Women's Prisons

Evolution of the Contemporary Women's Prison

In the first American prisons, women were housed in sections of men's prisons, where they suffered [Page 1051]from neglect and abuse. Left alone for long periods of time, denied regular exercise, education, work assignments, or religious instruction, women inmates were also particularly vulnerable to sexual assault by male officers and inmates. Much like today, most of the early women prisoners were incarcerated for crimes related to their gender and the struggles in their lives—drunkenness, petty theft, and prostitution.

The first prison for women in the United States was approved by the Indiana legislature in 1869 and opened in 1873. The Indiana Reformatory Institution for women and girls ushered in a new era of punishment. By 1917, 14 states had established similar penal institutions for women. Although the conditions in the reformatories were somewhat better than those in earlier facilities, these institutions often confined women in another way, by reinforcing traditional feminine and domestic images. Usually built in the “cottage style,” reformatories housed women in relatively small buildings that were designed to replicate the ideal middle-class home. Instead of male prison guards, prison matrons supervised the inmates; the matrons were meant to serve as models of respectability, domesticity, and femininity. These reformatories sought to rehabilitate their residents through training and education in cooking, cleaning, sewing, and other conventional domestic activities.

Women sent to the reformatories were usually those who had been convicted of moral or sexual crimes that transgressed the strict standards of middle-class sexual behavior and gender role expectations. They also tended to be white. Women of color continued to be sent to the more traditional custodial prisons, which lacked any programs or separate housing for them. Their different treatment was often justified by racist beliefs that they were morally inferior and would be immune to the treatment offered in the reformatories.

After the 1930s, the establishment of separate prisons for women became the norm. Some of these prisons were built specifically for women, whereas others were originally built as male or juvenile facilities. Several decades after the first reformatories, the cottage style gave way to “campus style,” which continued the use of small housing units and open green spaces. Also in this period, some jurisdictions experimented with “co-correctional” facilities. Co-correctional prisons confined women and men in the same institution and provided shared programming in education and job opportunities. Living quarters were separate, and interactions between female and male prisoners were formally controlled. This method sought to resolve some of the earlier problems faced by women in prisons by increasing their access to programs and services and promoting a more normal social environment. Critics of co-correctional facilities, however, asserted that women overall were disadvantaged by the presence of male inmates due to the increased surveillance required to control sexual activity, the tendency of male inmates to dominate desirable jobs and the informal social world of the inmates, and continued pressure for sexual arrangements. As a result, few systems today continue to use the co-correctional model.

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