Ogdensburg Correctional Facility

Ogdensburg, a 797-bed, medium-security institution, is situated in the city of Ogdensburg about a quarter-mile from where the Ogdensburg-Prescott International Bridge soars over the St. Lawrence River into Canada. The site is rich in history. Many years ago, before there was a bridge or a prison, the city was occupied briefly by British military forces. In retaliation for raids into Canadian territory by American militia during the War of 1812, British troops crossed the frozen river and captured the town and fort.

Many years later, in 1984, American forces returned to the scene, this time in friendship. A color guard from the correctional facility participated that year in a pageant at Canada's Fort Wellington. Among the observers were Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, who stopped to chat with the color guard members and thank them for coming. That nice touch just maybe atoned for the skittish refusal of plainclothes Royal Canadian Mounted Police, assigned as the Queen's body guard, to permit DOCS Correction Officers - as security-minded a group as you will find anywhere - to carry their wooden dummy rifles during the exercise.

The North Country asylum

The prison is one of three state institutions in the region. Architecturally, the trio represents a blend of the old and the new. When DOCS took over a part of the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center in 1982, it acquired a cluster of Victorian-style stone buildings constructed in 1892. Alongside this complex, the Department erected several dorms and other buildings in the "cookie-cutter" style of the 1980's and '90's. The psychiatric center retained the northern and eastern sides of the proper extending to the river; here, too, are 1890's structures side-by-side with modern buildings. And on the prison's southeast sit across Route 37, there is a another and newer DOCS facility Riverview - built in 1988 on the cookie-cutter design.

The psychiatric center came first. Initially, it was to be call the Ogdensburg State Asylum for the Insane, but the name was changed to the St. Lawrence State Hospital before the first patient was admitted. In the late 1970's, it was re-christened the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center.

The asylum was authorized in 1886 by the state Legislature after being persuaded of the need for such an institution in the northern part of the state. The governor appointed a site selection commission including Dr. Peter M. Wise (superintendent of the Willard State Hospital) and William P. Letchworth (a member of the state Board of Charities who was also instrumental in establishing what is now Groveland). They recommended Point Airy, a 950-acre tract of farmland bulging out into the St. Lawrence River The state purchased the land for $90,500 in 1887.

Later that year Isaac G. Perry, the state architect, consulted a group of experts to plan the asylum. Among them were Dr Wise and Dr. Carlos F. MacDonald. Dr MacDonald was superintendent of the Auburn State Asylum for Insane Criminals and, when that was relocated, he became the first superintendent of Matteawan State Hospital (now Fishkill). Dr. MacDonald was present at the world's first execution by electrocution, and his graphic report on William Kemmler's death at Auburn in 1890 is frequently cited in death penalty studies.

Their ideas laid the foundation for the family-style institution that would become standard in the design and conduct of future psychiatric hospitals. Plans drawn by the architect called for three discrete groups of buildings, so that patients could be grouped according to their particular psychiatric disorder. The buildings would be small, not exceeding two floors, with sleeping quarters above and rooms for day activities below.

Moral treatment

The St. Lawrence State Hospital opened on December 9, 1890, under the superintendency of Dr. Wise, who transferred from Willard. Dr Wise instituted a program of "moral treatment," designed to rescue the patient from the outside pressures that were widely thought to cause insanity. The "moral" inmoral treatment refers not to ethics but rather, as in the phrase "moral support," to "morale." Conceived before the advent of drug therapy and other medical interventions, moral treatment meant an attitude and an environment: a nurturing routine of rest without stress in comforting surroundings.

Recreation, as a mental stimulant, was an important component of the therapeutic program. Entertainments included stereopticon shows, musical and comedy productions, sleigh rides, popcorn parties, phonographic entertainments, camping on Lotus Island, skating and sledding in the winter and, in summer, river excursions on "Dorothy" (the hospital steamboat). Dancing was also encouraged, because it combined physical exercise with what is, in Dr. Wise's scale, "the most potent of all the factors of moral treatment - music."

Recreation was only one form of "purposeful activity" by which St. Lawrence strove to arouse previously unreachable patients from apathy. In 1908, St. Lawrence pioneered a fledgling occupational therapy program, described as "employment in various occupations for the purpose of re-educating the facilities of attention and volition." It would be imitated in state hospitals all over the country. Patients worked at weaving, sewing, woodworking and knitting (using wool from the hospital flock).

