Webs of Cruelty: Network Analysis of Carceral Institutions for Girls and Women in 19th Century Indiana

From a distance, maternity homes in 19th Century Indiana housed “fallen” girls and women under the care of matrons until they were well enough to return to society. By combining the cult of domesticity with moral reform, Indiana’s streets were cleansed of problem girls and women. The truth, however, is far more sinister. Maternity homes in 19th Century Indiana originally existed as an alternative to prison for girls and women, and in practice were not that different. Quaker prison reformers Rhoda Coffin and Sarah J. Smith pioneered separate, publicly funded female reformatories in the United States. The most well-known institution they opened is the Indiana Reformatory Institution for Women and Girls, which was the first public prison for women in the United States. The institution is, in part, still open today as the Indiana Women’s Prison. While the reformatory had two wings, a prison for women and reformatory for girls, the lines between each wing were blurred from the start. Like Catholic Magdalene laundries across the United States in the 19th century, reformatories for girls and women were prisons in disguise. As I researched 19th Century reformatories and women’s prisons across Indiana, I could not help but notice parallels. Names started repeating and funding overlapped. Matrons and superintendents employed the same uniquely inhumane forms of punishment. Everything came back to Sarah J. Smith and Rhoda Coffin. I have collected maternity home records, newspaper articles, lawsuit records, and a myriad of primary sources to track the movement and influence of those controlling these institutions as well as the incarcerated. The Indiana Women’s Prison History Project’s 2023 book Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 sets the stage for many of the stories I am sharing and/or developing. By tracing nodes for names, locations, cash-flow, and relationships I can demonstrate the volatile interconnectedness of eight institutions across approximately 50 years in an interactive network. Doing so will support my hypothesis that there was an intricately weaved web of custodial cruelty among "fallen" girls and women in 19th Century Indiana. A wealth of stories can be told depending on the nodes targeted in the network I have created. Location nodes reveal much about the incarcerated. Origin location nodes typically indicate where an inmate was arrested or taken without consent. When put onto a map, origin locations overlapped with poor neighborhoods and red-light districts. I have also tracked where inmates fled to upon escape or release. For example, one trend that I noticed is that many girls and women fled to local brothels time and time again, creating a cyclical network. Another important node type relates to cash flow. Tracking maternity home funding from state government and the upper class supports the hypothesis that female reformers in Indiana sought to maintain class divisions rather than the good nature caretaking that they claimed. Tracking cashflow for most maternity homes in Indiana exposes power whether it is the politician in the matron’s pocket or forced inmate labor. Identifying sources of income and profit contributes to revealing how a prison by any other name could not only exist, but multiply across Indiana. Digital Humanities methods such as network analysis are imperative to understanding stories that occurred between the lines. While there is a relative wealth of primary sources written by the matrons or superintendents of these reformatories, stories from the perspective of the incarcerated are missing or incomplete. Sarah J. Smith, Rhoda Coffin, and other pioneer reformers from Indiana have received their fair share of accolades. One cannot ignore the fruits of their influence in 19th Century Indiana. However, I created this network to tell the stories about and on behalf of incarcerated women under their control. Not only can my network help me articulate how they were treated while incarcerated, but I can learn about who they were outside of the prisons’ walls.