineteen fifty-three. The river still runs past the prison wall. The phrase is still in use.