The Missouri State Penitentiary: 170 Years inside "The Walls"

Women Prisoners Who Changed the Walls from the Inside Out

32 I find no criminals among them, but only unfortunates, broken , hapless, and hopeless human beings. —Emma Goldman, Living My Life Institutional reforms often have unexpected beginnings. In the Missouri State Penitentiary, a major impetus for reform in the early 1900s came from a long-neglected aspect of the penitentiary: its wing for female prisoners. The women’s wing of the Missouri State Penitentiary demonstrated the nation’s thinking about how to deal with criminals. In the 1800s, when the penitentiary system was at its most popular, almost no thought was given to the problem of dealing with women who had committed crimes. At that time, popular culture conceived of women as morally superior to men, and as a result, people thought that no prisons were needed for women. Documents concerning the problems faced by women convicted of crimes in the nineteenth century are so rare that a definitive historical study, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions by Blake McKelvey, does not even mention such problems. Although women did not always live up to society’s expectations, women’s duties as mothers and caretakers often made it necessary to secure pardons for them. Women Prisoners Who Changed the Walls from the Inside Out Women Prisoners 33 In Missouri during the first decades of the penitentiary’s existence, this combination of ideology and economic necessity resulted in neglect when women were convicted of serious crimes and sent to the penitentiary. Later, after fits and starts of reform, female prisoners were transferred to a separate site. But the story of the women prisoners in the interim is one of tragedy and transcendence. When the penitentiary at Jefferson City was first designed and built, it had no separate facilities for female prisoners. For the first five years of its existence, not a single woman was sentenced to serve a prison term. Authorities managed to avoid the problem of creating facilities for women at the prison. The first woman to be sentenced to a prison term in Missouri was Rebecca Hawkins in 1841. After many years of “cruel and barbarous” treatment, Hawkins attempted to poison her husband. She confessed to the attempted murder and was convicted. Before she could be transferred to the penitentiary, however, another person succeeded where she had failed: Mr. Hawkins was murdered. With their father dead and their mother headed for the penitentiary, the eight Hawkins children were left without a caretaker or provider. Governor Thomas Reynolds took pity on the family and pardoned Hawkins before she reached Jefferson City, making it possible for officials to avoid the problem of women prisoners for a little longer. When the next Missouri woman was convicted of a crime and received a prison sentence, there were still no facilities for women prisoners . The governor received a number of petitions for her pardon, and she, too, quickly received one. The third female convict in Missouri was not so lucky. Martha Casto arrived at the penitentiary on August 10, 1843. This time the wardens employed the woman as a domestic servant in their homes. Another prisoner of the time chronicled Casto’s sad story, explaining that she was so mistreated by the wife of one of the wardens that she ran away. When Casto was recaptured, she was placed in a cell in the prison and kept isolated there twenty-four hours a day. Of course, guards were allowed in her cell, and Casto later became pregnant and gave birth to a child within the prison walls. Once again, maternal duties motivated leniency. Because prisoners were not allowed stoves in their cells for fear of fire, many members of the public were 34 The Missouri State Penitentiary concerned that Casto’s baby would become sick during the winter. On December 6, 1844, mother and child were pardoned. Unfortunately, Casto’s treatment set the standard for the next several years. No separate facilities for female convicts were built. The leasees hired women prisoners out as domestic servants to avoid the spectacle of women working at hard labor alongside male convicts. At night, the women returned to the penitentiary where guards locked them in their cells to keep them from socializing with the male convicts. The abuses permitted by this system eventually led Governor Meredith Marmaduke to ask the general assembly to build a separate cell block for women prisoners. An effort to turn the warden’s home into a female prison failed, and...