Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Horn brings this forgotten history alive: there was terrible overcrowding prisoners were enlisted to care for the insane punishment was harsh and unfair and treatment was nonexistent. In the first contemporary investigative account of Blackwell’s, Stacy Horn tells this chilling narrative through the gripping voices of the island’s inhabitants, as well as the period’s officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated Nellie Bly. Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world ever seen, Blackwell’s Island quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, “a lounging, listless madhouse.” Then, it was Blackwell’s, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals. On a two-mile stretch of land in New York’s East River, a 19th-century horror story was unfolding.
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