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 own hard labor, were forced to build their own 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 contested?

Speakers

Lee Bernstein is Professor of History at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Bernstein received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Greatest Menace: Organized Crime in Cold War America (University of Massachusetts Press) and America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (University of North Carolina Press). He is currently writing a history of Sing Sing Prison. His recently published articles on the subject appeared in Early American Studies, New York History, and American Nineteenth Century History. He is a past member of PEN American Center’s Prison Writing Committee and works closely with the Sing Sing Prison Museum.

Judith Clark is the Community Justice Advocate for Hour Children, an organization that provides support, transportation and communication services and parent education for incarcerated women and their families at Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional Facilities and Rikers Island jail. In the community, Hour Children provides housing, counseling and services for women and gender non-conforming people and their children transitioning out of incarceration. During her 38 years in prison, Judy worked with her sisters to create peer led, community-based programs to address the challenges they faced and their desires to grow and to take responsibility for the harm they caused as they sought to repair their relationships with their families and communities. She was a founder of ACE (AIDS Counseling and Education) and part of the committee of women who built a college program after public funding was eliminated. Working in the Children’s Center, she helped develop programs for mothers to sustain bonds with their children and mentored new mothers living in the prison nursery. She is a senior advisor for the Women and Justice Project, and on the advisory boards of the Survivor’s Justice Project. Her poetry and writings have appeared, among other places, in The New Yorker, Zero to Three, and The Prison Journal.

Robert Rose III is the Communications Coordinator at the Sing Sing Prison Museum. He received his Bachelor of Science in Behavioral Science from Mercy College and a Master of Professional Studies from New York Theological Seminary. He is a passionate researcher on a mission to tear down the prison industrial complex. His work focuses on exposing how the criminal legal system has become a profitable business, while he is helping people who are currently in prison. His work has helped make a difference in several reports, including ones generated by Worth Rises, the Sing Sing Quaker Worship Group, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). Some of his most notable reports include “The Prison Industry: Mapping Private Sector Players” and “Reducing Violence from Within.” Before he joined the Sing Sing Museum, Robert worked as a Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Justice, and as the Production Manager for TEDxSing Sing, where he focused on the theme of Creating Healthy Communities. He also worked as a Digital Media Fellow at Second Chance Studios, where he organized and led campaigns to help people learn how to challenge those who profit from the nation’s carceral crisis. At the Sing Sing Museum Robert uses oral histories and historical analysis to tell the story of incarceration in New York over the past 50 years. His education and experience show Robert’s commitment to fighting for justice, education, and reform in the criminal legal system.

Samuel K Roberts is an Associate Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. He is also a former Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS). Dr. Roberts writes, teaches, and lectures widely on African-American urban history, especially medicine, public health, and science and technology. His widely acclaimed book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) is an exploration of the political economy of race and the modern American public health state between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, a period which encompasses the overlapping and mutually-informed eras of Jim Crow segregation and modern American public health practice.

NOTE: If you are a Columbia/Barnard affiliate with campus access, please use your Columbia/Barnard email when registering.

All external guests must have their OWN registration and email address.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.