I have previously written more generally about the history of punishing women in the 17^th through 19^th centuries.  I received an e-mail from a reader asking if I had any information about the type of women who ended up as prisoners once gender-specific penal institutions were established in the 1870s.  I looked through a couple of books in my home library and found some interesting facts about the population in women’s prisons from the 1870s to 1910.  Specifically, I offer information here about the women’s prisons in Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York.  I rely on the very good book Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 by Estelle B. Freedman for the bulk of the information in this post.

Please note that the information provided here focuses specifically on inmates in separate women’s prisons.  Most women prisoners across the U.S. during this period (late nineteenth and early 20th century) were actually housed in male penal institutions or houses of refuges along with local jails.  However Freedman (1981) suggests that there was a lot of similarity between the population of early women’s prisons and the general female inmate population.  There were however also some differences between those populations that will not be addressed today.   I hope to return to the topic in the near future and will expand on the differences then.

The majority of inmates in women’s prisons “were under age 25, white, and native-born, although often of immigrant parents.  Nearly two-thirds had been married at some time in their lives, but half of these were widowed, divorced, or separated at the time of their incarceration…Most of the women had no prior convictions, and those who did usually had only one, often for drunkenness.  The crimes for which they were serving in New York and Massachusetts were minor – under 20 percent had committed dangerous offenses against person or property.  Drunkenness and prostitution alone accounted for about half of the commitments.”