介绍：New York state opened its first minimum-security facility in 1956. Located in the town of Pharsalia in Chenango County, it was called a “camp” and was intended for younger inmates who would be employed at preserving and improving state forest lands. Camp Pharsalia proved to be everything hoped for by Corrections and Conservation officials. Three more correctional conservation youth camps opened in the next four years, all based on the Pharsalia model.

The DOCS camp program is still strong today, with surprisingly few modifications made over its 44-year career. The original age restrictions (“campmen” could be no more than 21) were extended, to 25, to 35, and then finally removed altogether. The camps are larger today. Pharsalia now houses 258 men, more than five times the original population. Though the growth was driven by the system-wide need for additional prison beds, it also presented the opportunity to enlarge the camp mission. Service to neighboring communities now supplements the traditional forestry work.

Camp Pharsalia is situated 50 miles north of the city of Binghamton in Broome County, about midway between the cities of Albany and Rochester. As far as the eye can see in every direction, the view is of roller coaster hills coated with dense evergreens.

This is Leatherstocking Country, so called after the popular James Fenimore Cooper adventure novels of trail blazing pioneers skirmishing with Indians in the vicinity of Cooperstown. In real life, the region was settled by Dutch and German immigrants with high hopes for farming. The land proved unproductive, though. It was too high, too rocky, too wet. Thousands of acres, cleared in vain of pines and boulders, were abandoned over the years.

The land eventually was acquired by the state and later reforested by the “Soil Soldiers” of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). A generation later, the abandoned CCC camp in Pharsalia would be put to use by New York state as a correctional camp in the service of the war on juvenile delinquency.