Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920

Inmates enrolled in a college program at “the oldest continually operated women’s prison in the United States” offer an ambitious and frequently disturbing history of their institution and its antecedents. One of the oldest women’s prisons in the U.S., the Indiana Reformatory Institution for Women and Girls (now known as the Indiana Women’s Prison) opened in 1873 in Indianapolis. By 1881, its Quaker directors were under investigation for mistreatment, mostly involving compulsory laundry work at the reformatory; they were eventually acquitted. Much less publicized were charges that head physician Theophilus Parvin sexually abused inmates and subjected them to experimental surgeries and treatments. Jones and other contributors shed valuable light on how so-called reformers rationalized subjecting inmates, many of whom were poor women of color, to “sexual and gendered violence, physical abuse, deprivations, isolation, experimentation, and torture” in the name of “better outcomes”—as defined by white, middle-class, Christian standards of behavior. Though general readers may be challenged by the academic jargon, the contributors impress with the depth and reach of their scholarship, much of it conducted under difficult circumstances. The result is a forceful critique of the roots of the carceral state. Illus. (Apr.)