State Correctional Institution - Rockview

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The Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Rockview is located off Pennsylvania Route 26 north of State College, at the foot of Mount Nittany in the Nittany Valley. SCI Rockview opened in 1915. It was a branch prison housing lesser security risk prisoners employed in Rockview's extensive farm program outside the gates. It now is a medium-security institution for men. [1]

Many at nearby Penn State like to call this the State Penn, a word play with the synonym penitentiary.

Pennsylvania State Archives

RG-15 Records of the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AGENCY HISTORY

The Department of Justice represents the government in litigation and is responsible for advising all branches of the government on legal matters. The head of the Department and chief law enforcement officer is the Attorney General, whose position has existed since the founding of Pennsylvania in 1681(even being traceable in the pre-Pennsylvania English settlements on the Delaware) and was recognized in the Constitution of 1776. Prior to 1923, the agency was known as the Attorney General's Department. Included in the agency is the Board of Pardons, established in 1874, and the Bureau of Corrections, created in1953 to administer the State correctional institutions which were transferred to it from the Department of Welfare. Originally prisons were under their own individual boards of trustees, but in 1869 they had been loosely grouped under the State Board of Public Charities. In 1923 they had been placed under the newly created Department of Welfare.

Pennsylvania's Prisons. In 1787, well-meaning Quakers formed the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Misery of Public Prisons. They convinced the State to impose solitary confinement on prisoners for both living and working conditions, believing it would facilitate repentance. This became known as "the Pennsylvania System." Laws of 1789 and 1790 made the Walnut Street Jail the incarceration center for state criminals, and solitary cells were added. Western Penitentiary, mandated by the General Assembly in 1818 and opened in 1826, was built entirely of banks of individual cells, so small that the entire building had to be demolished in the 1830s and rebuilt with larger individual cells. The Eastern Penitentiary at Cherry Hill, Philadelphia, was opened in 1829, with a more practical design but still emphasizing solitary cells. Although a statute of 1829 that allowed prisoners to be kept "singly and separately at labor" survived until 1978, the Pennsylvania System had long since disappeared under the discretion of the state's prison administrators.

A new Western Penitentiary was opened, though still incomplete, in 1882, at a location in Pittsburgh on the Ohio River. Known as Riverside, it survives. The earlier Pittsburgh facility was abandoned. The reformatory principle, modeled on New York's Elmira reformatory, was embodied in the design of the Reformatory at Huntingdon, opened as the Eastern Penitentiary in 1889. Theprinciple of a prisoner earning his way to freedom by good behavior was instituted there.

Rockview Prison, in Center County, was built as a new Western Pennsylvania facility, emphasizing a rural site for maximum security. Its first prisoners arrived in 1912. Originally named the New Central Penitentiary at Bellefonte, in the 1920s it was reclassified as medium security operated as a farm prison under the administration of the Western Penitentiary. It is also the facility for imposing the death penalty. The first death by electrocution took place in 1915.

The State Industrial Home for Women at Muncy opened in 1920, intended only for females aged 16 to 30. In 1925 it was authorized to hold women of all ages.

The first Secretary of Welfare, Ellen Potter, led the movement for a new eastern facility to replace Cherry Hill. This was Graterford, in Skippack Township, Montgomery County. Built in part by prison labor, it was opened in 1929, although construction continued for another decade. In 1970, it became the sole facility for southeastern Pennsylvania when the penitentiary at Cherry Hill was closed.

The Farview State Hospital, never a part of the prison system, had been opened for the criminally insane in 1912. Based on recommendations of a special commission in 1931, a decision was made to build a new institution for young male offenders and convert the reformatory at Huntingdon to a prison for defective delinquents. The new site was the Pennsylvania Industrial School at White Hill, in Camp Hill, Cumberland County. It was opened in 1941. By 1945 all youthful offenders had been transferred from Huntingdon to White Hill. Shortly thereafter, White Hill opened forestry camps called Correction Conservation Camps.

Large scale riots at Pittsburgh and Rockview, in the winter of 1953, led to the recommendations of an advisory committee chaired by retired army Major General Jacob L. Devers. This resulted in creation of the Bureau of Corrections within the Department of Justice, on August 31, 1953, and a number of upgrading measures for the system.

The State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Dallas was opened in 1960, and State Regional Correctional .Facilities at Greensburg in 1969 (reclassified as an SCI in 1986) and at Mercerin 1978. In 1987-1988 SCIs were opened in Frackville, Retreat (Luzerne County), Smithfield, and Cresson. An SCI for .adult women was opened for in 1991 at Cambridge Springs, Crawford County. In 1993, SCIs were added at Albion, Coal Township, Greene County, Mahanoy, and Somerset.

