“Consider the plight of the incarcerated historian,” Michelle Daniel Jones writes at the start of Who Would Believe a Prisoner?, a remarkable collaborative history of the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis: no Internet access, a tiny library consisting mostly of romance novels, no ability to travel to view archival material, captors legally authorized to censor your writing and foreclose your education. For more than twenty years, Jones—a highly regarded scholar and artist who has been profiled in The New York Times and recently completed a doctorate in American studies at New York University—was confined in the Indiana Women’s Prison as prisoner no. 970554. During that time she began working in the law library, became a paralegal, earned a bachelor’s degree, audited graduate courses, and ultimately embarked on her own historical research.
In the summer of 2013 Kelsey Kauffman—a sociologist teaching in the prison’s underfunded college program—gathered seventeen incarcerated people to write the institution’s history. This was no small task: the Indiana Women’s Prison was the first public prison for women in the United States, and it is the oldest continuously operating one. Impediments immediately arose. Leslie Hauk, one of the group’s strongest writers, was sent to solitary confinement and banned from educational programs for eighteen months after writing “I ♥ Jenny” on a wall inside the chapel’s bell tower. Lisa Hochstetler was forbidden from participating for two years after being accused of kissing her friend on the cheek—a charge that video evidence disproved. Kim Baldwin was transferred to another facility for, according to Kauffman, attempting to expose the prison’s culpability in the death of an inmate. Those who remained on the project had to share five old laptops and often spent many weeks or months waiting to receive copies of archival documents from the outside.
Kauffman had initially hoped that the women might publish a pamphlet, but the undertaking soon grew far beyond her original vision. Eventually it acquired a formal title: the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project. Within a year its participants were presenting at a scholarly conference and publishing in academic journals. A 2015 article in Slate noted that the incarcerated scholars hoped to assemble a book; eight years later New Press published it. Of its ten named authors, five, including Jones, were free by the time of publication. Dozens of others who worked on the project, Kauffman notes in her preface, “remain caged.”
Who Would Believe a Prisoner? belongs to a rich tradition of American prison writing. In 1974 the poet and professor Celes Tisdale edited a volume of poetry by inmates at Attica, memorializing their famous 1971 uprising.1 Attica inmates also produced the first essays in what would ultimately become the American Prison Writing Archive, an extraordinary collection of over 3,300 first-person accounts and poems.2 More than seven hundred prison newspapers have circulated in the United States since 1800, many of which are now collected in the American Prison Newspapers archive.3
What sets Who Would Believe a Prisoner? apart from these other works is that it contains not creative or journalistic writing but scholarship.4 It is a sober monograph, concluding with nearly fifty pages of endnotes. The subjects of the book’s fourteen short chapters range from the prison’s prehistory and early years to its leaders’ enthusiastic embrace of eugenics and their violent suppression of queer sexuality. Nearly all of the chapters are organized around particular inmates (“Sallie and Eva,” “Hazel,” “Billy”), drawing on an impressive range of published and unpublished sources.
No doubt some readers will be more interested in the conditions under which the book was produced than in the arguments it makes. But to focus on the lives of the authors would be to underrate the rigor of their scholarship. The members of the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project demolish many of the myths surrounding the institution, proving that its founders and administrators were far more abusive than conventional accounts suggest. More broadly, they challenge other historians who study the incarceration of women to expand their understanding of what constitutes a “women’s prison” in the first place.
From their earliest days, US states locked away not only men but also small numbers of women, who endured systematic sexual violence from guards and male inmates, with whom they sometimes shared cells. One woman incarcerated in Indiana in the 1860s, and serially raped by the deputy warden (among other prison officials), told a journalist, “Oh, if I were out of here, I would kill him if he touched me; here, he will kill me if I oppose him; he told me so.” Even as nineteenth-century reformers strove to improve prisons for men—advocating for rehabilitative measures, experimenting with uniforms and separate cells, phasing out some of the cruelest forms of deprivation and abuse—conditions for incarcerated women remained dire.
