January 15, 2026
Tag: Thomas Mott Osborne
-
Inside Sing Sing Prison and The Mutual Welfare League
5 Comments
Forty miles north of New York City, “up the Hudson River,” Sing Sing Prison got a new warden in 1915. Thomas Mott Osborne ushered in a wave of penal reform. Out went the lockstep, in came (limited) prisoner self-governance. T. Fred Robbins, a nearby photographer and constable, was allowed to document many of the changes…
Past Article
November 26, 2024 4 Comments
The cadre of characters who entertain us in literature and TV shows as crime detectives is a diverse group, but most of them have one conceptual ancestor – Dick Tracy. Tracy became an American pop-culture icon before it was popular to be one. Here is only a speck of his story. And the Dick Tracy postcards – we have most of them!