Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [272]
These were the special crimes of women. When women were accused of ordinary crimes, how did they do? Were they treated the same as men, or worse, or better? Were they less likely to be arrested, tried, and convicted, or more? Less likely or more to get lenient sentences? The evidence for the sixties and seventies seemed to suggest a certain amount of “chivalry” among judges (who were still overwhelmingly male). The differences were not dramatic, but they were consistent. Women in grand larceny cases, for example, were more likely than men to be released on bail, or to get probation or a suspended sentence. One judge in the Washington, D.C. area, who allowed he was, in fact, more lenient to women, could not explain why, except to say that “I love my mother very much.” Some judges thought jail was too degrading for women; some were particularly loath to lock up mothers of small children. The “chivalry effect” held up into the eighties as well.37
Women’s Prisons
Chivalry extended to and beyond the prison gates. Women’s jails and institutions tended to be more benign than the ones men were thrown into. In State v. Heitman, an interesting Kansas case of 1919, the defendant, a woman, was convicted of “keeping a liquor nuisance.”38 The judge imposed a fine of $100 and committed her to the state industrial farm for women, under an indeterminate sentence; this was in accordance with a statute of 1917. A man convicted of the same offense would have been treated differently; he would have gone to county jail, for a definite term. For both sexes, the maximum “jolt” (farm or jail) was six months. But Ms. Heitman, on appeal, insisted the statute violated her rights—why should men and women have different, and unequal, punishment, for one and the same kind of behavior?
The court saw no merit in her argument. The 1917 statute was not discrimination; rather, it was a sign of “progress.” The county jail was (justifiably) unpopular: men in the county jail were in a demoralizing, idle cage. Moreover, the definite sentence was a “relic of the stone age of penological theory and practice.” Ms. Heitman, to her good fortune, was going to an institution in which she would work “in the sunshine and wind and free air,... away from barred cells and frowning, guard-mounted walls.” The poor woman did not know when she was well off. Appeal dismissed.
The court, of course, had a point. To be sure, some states were exceptionally slow to build prisons for women, and in these states, conditions for women were as bad as conditions for men (which was very bad), or even worse. California at the beginning of the century was a blatant example. Women were confined to the “bear pit” at San Quentin, a space sixty by ninety feet, in the middle of it a cell building forty by twenty feet. Here between twenty and thirty women were confined. They were not allowed out to take the air or get exercise. There was no heat; rats scurried about; and the system of “slop buckets” was in full use. A separate women’s building was not built at San Quentin until 1927, and the California Institution for, Women, at Tehachapi, did not function until the thirties.39
The first federal prison for women opened for business in 1927. This was at Alderson, West Virginia; the director was Dr. Mary B. Harris; its official title was the Federal Industrial Institute for Women. All women who were sentenced to a year or more were to be sent there. Three women from Vermont were the first arrivals, on April 30, 1927. On November 24, 1928, the institute mounted a formal opening