Sing Sing Prison

Author : Ted Conover
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400033098
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Newjack written by Ted Conover and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-01-20 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION • An acclaimed journalist sets a new standard for bold, in-depth reporting in this first-hand account of life inside the penal system at Sing Sing. “Newjack is about as good as it gets—by turns gripping, funny, frightening, and sad.” —The Washington Post Book World When Ted Conover’s request to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer Academy was denied, he decided to apply for a job as a prison officer himself. The result is an unprecedented work of eyewitness journalism: the account of Conover's year-long passage into storied Sing Sing prison as a rookie guard, or "newjack." As he struggles to become a good officer, Conover angers inmates, dodges blows, and attempts, in the face of overwhelming odds, to balance decency with toughness. Through his insights into the harsh culture of prison, the grueling and demeaning working conditions of the officers, and the unexpected ways the job encroaches on his own family life, we begin to see how our burgeoning prison system brutalizes everyone connected with it. An intimate portrait of a world few readers have ever experienced, Newjack is a haunting journey into a dark undercurrent of American life.

Author : Guy Cheli
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780738512068
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sing Sing Prison written by Guy Cheli and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A popular backdrop for numerous movies, Sing Sing, or "the Big House," has been a site of both controversy and reform. The history of Sing Sing dates back to 1825, when warden Elam Lynds brought one hundred inmates to begin construction of the prison "up the river" on the banks of the Hudson. The marble quarry that supplied the building material for the prison was located in an area that was once home to the Sint Sink, a Native American tribe whose name means "stone upon stone." Prison life was dominated by hard labor during the early years. Convicts in striped suits and shackles built the prison with their own hands. With the arrival of warden Lewis Lawes in 1920, Sing Sing became the most progressive prison of its kind. During this time, the New York Yankees traveled up to Sing Sing to play the prison's home baseball team; the prison grounds were landscaped with shrubbery and flower gardens; and the compound grew to include a chapel, mess hall, barbershop, library, and gymnasium. The electric chair was first introduced at Sing Sing in 1891. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the first civilians to be found guilty of espionage, were put to death there in 1953. Sing Sing Prison contains rare photographs from the prison archives, the Ossining Historical Society, and a private collection.

Author : Lewis Edward Lawes
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 42 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sing Sing written by Lewis Edward Lawes and published by . This book was released on 1933 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief sketch of Sing Sing Prison in New York, its personnel, the men who comprised its population, and the methods and policies used to aid in their rehabilitation.

Author : Lemmert, Ronald, D.
Publisher : Orbis Books
ISBN 13 : 1608337502
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Refuge in Hell written by Lemmert, Ronald, D. and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without romanticizing the prisoners in his stories, the author--who served for many years as the Catholic chaplain at Sing Sing prison--humanizes them, offers a compelling picture of the reality of an oppressive criminal justice system, and describes the challenge and joy of proclaiming the gospel in such an environment.

Author : Ralph Blumenthal
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 9780312342739
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Miracle at Sing Sing written by Ralph Blumenthal and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2005-05-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the riotous days of Prohibition and the Jazz Age to the brutal awakening of Pearl Harbor, one man ruled the fate of America's most dangerous criminals. He was Lewis E. Lawes, warden of Sing Sing prison, the Big House up the river, who believed that no man was beyond redemption. Warden Lawes couldn't banish the electric chair (though he tried) but he knew that humanitarian care and good morale provided better security than the stoutest walls. Lawes befriended the Hollywood greats, Charlie Chaplin and Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy and Harry Warner, opening Sing Sing to the movies and exposing prisoners to the glamour of the silver screen. He brought Babe Ruth to Sing Sing, fielded a winning football team called The Black Sheep that brought gridiron glory to the circuit known as the Big Pen, and ran training shops, school classes and culture programs. Truly, Warden Lawes made Sing Sing sing. But Lawes was no pushover. He brought law to Sing Sing, a tale that comes alive in the hands of prize-winning New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. He killed on orders from the state, consigning 303 condemned men and women to the electric chair. But he crusaded fiercely against the death penalty as useless and preached that every man deserved a second chance, even if, in the end, he faced a terrible betrayal. Lawes taught the nation that a jail was a lockup but a prison was a community. With his perfect name and flawless eye for fashion, Lawes took over as the ninth warden in eight years -- at 39, the youngest man to lead the century-old institution, then overflowing with more than a thousand hardened criminals and luckless youths. Vice was rife -- bribery, alcohol, drugs and sex. The political bosses held sway, swinging deals for favored inmates. Enemies accused him of coddling prisoners but he ridiculed the charge. No one was coddled on a food budget of 18 cents a day. Lawes lived with his wife and daughters in a Victorian mansion abutting the cellblock, where he was shaved each morning by a prison barber convicted of slashing a man's throat, the household cook was a murderer, and his youngest daughter's favorite babysitter was serving twenty-five years for kidnapping. Lawes tamed the tyrannical Charles E. Chapin who had terrorized generations of reporters as the editor of Joseph Pulitzer's Evening World before murdering his wife and winding up as Lawes's favorite horticulturist, the Rose Man of Sing Sing. Lawes championed the advent of radio and used it to inspire his prisoners and educate the public on penal reform. He wrote film scripts and radio plays and dramas and best-selling books. But in the end, his finest tribute came not from the mighty but a lowly prisoner in the yard who muttered, to no one in particular, "There was a right guy."