In the last third of the nineteenth century, appalled by these conditions, elite white women, many of them Quakers, began to lobby municipal and state officials across the country to let them open and oversee separate penal institutions for women. Such facilities, they claimed, would be more effective and humane: in an 1885 speech quoted in Who Would Believe a Prisoner?, the Indiana prison reform advocate Rhoda Coffin claimed that “men cannot reform debased women.” They sought to locate many of these new institutions out in the country, far from the supposedly corrupting influences of the inmates’ former associates and well situated for the women to learn domestic and agricultural skills.
Indiana’s leading prison reformers, writes Kim Baldwin in Who Would Believe a Prisoner?, included a “who’s who of wealthy and politically connected men” and their “socialite wives.” The wife of a prominent banker, Coffin was a speaker and lecturer with a leading role in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Women’s Crusade. Sarah J. Smith, another of Indiana’s prison reformers, was an English-born Quaker activist who achieved renown preaching across the US. Starting in the 1860s Coffin and Smith campaigned for a public “reformatory” in which they might incarcerate their “fallen” sisters. In 1873 they finally got their wish, and the Indiana Reformatory Institution for Women and Girls opened its doors.
Because of its distinction as the country’s first public prison for women, this institution has long received a disproportionate amount of attention from historians. For many years they portrayed the reformatory—it was renamed a “prison” a quarter-century after its founding, in keeping with trends in terminology—as a gentler, female-run alternative to the old lockups, and its founders as altruistic administrators who had rescued women from the clutches of male guards. As late as 2000 the historian Margaret Hope Bacon wrote:
Sarah Smith and her assistants worked to create a homelike atmosphere, with linen and china on the tables and individual rooms for the inmates. The girls were offered reading and writing and the women, instruction in laundering, sewing, and knitting. Care was taken in placing inmates after parole.
Under the influence of second-wave feminism, several young scholars began to challenge such assumptions in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably Estelle B. Freedman, Nicole Hahn Rafter, and Mary E. Odem.5 Drawing on archival discoveries and new readings of old sources, they revealed that the early women’s prisons had often fallen far short of their founding ideals. Most significantly, these scholars showed that the creation of sex-segregated facilities enabled a major expansion of the population of incarcerated women, both because there was now more institutional capacity for detaining them and because, by claiming to provide moral uplift, the institutions’ administrators could justify arresting more women for vague crimes like “incorrigibility” or “waywardness,” which in practice included swearing, having premarital sex, and dating without parental permission.
To the authors of Who Would Believe a Prisoner? this second-wave historical work was vital but still did not sufficiently emphasize the remarkable violence with which Coffin and Smith carried out their vision of female reformation. Coffin, as president of the prison’s board, and Smith, as the superintendent, claimed to be “caring for, elevating and reforming [their] own sex,” relying on “the power of the gospel” rather than draconian punishment. Jones offers evidence sharply to the contrary. Contemporary newspaper reports, she shows, revealed that Smith beat women and girls, sometimes slamming their heads into walls or forcing other inmates to hold her victims down; “ducked” inmates’ heads in cold water, “a nineteenth-century version of waterboarding”; denied them access to bathrooms; stripped them naked as punishment; confined one inmate in a “dark cell in manacles”; and “targeted” a Black inmate for singular mistreatment, tying her down and beating her on the head with a broom handle.
Allegations of abuse grew so dire that in 1881 the state legislature was forced to investigate the prison’s conditions. Smith testified at length, admitting that she beat the inmates “severely,” but only with “slippers.” Though the legislature ultimately cleared her of any wrongdoing, she resigned two years later, warning her successors against the false accusations of ungrateful inmates. A year after Smith’s resignation, the prison adopted a new policy regulating—but not abolishing—corporal punishment. Coffin, meanwhile, left the prison in disgrace following the investigation of the prison as well as the revelation that her husband, the bank president, had embezzled thousands of dollars from his customers. Still, she remains “celebrated to this day as one of Indiana’s greatest women,” Kim Baldwin, Molly Whitted, and Michelle Williams write in one chapter.
