Hard Time at Tehachapi: California's First Women's Prison (review)

At the end of the film noir classic The Maltese Falcon (1941) Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade turns to femme fatale and murderer Mary Astor and says, "Well, if you get a break you'll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years and you can come back to me then. I hope they don't hang you, precious, by the neck." Though most modern day audiences would not recognize the name, California audiences in the 1940s would have instantly understood Bogey's reference. The California Institution for Women, Tehachapi, was the only women's prison in the state of California, a unique creation born out of a contentious political and social debate about gender, law enforcement, and the possibility of reform and rehabilitation for female criminals.

The creation of this institution, and its relatively short lifespan (1933-1952), are the subject of Kathleen A. Cairns' new book, Hard Times at Tehachapi: California's First Women's Prison. Cairns places Tehachapi squarely within the larger historical context of American prison reform. The 19th century had seen a gradual shift in how convicts were treated. The shift was away from incarceration and towards reformation. This new approach was seen as particularly vital for dealing with female prisoners, and revolutionary facilities like the women's reformatory in Framingham, Massachusetts, were soon cropping up across the country. But as late as the 1920s California's female prisoners were housed side by side with men at San Quentin; only in 1925 was ground broken on a separate female wing at the notorious prison. This arrangement lent itself to sexual and other forms of abuse and raised eyebrows among those who expected these women to eventually be rehabilitated and return to society. "Gender stereotypes," Cairns writes, "afforded prison reformers their greatest challenges, but also their greatest opportunities."(17)

By the early 20^th century, with Progressivism on the rise in the state, reform-minded women pushed for a new and separate facility. Not only would it be unique in the state for its approach to incarceration, but it was also designed to function largely independent of men. Clubwomen and professional prison reformers combined forces to lobby for the creation of "a kinder, gentler sort of prison," one that would "instill [in inmates] the ability and desire to succeed in domestic pursuits—marriage and family—reflecting what society at large expected of virtually all women of the time."(2,127) Managing such a facility was an uphill battle, however, one that required the passage of a state constitutional amendment (Proposition 21 in 1936) to move control of the new California Institution for Women from the jurisdiction of San Quentin and into the hands of Tehachapi's own board of trustees.

In her introduction Cairns points out that many records from the California Institution for Women were lost in the aftermath of the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake. But she nonetheless is able to reconstruct not only basic statistics about the inmate population but also the lives of a handful of inmates, including forger and convicted murderer Hazel Glab and Communist Party member and union organizer Caroline Decker. It is interesting to note that because the California Institution for Women, unlike many women's prisons in other states, housed felons, it thus was integrated from its very beginning. (Housing, however, was still segregated by race). Cairns documents the grind of day-to-day life in Tehachapi. It may not have been San Quentin, but as Cairns points out, boredom, loneliness, and the ever-present wind combined to take a toll on the emotional, psychological, and physical health of both inmates and employees.

Perhaps the most valuable part of his book deals with the personality clashes among the women who lobbied for and/or were in charge of the facility. Certainly, as Cairns points out, "ambitious, educated women, mostly white and middle class themselves, saw promise" in Progressive-era reform.(3) But this does not mean...