Food for Thought

[L Verge]

Thought I would check out the Albany Penitentiary history mentioned above before I resume reading Lincoln's Spies, I learned something new about why the first choice for the conspirators was a trip to the northern prison. It had opened in the 1840s and was a new experiment in criminal punishment. However, it was also the prison that received all criminals from Washington, D.C. who were sentenced to prison from 1862 on. That was the year that the D.C. penitentiary was taken over by the U.S. Arsenal and did not house prisoners again until the conspirators and trial were there in 1865.

http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2010/11...nitentiary