The hospital, like prisons of the day, resembled a self-supporting community. The farm was so productive that outside food purchases were seldom necessary; it also supplied the patients' tobacco needs. The farm closed in the 1960's, after changes in state law concerning patient labor. The land was sold to the Ogdensburg Bridge and Port Authority for industrial development.

In 1928, St. Lawrence instituted a beauty salon, another first that was soon widely imitated in recognition of its therapeutic value as a morale booster.

The nursing school was another first for St. Lawrence. When the hospital opened in 1890, there were only 23 schools of nursing in the U.S., and only 11 had been in existence long enough to have produced graduates. Dr. Wise reasoned that it would be easier to train his own nurses than to recruit them. In 1890, before the first patients arrived, he established a coed nursing school, the first such school affiliated with a state institution. No suitable texts were available, so Dr. Wise wrote his own (Textbook for Training Schools for Nurses published by G.R Putnam Sons in ] 896), which became the standard text in all Department of Mental Hygiene nursing schools. In 1913, the curriculum was expanded from two years to three. In 1972, with its in-patient population declining, New York started phasing out its costly nursing schools. St. Lawrence's program, operating out of the Flower Building, was the last to close (in1981).

The Point Airy institution began to accept self-commitments (voluntary patients) in 1908, a small step toward reducing the stigma of admission to the state hospital. Two years later, a free dispensary opened; this was the first out-patient clinic operated by a state institution and can be seen as a harbinger of the community care movement that would eventually become the preferred mode of dealing with mental illness.

Ogdensburg welcomes corrections

Nine years after the 1973 passage of the Rockefeller drug laws, New York's prison population was ascending steadily. To accommodate the influx of inmates, DOCS resorted to a variety of capacity expansion measures.

First, it took back its own properties at Eastern, on loan to New York City, and Woodbourne, on loan to the Drug Abuse Control Commission (DACC).

Next, the Department began to acquire unused or underused properties from other state agencies. From DACC the Department took Edgecombe, Bayview, Parkside, Fulton, Lincoln, Queensboro, Arthur Kill and Ray Brook. From the Division for Youth, DOCS acquired Rochester, Hudson, Otisville and Mid-Orange; from the Department of Mental Hygiene, it took over Mt. McGregor, Collins and Pilgrim.

The Department also acquired sites not already state-owned: a former tuberculosis sanitarium in Gabriel's and the former Air Force base in Watertown. The only facility built from scratch during this period was the new Downstate reception center.

In many cases, DOCS had to deal with community opposition. Prisons have never been high on the desirability scale, and overcoming the NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome was part of the process of siting and building a correctional facility. It came as a shock, therefore, when DOCS officials went to Ogdensburg and found themselves in the unprecedented position of being courted. Virtually the entire community was united in the desire to become a prison town. (On hearing this, a disbelieving metropolitan New York City newspaper reporter went north to expose the myth of Ogdensburg's happy unanimity. The reporter failed to find a single dissenter.)

Quite simply, Ogdensburg needed jobs. Into the 1960's, St. Lawrence's inpatient census was around 3,000. Then, with the development of psychotropic medications and the community care movement, the hospital's census went into free-fall. Staff were laid off, and there was no prospect that the deinstitutionalization process would ever be reversed. (The state is trying to sell the property now.)

When it was learned, in late 1981, that DOCS was interested in the depopulated old asylum, a Prison Task Force was formed headed by the mayor of Ogdensburg. It was comprised of local legislators, clergymen, business people and other prominent citizens, and representatives of the state Office of Mental Health (OMH) and DOCS.

With this kind of cooperation, it was less than a year between preliminary discussions and the arrival of the first inmates.

Since then, hosts of upstate communities have used the Ogdensburg experience as a model.

Flower Building blooms

A 17-acre rectangle of land was sliced out of the psychiatric center and transferred to DOCS.

The rectangle was bare except for the Flower Building, one of the original state hospital structures. It was named in gratitude to Governor Roswell P. Flower, who, after the nearly completed complex was destroyed by fire, pushed through an emergency bill for supplemental funding. It was finished in 1892.

Though it is referred to in the singular the Flower Building is actually a complex of eight or more gray stone buildings, all two stories high with sharply sloping roofs, connected to an 800-foot long central corridor. Wings and blocks of various sizes, some with square and some with rounded corners, jut out asymmetrically from each other and from the ends and sides of the corridor. A broad veranda, reminiscent of Adirondack luxury hotels of a century ago, wraps around much of the complex.

