Women
feeding chickens at the Indiana Women’s Prison, early 20th century.
Inmates
at America’s oldest women’s prison are writing a history of it—and exploding
the myth of its benevolent founders.
By Rebecca
Onion
In
1873, two Quaker reformers living in Indiana, shocked by allegations of sexual
abuse of female prisoners at the state’s unisex institution, pushed the state
to fund the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls: the first
totally separate women’s prison established in the United States. For years,
Rhoda Coffin, who lobbied for the prison and then joined its first board of
visitors, and Sarah Smith, the founding superintendent, enjoyed a historical
reputation of benevolence. Coffin and Smith, the story went, started an
institution that prioritized reform of inmates over punishment. If their
approach was invasive and personally constrictive—the institution focused on
reintegrating prisoners into Victorian gender roles, training them (as the
prison’s 1876 annual report put it) to “occupy the position assigned to them by
God, viz., wives, mothers, and educators of children”—at least this new kind of
prison provided safe surroundings and was bent on giving troubled inmates a
second chance at life.
Recently,
a group of women currently incarcerated at the 142-year-old institution (now
called the Indiana Women’s Prison) began to pore over documents from the
prison’s first 10 years. They had set out on an ambitious project: to write a
history of the institution’s founding decade, one that tells quite a different
story from the official narrative. What happens when inmates write a history of
their own prison? In this case, the perspective that the group brought to the
project took what inmate Michelle Jones, writing in the American Historical
Association’s magazine Perspectives on History, calls “a feel-good story” about
Quaker reformers rescuing women from abuse in men’s prisons and turned it into
a darker, more complicated tale.
The
researchers focused their attention on allegations of wrongdoing at the prison,
looking at previously discredited testimonies of prisoners who claimed to have
been physically abused and at the activities of a prison doctor who had some
very Victorian ideas about women and sex. They began to unravel a long-standing
mystery: Why didn’t the prison incarcerate any prostitutes in its early years?
They presented their findings at academic conferences and published papers in
journals. And they did all of it without access to the Internet.
Kelsey
Kauffman, who spearheaded the project, holds an Ed.D. in human development,
worked as a correctional officer, wrote a book about correctional officers, and
taught college classes in writing at two men’s prisons.* Kauffman was dismayed
when the Indiana state legislature canceled funding for nonvocational college
programs in prisons in 2012. At the suggestion of the Indiana Women’s Prison’s
superintendent, and working with two other educators, she started a new,
grassroots program of college courses at IWP.
Kauffman’s
book contained a chapter on prison history in Massachusetts, and she had long
been interested in the idea of leading a class in writing a history of the IWP.
She told me that she tried the project with her college students at DePauw
University, to no avail. “They never asked an interesting question,” she told
me. “To some extent, you can’t blame them for that, because they know nothing
about prisons. It doesn’t relate to their lives.” Kauffman resolved to try the
subject out on students who knew the subject firsthand.
*
* *
IWP
is a maximum-security facility, and many of Kauffman’s 20 students were serving
sentences for violent crimes, ranging from robbery to murder. Some had just
started taking college classes, while others had been at the facility long
enough to have graduated with a degree through the prison’s old college
program. Michelle Jones and Anastazia Schmid, the two researchers I interviewed
for this story, each earned a bachelor’s from Ball State University that way.
Jones, 43, has been at the prison since 1996; Schmid, 42, has been incarcerated
since 2001.
Anastazia Schmid working on a painting for a
fundraiser at the prison, 2012.
The
group met once a week for three-hour sessions. Kauffman set out to convince
them that they could make real interventions in the history of 19th-century
women’s prisons, publish and present their research, and eventually write a
book. At the beginning of the project, some of the student researchers were
dubious of those ambitions. “A lot of people did not believe it,” Jones told
me. “I was skeptical.”
Kauffman
began by splitting the group of researchers in half. Some began with secondary
research, reading histories that covered related subject areas (19th-century
mental hospitals, the history of medicine). The others began looking at primary
sources from the prison’s history, concentrating on a topic: health care, the
economy of the prison, food. Jones began to wrangle data from the prison
registries, which Kauffman had scanned at the state archives, printed, and
brought in for the researchers to use.
Michelle Jones working on a painting for a
fundraiser at the prison, 2012.
Research
in the prison is difficult. I asked Jones about the library’s stock of books.
“Our recreational library is very good,” she said, “but it’s limited
predominantly to fiction, so when it comes to doing research, particularly if
you’re interested in the 19th century ... it’s just not going to be there.”
Interlibrary loan is slow. The IWP researchers followed the time-honored
approach of tracking down new references using the footnotes and bibliographies
of the books they were currently reading, but the new requests sometimes took
months to arrive. Kauffman and other volunteers tried to fill the gap by
providing books themselves, but with a long list of research requests, they
couldn’t always access titles quickly enough. The digital databases and online
archives and collections that historians now take for granted were not
available to the women. The researchers were not just researching the 19th
century; they were working at a 19th-century pace.
As
the group’s research inched forward, the two women who founded the prison—Rhoda
Coffin and Sarah Smith—began to come in for their share of skeptical analysis.
The founders’ story—female reformers who “rescued” women from sexual abuse in
an institution full of predatory guards and prisoners—had traditionally been
one of exemplary Christian female heroism. In historical sources, the women
were described using the Victorian rhetoric of womanly virtue, with Smith in
particular held up as an example to sinning prisoners under her care. “We
referred to Sarah Smith as ‘Saint Sarah’ in our class,” Kauffmann told me,
since so much contemporary literature lauded the prison’s first superintendent
for her forbearance and purity.
Sarah J. Smith. Courtesy of the
Indiana Department of Correction
Virtual Museum.
“I
am the modern version of
the
women I’m talking about.”
Anastazia
Schmid
Less
complimentary descriptions of the two women fade into the background in most
histories, which discuss their work as part of a largely benevolent movement
toward prison reform for women in the late 19th century. Kauffman’s researchers
were therefore surprised to read a published report of an 1881 inquiry into
mistreatment of prisoners, in which Smith had been accused of humiliation,
assault, and “dunking” of prisoners who didn’t follow the institution’s rules.
Several former prison employees testified to witnessing Smith hit the
prisoners, with two saying that they had seen Smith “pull their hair and pound
their heads against the wall.” According to testimony, prisoners were also put
into solitary confinement and denied food and medications. Smith and the prison
were exonerated of these charges, but most of the researchers believed the
inmates, nurses, and other staff whose testimony appeared in the report, and
the class debated what might really have happened, arguing over how harshly to
judge Smith for the punishments used at the prison she ran in the name of
mercy.
Indiana Women’s Reformatory, 1873. Courtesy
of the Indiana State Library.
As
for Coffin, who was not involved in the daily administration of the prison, the
researchers discovered that her life had its own troubling chapters. In 1884,
Coffin’s husband, Charles, who ran a bank, was found to have embezzled, cooked
the books, and extended unsecured loans to his sons, while living a luxurious
lifestyle financed by this malfeasance. Many of the people harmed by the bank’s
eventual collapse were working-class depositors. The scandal forced the Coffins
to move from Richmond, Indiana, to Chicago. While it’s hard to know what Coffin
knew about her husband’s wrongdoing during the years when he carried out his
crimes, the students found themselves unable to forgive her, insisting that she
couldn’t have been completely ignorant of his actions, and finding hypocrisy in
the contrast between her humble public posture and her well-to-do life.
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