This collection is made of nine receipts for payments made to agent and principal keeper of Mount Pleasant Prison Robert Wiltse for payments made and received by the facility between April 1, 1833, and June 30, 1833. The receipts document payments for pardoned convicts ("expenses" owed to "place of conviction"); cartage of limestone, boxes, locks, sundries, and railroad blocks; "36 sides upper" leather; postage; old copper; casks of winter oil; 25,300 convict rations; and prison personnel (signed by each man, with their positions and pay identified).
NB: Mount Pleasant Prison was located at Sing Sing, New York, and decades after these receipts, the institution took the name Sing Sing Prison.
In the early 19th century, New York had three State prisons: Newgate Prison (New York City), Auburn Prison (Auburn, New York), and Clinton Prison (Dannemora, New York). Beginning in 1797, a Board of Inspectors handled administration of the New York State prisons. Their responsibilities included prison evaluations, facilities, maintenance, personnel, order, discipline, finances, managing convict labor, prisoner transfers, purchase of convict clothing and bedding, acquisition of manufacturing materials, and other matters. From 1848 to 1876, three inspectors comprised the Board. In 1876, the Board dissolved and a Superintendent of Prisons took over management of the State prisons.
In the 1820s, Newgate Prison occupied valuable New York City real estate, which was needed for the expanding city, and so in 1825 the State legislature appropriated funds for the construction of a new State Prison. A site was chosen at the quarry-adjacent Mount Pleasant, in Sing Sing, New York (now Ossining, New York), on the Hudson River. The facility adopted the name Mount Pleasant Prison.
The first prisoners arrived as transfers from Auburn Prison in 1825, before construction on Mount Pleasant began. After a few weeks of convict labor, they established temporary buildings, including barracks, carpenter and blacksmith shops, and a cookhouse. In the ensuing years, with ever-stretched appropriation monies, the prisoners completed the construction of a cellblock in October 1828. Unshackled, largely unguarded inmates continued at the construction, adding a kitchen, hospital, chapel, wharf, and workshops.
Mount Pleasant Prison's management was modelled after the Auburn System, a strict and monotonous method by which prisoners were kept in solitary cells at night, engaged in work during the daytime, required to keep silent during work, and forbidden from turning their heads or moving in their workstations. Failure to abide by these rules would result in severe punishment.
By 1830, over 500 Mount Pleasant convicts were forced into labor according to the contract system, by which the State advertised the prisoners' cheap resource-extraction and manufacturing work, made contracts with businesses to hire out prisoner labor, and managed the labor force and finances. Private and public individuals and groups argued for and against this physical and financial exploitation of convicts, and the contract system continued almost to the turn of the century.
Mount Pleasant Prison's name changed to Sing Sing Prison in the 1850s, to match the town in which it presided.