The standard double-row of fencing was placed around the grounds. Then, at the request of the Task Force, a unique third fence was placed outside the road encircling the perimeter fencing. This has served to keep patients from setting off alarms (injuring themselves, though in the midst of a psychiatric center - the occasional nuisance or bizarre incident is inevitable.

Staff still recall the female patient who liked to disrobe and shriek obscenities at inmates.

The first draft of 19 inmates arrived on November 15,1982, with additional transfers every few weeks until the 242 Flower beds were filled. In the first years, the Flower Building was the prison. It served as housing, office space, maintenance and stores building, schoolhouse, kitchen and mess hall, and recreation room.

The community's enthusiasm for its new institution did not flag. The Prison Task Force was reorganized as a Community Advisory Board and joined discussions between DOC S, which wanted to add beds to the prison, and OMH, which was concerned over the impact on psychiatric center operations. The discussions culminated in a $23 million construction plan that would benefit all parties. The prison would get an additional 300 beds and another 100 jobs. The psychiatric center would get a new, modem building for the children's unit (which had been mystifyingly located in one of the original brick structures immediately across the road from the prison) and other improvements.

For two years, the new prison resembled a construction site. Renovations to the Flower Building were completed, including expansion of the mess hall and the construction of concrete enclosed exterior stair cases for use in fire or other emergencies. Then, seven large prototype buildings were erected on the 17-acre lot; an administration building, a vocational education building, a gymnasium/activities building, a plant operations building (garage and storehouse) and three cookie-cutter design housing units with 300 beds. The new units are officially known as "New Housing" and, unofficially, as "the projects."

When these additions were completed late in 1984, the main entrance was moved from the north end of the Flower Building to the south end, in front of the new administration building.

Facility expansion begins

The enlargement of Ogdensburg from 242 to 542 general confinement beds was of course not the final answer to DOCS' ongoing need for capacity expansion. More prisons were built, including the adjacent Riverview. In 1989, 200 beds were moved into Ogdensburg's gym, increasing the capacity to 742; a bubble" - an air-supported tent - was placed on the grounds for indoor recreation.

These conditions persisted for about a year In 1990, relief came with permission to double bunk. Ogdensburg's inmates departed the gym and the new housing units were doublebunked, going from 300 to 540 beds (for a net gain of 40) and regaining the gymnasium (the bubble collapsed under snow a couple of years ago).

New inmates are assigned to the double-bunked new housing units. They are usually quick to put their names on the waiting list for transfer to the roomier "old housing" in the Flower Building, consisting of 23-bed dorms and small rooms ranging from two to six beds.

Ogdensburg's inmates participate in the full array of modern correctional programs offered by DOCS. Most inmates are assigned to a job at the facility, either in the kitchen or laundry or maintenance and grounds work. One crew of inmates is approved for outside maintenance work and community service projects. Three hundred fifty-five inmates are enrolled in academic education classes through the high school level. Another 345 inmates are enrolled in the facility's vocational training programs: horticulture, electrical trades, custodial maintenance, computer repair (formerly office machine repair), general business, drafting, printing, building maintenance and small engine repair.

Most inmates receive counseling in one of two alcohol and substance abuse programs at Ogdensburg. The facility has DOCS modular ASAT (Alcohol and Substance Abuse Treatment) program for 40 inmates. Also offered is RSAF (Residential Substance Abuse Treatment), a six-month therapeutic community program for 120 inmates at a time operating out of Dorm C (one of the New Housing units); RSAT, at Ogdensburg since September, 1999, is 75 percent federally funded.

Other counseling programs include Aggression Replacement Training, a 360-hour course conducted by staff Counselors, and Alternatives to Violence, a 24-hour course conducted one weekend a month by outside volunteers.

In addition to traditional recreation programs, Ogdensburg holds an annual Summer Superstars competition. Contestants vie for prizes (first prize: a case of soda and three click-click photos) and the honor of being Ogdensburg's superstar of the year by competing in 10 events (such as foul shooting, bocce throw, shot put, football throw, bench press and two-lap yard run). Superstar points are awarded in each event and totaled as in the Olympics decathlon.

In more than 18 years as a correctional facility, Ogdensburg has operated without a whisper of trouble. Maybe the old "moral treatment" setting - the natural beauty of the Point Airy scenery, the tranquil mood of the architecture is still working its magic. Certainly the welcome extended by the community reduced the stress and tension of opening and immediately expanding the facility, and community acceptance still contributes importantly to smooth functioning. But the lion's share of the credit is owing to Ogdensburg's 392 administrators and employees, for planning, directing and executing a modern, quality correctional program.

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