2025 marks the bicentenary of Sing Sing Prison. In collaboration with the Sing Sing Prison Museum, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and Justice-in-Education initiative will host a commemorative event examining the role that religion has played in the project of incarceration in the United States.

In 1825, incarcerated men, with their hard labor, were forced to build their cages in a quarry adjacent to the prison site along the Hudson River. Their work and their punishment unfolded in a context of lockstep, silence, horrific physical penalty for infractions, and solitary confinement.

This panel will look at what formed early notions of rehabilitation and reform in the United States, what constituted the actions needed to create a safe and just society, and how our new democracy imagined innovative incarceration. It will ask how this history informs contemporary practices and public perceptions and why reform is so entrenched in isolation, deprivation, suffering, religious tenets, and authoritarian control. Ultimately, this panel will ask again why we have prisons and why education, as reform, is so content.

Time: 6:15 pm EST

Free!

Registration