A History of Incarceration by Women Who Have Lived Through It

The New Yorker, May 22, 2023: A History of Incarceration by Women Who Have Lived Through It

“…The oldest women-only, state-run prison in the U.S., the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls, opened in 1873. Its primary founders, Sarah Smith and Rhoda Coffin, were both Quakers who became nationally recognized prison reformers and women’s-rights advocates. Until Smith and Coffin’s campaign, state prisons had been managed and overseen almost exclusively by men; the reformers argued that an all-female facility should be run by women, who would be uniquely suited to meet the needs of incarcerated women. Smith became the reformatory’s first superintendent, or warden, and was lauded for her progressive, humane institutional leadership during her tenure. Her portrait still hangs in the hall of the reformatory’s current incarnation, the Indiana Women’s Prison (I.W.P.).

“In 2013, a group of incarcerated women at I.W.P. met with Kelsey Kauffman, a local academic. The prison had previously offered a comprehensive college program in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands, but the Indiana state legislature had cut off the program’s funding in 2011. At the time of the 2013 meeting, Kauffman was running ad-hoc college courses at the prison, relying on only volunteers and donations. She had struggled to find materials with which her students could be trained to learn research methods; they did not have direct access to the Internet or to a public library, and interlibrary loans to the prison were slow and cumbersome. Kauffman did have, however, an archive of documents pertaining to the prison’s founding and history, and her idea was to use these primary sources as grist for the research mill. She proposed to her students that they spend a few months conducting a historical investigation of the institution that confined them, and that, at the end of the course, they produce a pamphlet about the prison that could be shared with visitors interested in its origins.

“That group became the foundation of the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project, a collective of incarcerated and now formerly incarcerated women who have, over the past decade, produced an astonishing body of investigations into the early history of Indiana’s correctional system. This year, the New Press published an anthology titled ‘Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920,’ with contributions by twenty-nine members of the collective.”

Additional reading:

Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 by the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project on bookshop.org

The New York Times, May 14, 2022: What Would a Feminist Jail Look Like?

The New York Times, May 12, 2020: The Women’s Jail at Rikers Island Is Named for My Grandmother. She Would Not Be Proud.

Slate, March 22, 2015: The Pen: Inmates at America’s oldest women’s prison are writing a history of it—and exploding the myth of its benevolent founders.