Another gulf between myth and reality is exposed in a chapter by Anastazia Schmid on Theophilus Parvin, the founder of the American Gynecological Society and later president of the American Medical Association, who served as the prison’s doctor from 1873 to 1883. Parvin “remains a prominent and lauded figure for his work in the then-budding fields of gynecology and obstetrics,” Schmid writes. But his “published articles,” she argues, “make clear that he considered the people incarcerated at the reformatory fair game for experimentation,” including to test treatments for typhoid fever. They also, she shows, suggest a strong “desire to control female sexuality”: in an article published several years after Parvin left the prison, he described studying a widowed patient’s supposed nymphomania by digitally penetrating her to induce orgasm, without any indication of her consent. Eventually, as rumors of pervasive prisoner abuse led authorities to threaten and ultimately undertake their 1881 investigation of the prison, Parvin resigned and left the state, taking a position as chair of obstetrics at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia and continuing what would be an illustrious career.
Schmid’s chapter draws heavily on Parvin’s own writings, which have long been publicly available but have received little scrutiny, even as scholars like G.J. Barker-Benfield and Harriet A. Washington have exposed the misdeeds of other pioneers of gynecology, such as J. Marion Sims, now well known for experimenting on enslaved women.6 Kauffman recalls in her preface that Schmid, tasked with researching the health of historical inmates, “took an instant dislike” to Parvin, wondering why “such a high-caliber doctor [would] be working at a women’s prison in what was considered a backwater state.” Kauffman apparently “chided” Schmid for this seemingly groundless suspicion—until she looked up Parvin’s scholarly publications and discovered “deeply misogynistic and racist” language, along with “gleeful descriptions” of abuse. “Incarcerated scholars intimately understand and experience marginalization, secrecy, and subjection,” Jones writes, which gives them particular insight into “the systematic subjugation of others.” Elsewhere she puts it more directly: “We know which questions to ask.”
The boldest argument in Who Would Believe a Prisoner? also arose from an incarcerated woman’s skepticism. Three weeks into the group’s research, Kauffman remembers, Jones asked a blunt question: “Where were the hos?” The incarcerated scholars were confounded that the prison’s nineteenth-century registries contained no women convicted of prostitution and just one woman convicted of any sex crime.
The answer they propose is that another penal institution for women was in fact already operating by the time the Indiana Women’s Prison—despite its renown as the first separate women’s prison in the US—was founded. It was this institution, the Indianapolis House of the Good Shepherd, to which women and girls convicted or merely accused of sex crimes were consigned. Chapters by Christina Kovats, Natalie Medley, Rheann Kelly, and Lara Campbell ably explore the history of the House, another institution long depicted by credulous chroniclers (including reporters for the Indianapolis News) as a benevolent facility devoted to “helping” women. More daringly, they argue that the House itself should be considered a women’s prison. Implicit in this argument is the demand that the term “prison” be expanded to encompass the varied settings in which women have been caged.
The House of the Good Shepherd opened five months before the Indiana Women’s Prison. It was overseen by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic order that ran a chain of dozens of homes for “fallen” women in several countries—the Indianapolis House was just one of many in the US—with the goal of indoctrinating its inmates with a particularly rigid form of Christian ethics. In Indianapolis, relatives and state officials alike brought women and girls to the House for a wide range of offenses, from petty crime and general “immoral behavior” to gender nonconformity and prostitution. They were given new names (“Billy” became “Mary Angela,” for instance), locked in cells (some of them “small and barred,” reportedly freezing in the winter), tasked with hazardous laundry labor (work was meted out according to “perceived degree of sinfulness,” in Kelly’s words), and subjected to compulsory evangelizing and corporal punishment. In 1873 one inmate complained to the mayor of Indianapolis that she had seen another inmate “confined in a solitary room” with “her hands tied behind her…where food was thrown in like it would be to a hog.”
Several carceral historians have examined the Houses of the Good Shepherd, and journalists have uncovered shocking abuses that occurred within them. Similar revelations have come to light about institutions like the Magdalene Laundries—predominantly Catholic institutions that originated in England and Ireland in the eighteenth century and spread quickly throughout the nineteenth-century United States—and the evangelical Crittenton Homes, administered by the National Florence Crittenton Mission, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Both the Crittenton Homes and the Magdalene Laundries housed sex workers, unwed mothers, and other so-called fallen women (some there voluntarily, many coerced or compelled to be there by families or authorities) in exchange for labor, religious indoctrination, and, frequently, being forced to put their infant children up for adoption.
