Lincoln Correctional Facility

The Lincoln Correctional Facility is a minimum security prison for men. It has a 408-person capacity, but today its average population runs closer to 275. Like the rest of the prison system in the state of New York,  the majority of men have been convicted for drug offenses.

Listen to Eddie Rosario talk about his time at the facility in the 1990s and his analysis of the Prison Industrial Complex. Eddie Rosario now works for the Prison Visiting Project at the Correctional Association of New York.

The building it occupies was originally intended to be anything but a prison—founded in 1914 as a branch of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA), the facility housed newly immigrated Jewish women, usually poor, without families, and in dire need of job and language skills. At the time, Harlem was home to some 175,000 Jews—and was, according to the New York Times, ‘the third largest Jewish settlement in the world, after the Lower East Side and Warsaw.’

[slickr-flickr set=”Lincoln” type=”gallery”]

[slickr-flickr tag=”Lincoln” type=”gallery”]