Prisons for Women, 1790-1980

Until recently, women's institutions and their inmates have received little attention in the literature on prisons. This neglect in part stems from the fact that over time women have comprised but a small fraction of the total prisoner population. Yet it is also the product of two common assumptions: that the development of the women's prison system and experiences of its inmates closely resemble those of men; or that, if different, the evolution of the women's prison system and female experience of incarceration are irrelevant to mainstream penology just because they can shed little light on the nature of the prison system as a whole. Neither assumption is correct. During the first stage in the development of the women's prison system (1790-1870), female penal units outwardly resembled male penitentiaries, but in some respects their inmates received inferior care. During the second stage (1870-1935), strenuous and often successful efforts were made to establish an entirely new type of prison, the women's reformatory, in which women would receive care more appropriate to their "feminine" nature. Yet by institutionalizing differential treatment, the reformatories legitimated a tradition of providing care that, from our current perspective, was inherently unequal. In the third stage (1935 to the present), the women's prison system continued to evolve in ways which perpetuated the older traditions of differential treatment. The women's prison system is not, then, merely a miniature version of that for men. Nor is the history of the incarceration of women irrelevant to understanding of the prison system as a whole. The older, questionable generalizations, however, may be safely replaced with another: despite variations in its causes and character, the fact of differential care of female prisoners has remained a constant across time in this country.