house of detention

To the Frenchmen, “accustomed to the fortress-like houses of detention and the old-fashioned walled prisons of France, it was an extraordinary sight.”

According to local lore, passed down by an aging oysterman to the building’s owner, Richie DePierro, it was erected on neighboring Hart Island in the 19th century as a women’s house of detention.

Our Austrian prisons, especially those in which the cell system has not been introduced, are simply houses of detention, not penitentiaries, still less reformatories.

Her new residence was one of the regular couvents de force, or houses of detention, where the most rigorous discipline prevailed, and she was treated "like a State criminal."

I learned, moreover, to know one suffering which is perhaps the sharpest, the most painful that can be experienced in a house of detention apart from laws and liberty.