Auburn System
Definition
Also called the silent system, a regime combining solitary night cells with daytime congregate labour under an absolute rule against speech, developed at Auburn Prison in New York in the 1820s.
Related terms
- Congregate Labour
- Work performed by prisoners together in shared workshops during the day, the defining feature of the Auburn system, as opposed to solitary...
- Panopticon
- Jeremy Bentham's 1791 design for an institution built around a central observation tower, letting a single supervisor watch many inmates who cannot...
- Penitentiary
- An institution built on the idea that isolation, labour and religious instruction could produce genuine penitence and reform an offender's character, rather...
- Pennsylvania System
- Also called the separate system, a regime of total individual isolation day and night, with solitary labour, refined at Eastern State Penitentiary...
- Indeterminate Sentence
- A prison term without a fixed release date, set instead by a range that a parole authority narrows based on the prisoner's...
- Reformatory Movement
- The post-1870 shift to indeterminate sentences and earned release, applied at Elmira Reformatory from 1876 in place of fixed-term discipline.
- Separate System
- The formal name for the Pennsylvania system's total isolation of one prisoner from every other prisoner.
- Silent System
- The Auburn system's core rule, an absolute ban on prisoners speaking to one another in workshop, mess hall or yard, enforced through...
Explained in these topics
- Penitentiary, Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems (UGC-NET Unit VIII)A prison design from Auburn Prison in New York that held prisoners alone at night but put them to congregate labour in shared workshops by day.
- The Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems of Prison Discipline