Yet despite such discoveries, historians have tended not to call these institutions prisons, a decision that the authors of Who Would Believe a Prisoner? insist carries more than a semantic significance. Viewing these religious institutions as prisons, they argue, allows us to better understand how Christian proselytization fueled the rise of incarceration. It calls attention to the fact that the professional advancement of certain prominent women—the wardens, the guards, the probation officers, even the social workers—depended on the subjugation of their working-class sisters. It challenges the supposition that the state enjoyed a monopoly on legalized violence: in fact the government outsourced control over the poor and unruly to religious orders and the burgeoning professional class. Above all it matters for the simple reason that these institutions imprisoned a great many women. In 1900, Kovats notes, there were “only three state prisons for women” in the United States, but thirty-nine Houses of the Good Shepherd.
Elsewhere the contributors take up still other institutions that caged women yet are not widely considered prisons. Nicole Hayes explores the cycles of stigma and poverty that forced many sex workers to return repeatedly to the Indiana Industrial School for Girls. Kim Baldwin argues that the Indianapolis Home for Friendless Women helped criminalize poverty by providing a place of incarceration for women charged not just with prostitution but with a wide range of offenses (drunkenness, idleness, stubbornness, etc.) that authorities associated with the poor.
In an inspired chapter, Molly Whitted describes the eugenicist logic that governed the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth, which in 1901 began to incarcerate women deemed “sexually immoral” and thus liable to pass along genes that reformers wished to weed out of the human race. Nearly all the women incarcerated at the school between 1901 and 1930 were young and unmarried. As generations of scholars have noted, tens of thousands of women in the twentieth-century US were sterilized against their wishes on eugenicist grounds. Whitted adds significantly to this research by arguing that the incarceration of women “for the whole of their childbearing years” was another strategy—indeed the “predominant” strategy—used by state officials to prevent certain women from having children.
Of all the women incarcerated worldwide, one in four is imprisoned in the United States. Over the past four decades, the number of women in state prisons has grown by almost 600 percent, double the pace of the male population. In 1978 just 121 women were caged in Indiana; in 2015 that number was 2,540. The causes of this rapid growth are varied and understudied, but the spike in arrests and prosecutions during the “war on drugs” was a significant factor, as was the decimation of the US welfare state, which disproportionately drove women into poverty.
Given this recent explosion, it is lamentable that the timeline of Who Would Believe a Prisoner? ends in 1920. The book’s authors agree, and they are frank about why: the Indiana Department of Correction, Jones writes, “would have shut us down if we had set out to expose abuse perpetrated by currently employed prison officials.” The writers do, however, draw sly connections between the histories they narrate and modern conditions. Schmid links Parvin’s transgressions to the recent revelation that, between 1978 and 2013, California authorities subjected hundreds, perhaps thousands, of incarcerated women to tubal ligations and hysterectomies. Hayes connects the criminalization of sex workers in the 1910s in the name of preventing human trafficking to similar legal efforts underway today. (I’ve written on how laws such as the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act were ostensibly enacted to protect trafficking victims but ended up rendering them even more vulnerable to abuse.)7 Jones is most explicit about the continued relevance of their research: “The presence of linen tablecloths and vases with flowers didn’t create a safer or more humane prison for women and girls…. These spaces proliferate with gendered and sexual violence.”
Ultimately, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? is a study of the profound limitations of reform. The founders of the Indiana Women’s Prison sought to free female prisoners from abuse, to create an environment in which “fallen” women could be uplifted, to give them education and compassion and adequate health care. As this book documents in damning detail, the prison’s administrators failed dismally at all those goals. Worse, their efforts initiated a dramatic expansion of the female prison population. Not only did they provide more cells for the state to fill; they made incarceration seem, to many in power, intuitive—even humane.
English (US) · 