Nineteenth century American prisons were paradoxical institutions. Porous and impermeable, transparent and opaque, open to public view and occluded from sight; prisons clearly functioned as containers for raw coercion even as they were paraded as paragons of democratic transparency. How did New York State navigate between these countervailing positions and how did officials explicate the difference between them? In this essay I focus on the representation of institutional violence as a problematic of governance, I consider its impact on the development and transformation of public authority and track the role of state actors in navigating the scandals, crises and opportunities it engendered.