[5] Lynds, believing that chaining prisoners in a dungeon failed to produce "a good state of discipline," resorted exclusively to beatings.

[5] Speaking in 1826 to visiting commissioners, Lynds explained: After making, as I thought, a fair experiment of [the dungeon], and finding it fail me altogether, I began to use the rod ; and when a [prisoner] would laugh at the dungeon, I could make him perfectly obedient with a few stripes of a cowskin [whip], and a promise that he should have as much more as should be requisite.

Henry Hall, in The History of Auburn (1861), described the scene: As he passed through the prison gate, he was seized by a furious crowd of laborers, tarred from head to foot, and borne through the streets astride a rail.

The ring-leader of the mob, with a hen under his arm, walked by the side of the unfortunate Thompson, and plucking handfuls of feathers from the screaming fowl, stuck them to the blacksmith's tarry coat.

On the other hand, the convicts, stimulated by this outside sympathy, learned to be rebellious, transgressed the rules of the shops at every opportunity, and set fire to the buildings, and destroyed their work, whenever they dared.