Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House

by Scott Christianson

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814715966
• ISBN13: 9780814715963
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.2" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

Wow! Haunting

It only took me 2 hours to get through this book, yes it's not much of a reader but the mugshots truly tell the story of these people who 6 months to 2 years later would be dead! I highly recommend this book to anyone or everyone who is intrigued by the justice system or capital punishment.

Pictures that are worth many thousand words . . .

Regardless of the reader's position on the death penalty, this book is a fascinating, disturbing, thought-provoking, and very necessary addition to the personal library of anyone interested in that issue. The book contains an incredible array of photos, documents, and information quoted directly from long-buried records. Until recently, these materials were never viewed by anyone outside the "power elite" of the corrections system.The author makes the book truly unique by using only a bare minimum of narration and commentary. Instead, he allows these haunting images to speak for themselves. By doing so, he allows the reader to form his or her own impressions, opinions and conclusions. This makes the book's impact all the more powerful.An especially troubling message of this book is that our criminal justice system has traditionally kept a tight lid on public knowledge of many aspects of the life and death of its condemned men and women, and that this remains so today in all but the very few most highly-publicized cases (such as Timothy McVeigh or Karla Faye Tucker).

Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House

The author has presented documents, letters, photographs, and memos between prison personnel in a clever, yet straight-forward manner that allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. The photographs were fascinating and speak volumes of the lives of these death row inmates. I was most struck by three consecutive mug shots of Frederick Wood, which illustrated the aging effect that the prison had on him over 18 years. As an investigator, I was impressed that the author was able to obtain these telling documents from Sing-Sing. The book conjures up many emotions regarding the lives and deaths of these people. The fact that some of the subjects look like they belong in most family photo albums really brings it home. The book would make a riviting museum exhibit. I highly recommend it.

Incredible book, deeply troubling

This is the kind of book you can't put down - the photographs and other archival materials pull you into a kind of intimate dance with the bureaucracy of death. In doing so, I think this book seeks to rehumanize the human beings - guilty or innocent -whose bodies became the property of the state. There is nothing superficial about this endeavor -this wealth of material opens up deep, disturbing issues about class, punishment, race, gender, wealth and poverty, and even democracy itself. I've never read anything quite like this book, and I highly recommend it to everyone.