Author : Denis Brian
Publisher : Prometheus Books
ISBN 13 : 1615925449
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sing Sing written by Denis Brian and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive research with original sources, Brian's narrative covers every period of the prison's checkered history, from the awful conditions of the 19th century to the relative improvements of the 20th century to today.

Author : John Cheever
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307760715
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Falconer written by John Cheever and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Only Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.

Author : Idanna Pucci
Publisher : Tiller Press
ISBN 13 : 1982139315
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lady of Sing Sing written by Idanna Pucci and published by Tiller Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “gripping social history” (Publishers Weekly), with all the passion and pathos of a classic opera, chronicles the riveting first campaign against the death penalty waged in 1895 by American pioneer activist, Cora Slocomb, Countess of Brazzà, to save the life of a twenty-year-old illiterate Italian immigrant, Maria Barbella, who killed the man who had abused her. Previously published as The Trials of Maria Barbella. In 1895, a twenty-two-year-old Italian seamstress named Maria Barbella was accused of murdering her lover, Domenico Cataldo, after he seduced her and broke his promise to marry her. Following a sensational trial filled with inept lawyers, dishonest reporters and editors, and a crooked judge repaying political favors, the illiterate immigrant became the first woman sentenced to the newly invented electric chair at Sing Sing, where she is also the first female prisoner. Behind the scenes, a corporate war raged for the monopoly of electricity pitting two giants, Edison and Westinghouse with Nikola Tesla at his side, against each other. Enter Cora Slocomb, an American-born Italian aristocrat and activist, who launched the first campaign against the death penalty to save Maria. Rallying the New York press, Cora reached out across the social divide—from the mansions of Fifth Avenue to the tenements of Little Italy. Maria’s “crime of honor” quickly becomes a cause celebre, seizing the nation’s attention. Idanna Pucci, Cora’s great-granddaughter, masterfully recounts this astonishing story by drawing on original research and documents from the US and Italy. This dramatic page-turner, interwoven with twists and unexpected turns, grapples with the tragedy of immigration, capital punishment, ethnic prejudice, criminal justice, corporate greed, violence against women, and a woman’s right to reject the role of victim. Over a century later, this story is as urgent as ever.

Author : Ron Arons
Publisher : Barricade Books
ISBN 13 : 9781569801536
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jews of Sing Sing written by Ron Arons and published by Barricade Books. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once Ron Arons was over the shock of learning that his great-grandfather had done a 'stretch' in the famed sing sing prison, he embarked on a journey to learn more about his ancestor and how he landed in jail. What he discovered was that between 1880 and 1950 there were thousands of Jews behind bars at Sing Sing, for crimes ranging from incest to arson to selling air rights over Manhattan. The Jews of Sing Sing is the first book to fully expose the scope of Jewish criminality over the past 160 years, and it features famous gangsters like Lepke Buchalter.

Author : Scott Christianson
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814716164
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Condemned written by Scott Christianson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside look into one of the most mythologized prisons in modern America--the Sing Sing death house In the annals of American criminal justice, two prisons stand out as icons of institutionalized brutality and deprivation: Alcatraz and Sing Sing. In the 70 odd years before 1963, when the death sentence was declared unconstitutional in New York, Sing Sing was the site of almost one-half of the 1,353 executions carried out in the state. More people were executed at Sing Sing than at any other American prison, yet Sing Sing's death house was, to a remarkable extent, one of the most closed, secret and mythologized places in modern America. In this remarkable book, based on recently revealed archival materials, Scott Christianson takes us on a disturbing and poignant tour of Sing Sing's legendary death house, and introduces us to those whose lives Sing Sing claimed. Within the dusty files were mug shots of each newly arrived prisoner, most still wearing the out-to-court clothes they had on earlier that day when they learned their verdict and were sentenced to death. It is these sometimes bewildered, sometimes defiant, faces that fill the pages of Condemned, along with the documents of their last months at Sing Sing. The reader follows prisoners from their introduction to the rules of Sing Sing, through their contact with guards and psychiatrists, their pleas for clemency, escape attempts, resistance, and their final letters and messages before being put to death. We meet the mother of five accused of killing her husband, the two young Chinese men accused of a murder during a robbery and the drifter who doesn't remember killing at all. While the majority of inmates are everyday people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were also executed here, as were the major figures in the infamous Murder Inc., forerunner of the American mafia. Page upon page, Condemned leaves an indelible impression of humanity and suffering.