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- The Elmira system classified and separated various types of prisoners, gave them individualized treatment emphasizing vocational training and industrial employment, used indeterminate sentences, rewarded good behaviour, and paroled inmates under supervision.
www.britannica.com/topic/Elmira-systemElmira system | Rehabilitation, Reform & Prisoners | Britannica
Changes in correctional education impelled broader prison reform in the middle of the nineteenth century. Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York offered the most successful program of approaches since the eighteenth-century origins of American correctional education.
It differed from many prisons of the day as it focused on reforming the convict using psychological methods rather than physical. Previously, prisoners were required to abide by the "holy trinity" of silence, obedience, and labor. Sentences were indeterminate.
When New York's Elmira Reformatory opened in 1876, it rejected 19th century penology's holy trinity of silence, obedience and labor. Elmira's goal would be reform of the convict, and its methods would be psychological rather than physical.
The Eastern New York Reformatory at Napanoch opened in 1900, receiving its inmates by transfer from Elmira. Napanoch, still in the building stage, needed construction workers, so Elmira sent on its older and stronger inmates.
While changes at Elmira finally took place by the end of the century, the institution never recovered from earlier abuses and the institution's supervisors became increasingly skeptical of the ability of adult reformatories to rehabilitate criminals.
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The Elmira Reformatory was without question the first prison in American penal history to employ the indeterminate sentence, good-time, and parole. For that distinction alone, Elmira represented a sea change in penal philosophy and practice.