Attorney General's Office: Powers and duties of the position descend from English common law and have been held in other states to be American common law. This is important since the office, explicitly named in the Constitution of 1776, was not specified in the Constitutions of 1790 and 1838. An act of 1792 required annual reports from the Attorney General showing the fees he collected for various writs and documents pertaining to his work, and his salary was specified in a statute.

At first the Attorney General's function as Governor's lawyer was greatly emphasized. The officer was appointed for an undefined period by the Governor and was not subjected to legislative approval until the office was specified in the Constitution of 1874. Incoming Governors usually chose their own Attorneys General. Governor McKean appointed his son Joseph and had him emphasize partisan issues including defense against attacks on the Governor's person. Governor Curtin's Attorney General was heavily involved in defending his administration against charges of corrupt war munitions contracts.

Until 1850, the year the office of county district attorney was created, deputies of the Attorney General bore the brunt of indicting criminals at the county level and also instituted some civil proceedings. In 1810, legislation enlarged the Attorney General's duties by ordering him to represent the Commonwealth in civil suits in which it was a party. In 1819, legislation required the Attorney General to remove those of his deputies who had not followed proper legal procedures, and his own power to kill prosecutions by entering nolle prosequi was curtailed. In1820, his office was assigned to represent the State in sheriff's sales of lands that had been improperly conveyed by the pre-revolutionary proprietary government.

In 1850, elected county district attorneys took over much of the work that Attorney General's deputies had performed, and the Constitution of 1874 made these county officers permanent. However, a smaller Attorney General function continued and would ultimately grow anew.

The continued existence of the office was assured by an Act of 1857 which fixed the salary, provided for a small staff, and gave the Attorney General responsibility for collecting debts due the Commonwealth which were uncovered and reported to him by the Auditor General and the State Treasurer. Nevertheless, the office was so small that for many years it was only able to cover a small portion of the internal affairs of state government, by writing opinions, giving informal advice, investigating charges of government fraud, and collecting delinquent revenue. Little civil litigation and almost no criminal prosecution was undertaken.

When F. Carroll Brewster was Attorney General (1869-1873), the Board of Pardons was created on which the Attorney General was a permanent member, and the Attorney General's office showed the first signs of becoming a protector of consumers' interests. Under Henry W. Palmer (1879-1883) and Lewis C. Cassidy (1883-1887), corporate interests were held in check and vigorously pursued for all taxes they owed the state. Antitrust laws litigation would become an important function of the Attorney General's office. Palmer was also responsible for closing down bogus medical schools.

Two Attorneys General in the late nineteenth century were so bold as to refuse to render opinions when asked to do so by the General Assembly. The distinction between formal and informal opinions now became a sore point, one disputed down into recent decades. Informal opinions grew to have the appearance of secret communications hidden from public scrutiny. Another problem that arose from the work load placed on the office was the hiring for fee of private attorneys to handle some of the assignments. The office's involvement in the Capitol Graft Scandal trials and other reform initiatives of the first decade of the twentieth century created an enormous amount of work. Meanwhile, the office had also been acquiring additional specific duties with regard to assisting many government agencies. Therefore, the office had to be given a new life through statutes passed in 1915. It was now truly recognizable as a department. Salaries, deputy attorneys general, and clerical staff were authorized, and the Attorney General was made the exclusive source for legal advice to most of the government's agencies. A government agency now had to ask the office for advice and, once given, the agency had to follow the course the Attorney General advised. Furthermore, under certain circumstances, deputy attorney generals would supersede county district attorneys as prosecutors.

From the 1930s forward, the department would gradually shift to an emphasis on battling organized crime, to a mission to protect consumers and ferret out fraud, and now to an emphasis on Civil Rights. The Department acquired administrative control of the prison system, named the Bureau of Corrections, in 1953 and held it until the creation of a separate Department of Corrections in 1984. The Attorney General was the chairman of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission from its creation in 1967 until 1979. The creation of the Bureau of Consumer Protection in 1966, confirmed a commitment to a policy stressed by many previous Attorneys General.

In 1980, as a result of a constitutional amendment approved in 1978, the Attorney General became a four-year term elective office. Since now both Governor and Attorney General were now responsible to the electorate by separate general election ballots, the Office of General Counsel was created to serve as chief legal adviser to the Governor and to direct the legal activities of the executive branch. The same measure which created the General Counsel, the Commonwealth Attorneys Act, also restated the duties of the Attorney General.