BBM
The State's Only Prison For Women Began as a Working Farm
One hundred years ago, after much debate, misgivings and opposition, the Connecticut State Farm for Women, set up in a collection of cottages in the fields of Niantic, opened its doors to 12 inmates.
One could hardly call it a prison. It was a working farm.
[...]
What were their offenses? Harrison’s research turned up some of them: lascivious carriage, prostitution, manifest danger of falling into habits of vice, intoxication, delinquency, vagrancy, theft, forgery, being a habitual offender, neglect of children, impairing the morals of a minor child, frequenting disorderly houses, street walking, incorrigibility, and being lewd, wanton or lascivious.
A woman could also be sent to the farm if she “led a vicious life” or possessed “obscene pictures.”
Many years later, when Harrison was a correction officer at the former farm, renamed the Janet S. York Correctional Institution, the women incarcerated there had been convicted of much more serious crimes, such as assault or murder. Although it was no longer a farm, it retained progressive programs, including the acclaimed women’s writing course led by novelist Wally Lamb.
Harrison thinks Connecticut residents should be proud of the facility, which he notes became a national role model for how to set up and run a women’s prison. After reaching a height of 1,427 inmates in 2007, the population has seen a decline since, falling to 936 this past July and bucking the national trend in women’s prison populations.
[...]
However, when a new bill was presented in 1917 amid greater public support, the General Assembly approved it. The women’s farm opened in July of the following year.
The farm included woods and pastures that could be tilled. Harrison found a listing of the animals there in 1925; they included cows, heifers, bulls, horses, hens, chickens and swine. The women split wood, sawed and burned brush, did the gardening and worked at the dairy barn. A women’s hospital also was built there in 1919. (Some of the inmates were mothers with babies.)
[...]
