Rafter, Nicole Hahn (1939–)

Biographical Details

Rafter did her undergraduate work at Oberlin College and at Swarthmore College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1962; a year later, she obtained a master's degree in teaching at Harvard University. In the mid-1970s, she enrolled in the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York, Albany, where, in 1978, she received her doctorate. Her dissertation on the defective delinquency movement in New York State (Rafter, 1978) [Page 816]marked her entry into two general areas of research—women's prisons and eugenics—that would dominate her professional research and public service contributions throughout her career.

Partial Justice

Rafter's research on women's imprisonment documents the pre-reformatory developments of the early 1800s and extends through the 1980s. Rafter's major study, Partial Justice, published in 1985, chronicles the historical development of prisons for women in three states—New York, Ohio, and Tennessee—until 1935. In this book Rafter analyzes the role of gender and ethnicity in shaping women's treatment, neither of which had been addressed in prior studies of the history of prisons. In an appendix, she describes the expansion of women's prisons in all regions of the country between 1935 and 1980, while in a second edition of the book, published in 1990, she enlarges her coverage to include developments in the use of women's prisons through the 1980s.

According to Rafter, when separate women's prisons were originally built, they were meant to serve as alternative institutions. Over the years, however, they have come to represent a failure to find adequate alternatives to institutionalization.

Rafter described three stages of women's prison development. In the first stage, from 1790 to 1870, women were often incarcerated under conditions that resembled those of male prisoners. In the second period, between 1870 and 1935, women reformers developed new models of reformatory care for female offenders. As a result, institutions designed specially for women were built in Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York in the late 1800s. Between 1870 and 1935, 20 new women's reformatories were built in 18 states: In the Northeast, reformatories were built in Massachusetts (1877), New York (1887, 1893, 1901), New Jersey (1913), Maine (1916), Connecticut (1918), and Pennsylvania (1920). In the North Central region, reformatories started in Indiana (1873), Ohio (1916), Iowa (1918), Kansas (1918), Minnesota (1920), Nebraska (1920), Wisconsin (1921), and Illinois (1930). In the South, reformatories opened in Arkansas (1920), North Carolina (1929), and Virginia (1932), and in the West in California (1933). While these prisons seemed to focus on the women in custody, patterns of unequal and inferior treatment arose. This period also marked the end of the reformatory movement.

In the third stage, from 1935 to 1980, women's prisons were formally integrated into the larger systems of prisons across the country. New prison buildings for women were constructed in 20 states throughout the Midwest (Missouri and Michigan), the South (Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia), and the West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming).

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