Bedford Hills Correctional Facility

History

In New York's earliest correctional history, women were housed at men's prisons or in local jails. Between 1838 and 1877, a building at Sing Sing Prison served as the state's women's facility. When overcrowding became an issue in the men's section of Sing Sing, women were moved to county jails in Brooklyn, Buffalo, and Rochester. The condition of women inmates did not improve in these places as local jails were hardly a suitable place for state-sentenced inmates facing years of confinement.

As reformatories were being established with the promise to salvage young men's lives through education and parole, legislators were pressed to give women the same consideration. Eleven years after the world-renowned Elmira Reformatory opened, the Hudson House of Refuge for Women opened in 1887. With the success of the Hudson House, in 1892, the New York State Legislature passed a bill authorizing a woman's reformatory in Westchester County, to be built at Bedford Station on the Harlem Railroad line.

Seven years later, the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford opened, with the first inmates arriving on May 11, 1901. The reformatory was to house women, aged 16 to 30, who had been convicted of minor offenses. Bedford was controlled by a Board of Managers, appointed by the governor. Dr. Katharine Bement Davis was named Bedford's first superintendent. Davis's innovations at Bedford won her national and international acclaim as a champion of women's suffrage.

The first inmates at Bedford Hills worked half a day cooking; making clothing, baskets, and hats; and working in the laundry building. The women milked cows, raised chickens and pigs, farmed in vegetables, planted trees, shoveled coal, painted cottages, and put up fences. They built an artificial pond and harvested the ice during winter. They also learned to make concrete, building thousands of square feet of walkways, stairways, and floors.

The other half of the day was spent in traditional education classes, as well as courses in carpentry, stenography, typing, chair caning, painting, mechanical drawing, cobbling, and bookbinding. Gymnastics classes, inmate productions of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, and summer recreation were also a part of Davis's fresh-air treatment of the inmates.

In 1927, Bedford, as part of a reorganization of New York's state government, was placed under the newly created Department of Correction. In 1933, women from the state prison in Auburn were moved to a group of buildings adjacent to the reformatory. The entire complex was renamed the Westfield State Farm. Although the reformatory and prison were within one-quarter mile of each other, they operated as two distinct institutions separated by a road and fence.

In 1970, Westfield State Farm was reorganized as women were removed from the prison section and replaced with male inmates. The reformatory became a general confinement facility for women. This new complex constituted a single institution called the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The men and women inmates were separated with the exception of coed activities such as creative writing classes and dances.

...