I 
NOTE. 
[The subject of the penitentiary discipline in the state of New-York, is too important to be passed with 
only such very general reference as could be made to it in the foregoing introduction. The following 
account was furnished by the Hon. John L. O’Sullivan ] 
The Penitentiary System of New-York, as it has now existed for a period of nearly a quarter 
of a century, has presented one of the institutions of the state which have been the subject of 
the highest interest to the stranger and pride to its own citizens. The two great establishments 
in which it is to be seen in operation, on a larger scale than in any of the other states of the 
union, are situated at the villages of Auburn and Sing-Sing; the former for the reception of 
convicts from the western, the latter from the eastern district of the state. The Mount- 
Pleasant prison, at Sing-Sing, on the Hudson, about thirty-three miles north of the city of 
New-York, has also a separate building for the reception of female convicts from the whole 
state. The former of these establishments, at the village of Auburn, in the county of Cayuga, 
situated 169 miles west of Albany, and 139 east of Buffalo, and about seven miles south of 
the line of the Erie canal, was the first in the union in which the peculiar system now prevail¬ 
ing in both was adopted, or at least carried out to that degree of completeness and efficiency, 
which has become the just subject of the admiration of the civilized world. It has, therefore, 
given its name to the system, notwithstanding that its leading features were by no means 
novel to the science of prison discipline, or original with the founder of this institution. It 
has constituted the model from which most of the other states of the union have derived the 
plans of the penitentiaries which most of them have, of late years, been led to establish, under 
the stimulus of an example so successful in itself and so honorable in the eyes of the world ; 
arid in the vehement controversy which has been waged, through many modes of publication, 
between the respective partisans of this system and of the rival system in operation in the 
state of Pennsylvania, it is always and every where designated as the Auburn system. A 
brief sketch of its origin, as well as of its present condition, will not be deemed misplaced. 
Previously to the year 1786, the different states of this union were governed, in the main, by 
the sanguinary criminal code which all as colonies had inherited from their mother-country. 
In that year, Pennsylvania, in which had been more widely sown than in any other the seeds 
of that philanthropic wisdom which so peculiarly marked the character of its immortal founder, 
as well as of the religious communion of which he was an ornament, was the first to lead the 
