Harris, Mary Belle (1874–1957)

Beginnings: Education and Teaching in the Classics

Mary Belle Harris, born August 19, 1874, was the oldest child of three, and the only daughter, of John Howard and Mary Elizabeth (Mace) Harris. Her mother died in 1880, and her father married Lucy Bailey, a cousin of Mary Mace, who became her beloved stepmother. John Howard Harris was a Baptist minister and president of Bucknell University (1889–1919), where Mary Belle Harris earned a music degree (1893), an A.B. (1894), and an M.A. in Latin and classics (1896). Thereafter, she went to the University of Chicago, receiving a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European philology (1900). It was at Chicago that she became friends with Katharine Bement Davis, a woman who was to have a pivotal role in Harris's later career in corrections.

Between 1900 and 1914, Harris taught Latin (one appointment was at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, Maryland, led by Edith Hamilton), studied numismatics at Johns Hopkins University, and traveled to Europe as a teacher-chaperone, working at the American Classical School in Rome. During this time, she also studied numismatics at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. She returned to the United States in 1914.

Prison Reform and Administration

Harris arrived in New York City when Katharine Bement Davis was commissioner of corrections. Davis offered Harris the newly created position of superintendent of women and deputy warden of the Workhouse at Blackwell Island, which she accepted. Thus, on July 1, 1914, at age 40, Mary Belle Harris began the work for which she had not trained, yet would bring her national renown.

In 1914, the workhouse held around 700 women convicted of prostitution, alcoholism, and drugs, who were serving sentences from three days to six months. Harris instituted changes that enabled the women to leave their cells, get some exercise, and do activities that relieved the boredom and petty infractions. Harris opened a library and allowed women to play cards and knit. She fenced off part of the yard so they could exercise. She also renovated the dining room and opened a lounge for staff. Harris's approach at Blackwell Island was to be her trademark: common sense changes that fit women's needs, even when it meant altering the accepted ways or challenging the bureaucracy.

After leaving the workhouse in 1917, Harris became superintendent at the State Reformatory for Women in Clinton, New Jersey, for two years. Over the same period, while on leave from Clinton, she was assistant director of the Section on Reformatories and Detention Houses for the (U.S.) War Department's Commission on Training Camp Activities under Martha P. Falconer. From 1919 to 1924, she was the superintendent of the State Home for Girls (juveniles) in Trenton, New Jersey, In March 1925, Mary Belle Harris embarked on her final and most public leadership role in women's corrections: heading the new federal prison for women in Alderson, West Virginia.

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