by Thera Webb
The Digital Prison Archive is an outreach project for the Prison Public Memory Project, an organization that currently focuses on collecting and archiving stories and experiences from people connected to the three prisons in Hudson New York – the House of Refuge for Women (1887-1904), the NY State Training School for Girls (1904-1975), and the Hudson Correctional Facility (1976-present). As stated on their website the “Project works with individuals and organizations in communities with prisons across the United States to recover, preserve, interpret, present, and honor the memories of what took place in those institutions,” and in doing so they engage with people who were incarcerated and people who worked at the prisons, as well as community members.
The Prison Public Memory Project has a number of outreach projects – including very active Facebook and Instagram pages. You can listen to oral histories of prison employees and people who were incarcerated at the prisons, on their SoundCloud or on their website. They occasionally hold pop-up museums at community events, as well as hosting speakers, all of which can been seen on their YouTube channel as well as their website.
The Digital Prison Archive is currently housed on Flickr, which makes the content searchable and easily available to the average researcher or user. This means that, while the Prison Public Memory Project is in the process of moving into their renovated physical space – which they acquired in 2015 – some of their files are fully accessible to the public.
Rather than hosting the entire collection of records online, the Digital Prison Archive has digitized one box, as sort of a taster for the collection. Since the archive is not affiliated with any institutions or libraries, this is a good way to introduce the public to what their records hold. The digitized records are all related to the NY State Training School for Girls and were created in the 1920s. These records range from photographs and letters, to the intake histories of young women who were incarcerated there.
Having these stories online both and supplemented with scans of primary sources that you can zoom in on and read, adds an extra dimension to the experiences of these women. Not only can you read about their experiences being incarcerated, and listen to oral histories from some of the women, but you can also delve into their experiences exactly as written when they were in the State Training School for Girls.
Being able to access images of the original documents involves readers on a deeper level, as well as drawing more attention to the main page of the Prison Public Memory Project by directing viewers who would like to learn more to browse the site.