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Book Review
| L. Mara Dodge, "Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind": A Study of Women, Crime, and Prisons, 1835–2000, Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 342. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 0-87580-296-6).
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| Made known largely by B-movies and pulp novels, in "Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind," L. Mara Dodge presents an expansive social history of women's prisons, inmates, and the crimes for which they were incarcerated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilizing archival materials including convict registers, inmate files, and pardon petitions, Dodge constructs a database of female convicts from which she capably demonstrates important trends about the racial and class bias embedded in the experiences of women imprisoned. Sources that include disciplinary reports, confiscated notes, and letters that failed to pass censors provide Dodge with insights into the everyday life of women in Illinois's prisons, humanizing their experiences and adding to this history. Historical monographs on the topic of women's prisons often focus on the Progressive Era, when prison reform was part of a broader trend of social improvement. Beginning with the first woman incarcerated in Illinois and extending her analysis beyond the years when reform ideals shaped the construction of women's prisons, Dodge fills historiographical gaps and presents a more thorough understanding of how social forces shaped the incarceration of women in modern America. |
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Alternating between a chronological assessment of the institutions that housed female inmates and a thematic discussion about the changing views on crime and criminality, Dodge demonstrates how "the bonds of 'respectable' womanhood imprisoned all women"(4). She rejects positivist notions that treat crime as an objective fact and instead argues that criminality, and the treatment of female inmates, is socially constructed. Part I analyzes the experiences of women in male penitentiaries, since independent facilities did not exist during most of the nineteenth century. While the penitentiary represented a shift from corporeal punishment to incarceration, informed by Enlightenment ideals about penalization, women did not share men's rehabilitative opportunities during this period. Female inmates were isolated on a separate floor where they worked laundering uniforms and sewing piecework; the success of their imprisonment was measured by its profitability. Most officials felt that women could not be reformed and struggled to maintain custodial care of "the most degraded of their sex, if not of humanity" (36). |
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The first separate women's prisons mirrored the institutions that housed male convicts. Joliet Women's Prison opened its doors across the street from the male penitentiary (of the same name) in 1896. Reform ideals contradicted the administration of this institution, which emphasized security concerns even though many warden-matrons were educated in the tradition of progressive reformers and took a more sympathetic view toward their charges than national trends dictated. Prison reform took new shape when the cottage-style Illinois State Reformatory for Women at Dwight opened in 1930. Believing in the rehabilitative potential of domesticity (a constant trope in the treatment of female inmates) officials hoped the new facilities would promote traditional notions of family-oriented femininity. Because Dwight housed both felons and misdemeanants, the latter convicted of lesser crimes and automatically sentenced to one year, its reformative goals immediately clashed with day-to-day operations, and the physical construction of the institution presented constant security problems. Moreover, with their release ensured after twelve months, misdemeanants rarely adhered to domestic mandates. Cottage housing quickly became a reward for good behavior among felons, who were assumed to have less potential for reform. Despite their actions while incarcerated, however, the parole board remained skeptical about rehabilitating female felons. By mid-century, parole officials rejected two-thirds of all petitioners, interrogating women about their sexuality and making traditional beliefs about femininity paramount while predicting parole success. Dodge argues that gender, race, and class—and not merely reform potential—predominantly shaped this process. |
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By the 1950s, Dwight had all but abandoned gendered rehabilitation and was supervised by matrons trained in law enforcement, rather than in reform-oriented fields like social work. Its close quarters subjected women to supervision unlike that found in the larger, and more anonymous, cell-blocks at men's prisons. They were disciplined for the slightest rule infraction, such as improper food preparation or cleaning, and "deviant" behaviors including the use of vulgar language and suspicion of lesbianism. As Dodge points out, women—either in prison or out—"were expected to acquiesce to a level of social control that would be deemed utterly unacceptable by men" (233). This did not mean that female inmates failed to challenge the demands of traditional femininity imposed upon them, and her analysis of confiscated notes and letters reveals a vital, resistant prisoner subculture. |
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The study focuses on Illinois as representative of national trends in women's prison reform and administration. Expanding this context would have added to Dodge's analysis. She rightly challenges Foucault's assessment of the prison as reflective of modernity itself, when disciplinary institutions sought to control both bodies and minds, by demonstrating a resistant female inmate subculture, but fails to make use of a growing body of postcolonial literature that might help contextualize the civilizing project. Though not administered as overseas colonies, America's prison populations were similarly treated, especially when considering racial differences among who was convicted and for what. Likewise, relating postwar supervisory trends to Cold War internationalism could help illuminate reasons behind the severe control of female inmates' everyday lives during the 1950s and 1960s. Already suffering from moral corruption, it is likely that misdemeanants especially were feared prone to communist influences within prison walls, which they could spread upon their quick release. These observations do not, however, detract from what is otherwise an important and engaging study that adds much to fields of gender, crime, and institutional history. |
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| Dawn Rae Flood
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| University of South Florida |
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