Auburn system

Whigs favored this system because it promised to rehabilitate criminals by teaching them personal discipline and respect for work, property, and other people.Within the next fifteen years, the system was used in prisons in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Upper Canada, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, and Michigan.Some of these included making "nails, barrels, clothing, shoes and boots, carpets, buttons, carpenters' tools, steam engines and boilers, combs, harnesses, furniture, brooms, clocks, buckets and pails, saddle trees...".To ensure silence and to compel prisoners to work, agent Lynds, at first hired to oversee construction and command workers, used several methods of violence and coercion.Incarcerated men, however, resisted such forms of control in numerous ways, including passing notes, whispering, and even using ventriloquism to communicate with one another.He believed in the disciplinary power of the lash, and used flogging to punish even minor infractions, and created his own version of a cat o' nine tails whip for that purpose, while also imposing a system of isolation that prevented inmates from communicating with their families.The prisoner was stripped naked, bound hand and foot, with a wooden collar around his neck to prevent him moving his head.The Auburn Women's Prison remained in operation until 1933, when a new maximum-security wing for female inmates opened at Bedford Hills.