Westchester County Penitentiary and Workhouse, White Plains, N. Y.
By Alfred Hopkins, Architect
(First published in February, 1918)
WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N. Y., PENITENTIARY—GENERAL VIEW FROM APPROACH
Alfred Hopkins, Architect
The Westchester County Penitentiary is a simple form of the type of a plan whose various parts are brought together by the use of the connecting corridor to provide indoor circulation throughout the group. This system of design is well known in connection with other types of building, but seems to be new to prison architecture. Indeed, such an arrangement would have only been tolerated in the present attitude toward the offender. Modern penology demands, first of all, adequate possibilities for segregation and classification. These are of vital importance in the administration of the modern penal institution, and cannot be properly had in the huge cell block. To achieve this classification and segregation, the connecting corridor offers the greatest possibilities.
The General Problem
The general problem was as follows:
Westchester County had purchased at East View, at a very reasonable price, a fine estate of some four hundred acres of exceptionally tillable land. On this property it was proposed to build a Poor House for about 700 and a penitentiary and workhouse for about 350, all short-term prisoners, the maximum sentence being thirteen months. Most of the men were to be employed on the farm, but in an institution of this size there are always men who will do better in shops so that the two kinds of work ought to be available. The plan was to build the institution by contract and the shops by prison labor.