Cottage System

History

Cottages represented a radical departure from traditional prison design. During most of the 19th century, women were incarcerated alongside men in separate annexes, wings, or units either within or attached to their state's male penitentiaries. After the Civil War, women activists began to campaign for entirely separate women's prisons. These reformers were convinced that female offenders would be reformed only within a more domestic and homelike setting.

In 1873, Indiana established the nation's first completely independent, all female-staffed, women's prison. However, it followed a traditional cellblock design. New York's House of Refuge at Hudson (1887) and Western House of Refuge at Albion (1893) were the first women's institutions (albeit, for younger women) to incorporate cottage units alongside a typical “custodial” prison building.

Between 1900 and 1935, this new type of women's prison, officially labeled reformatories, was established in 17 states. The New Jersey State Reformatory for Women at Clinton, opened in 1913, was the first to rely exclusively on cottage housing. Subsequently, eight states mandated that their women's reformatories be built according to a cottage plan: Minnesota (1916), Ohio (1916), Connecticut (1917), Kansas (1917), Maine (1917), Arkansas (1920), Pennsylvania (1920), and North Carolina (1929).

During these early decades, African American women remained relegated to the more traditional women's prisons. In 1923, African American women represented two-thirds (65%) of female prisoners incarcerated in state penitentiaries, whereas they were only 12% of those sentenced to the new reformatories. Reformatory advocates fully subscribed to the dominant racist ideology that portrayed African American women as more “masculine,” violent, aggressive, hardened, promiscuous, and immoral than white women. Consequently, African American women were regarded as unsuitable subjects for the reformatory's goal of transforming female offenders into proper ladies.

In addition to their cottage style architecture, women's reformatory prisons broke radically with traditional male prisons in their commitment policies, incarcerating both felons and misdemeanants. Unlike men, women could be sentenced to a reformatory for such misdemeanor offenses as disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, vagrancy, adultery, fornication, and petit larceny. In Illinois, for example, misdemeanor commitments represented 73% of all reformatory commitments in the 1930s, 38% in the 1950s, and 12% in the 1970s.

Discipline and Daily Life

To outside observers, the cottage style women's reformatory appeared far more benign than men's prisons: quaint cottages scattered across a campus style setting. However, the conditions of women's incarceration could be even more restrictive. Surveillance within the small cottages was often more intense and invasive than that experienced by men housed in far larger, more anonymous, cell-block units. Because women's reformatories initially lacked fences, walls, and guard towers, prisoners had to be strictly supervised. Ironically, they often enjoyed little freedom of movement across their bucolic campus settings.

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