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TIL that 2023 is 200 years since the Gaols Act 1823 created single sex prisons across the British Empire, and about Elizabeth Fry, social reformer, who was a driving force behind female only prisons.
Next year is the 200 year anniversary of the Gaols Act 1823 which:
mandated sex-segregation of prisons and female warders for female inmates to protect them from sexual exploitation. Fry kept extensive diaries in which the need to protect female prisoners from rape and sexual exploitation is explicit.
Elizabeth Fry was a social reformer who campaigned against the slave trade, & for prison reform. She also opened a training school for nurses which inspired Florence Nightingale. Fry was the first women to present evidence in the British parliament.
Fry petitioned the authorities to improve the conditions of deported women & girls after she was told that deported women were simply abandonded when they arrived in Botany Bay. She worked to ensure womens barracks were built & auitable transport was provided for them. Fry also provided transported women with care packages that included essentials like knives & forks, & sewing kits.
Fry also created a prison school for children imprisoned with thier mothers, & promoted rehabilitiation through training in needlework & knitting for women prisoners.
Elizabeth Fry was a remarkable woman who deicated her life trying to improve the lives of the most vulnerable women in society.
Imagine the brutality, when all of the wardens were men and women were left to the male prisoners in general pop to abuse. Of course, it's appalling that TiMs are now being housed again with women, but I'm assuming the conditions back then were far worse with even more intermixing. Considering the status of women in 1800s society, men must have felt they could do ANYTHING to a woman branded as a criminal or prostitute.
Edit: This made me look for similar info on women's prison in the USA, and an interesting New Yorker article came up. The final paragraph is strangely focused on undermining the idea that an all-woman-run facility would be any better for women.
I am not sure if the conditions in the 1800s were worse, or perhaps, in a twisted way, better. (With regards to the rape, at least - I take it as a given that food and such are better nowadays.)
Consider this: Poor men were also imprisoned for the pettiest of crimes back then, so there might have been a few decent men in there, and the rapists who were fellow prisoners might not have been able to get women alone. Plus, being in one room with the other women in prison would have made it easier to look out for each other, even though women would probably have been there in much smaller numbers. (Or perhaps not, seeing as underage children were just thrown in along with the mothers)
Nowadays, much care is taken to only select the rapists who actively want to be in women's prison to imprison women with them, guaranteeing them access to victims that is completely unhindered by other people. Plus, in the 1800s, no one cared if prisoners washed. Now, they seem to be shepherded into group showers, from what I heard.
The final paragraph is strangely focused on undermining the idea that an all-woman-run facility would be any better for women.
I can't see archive links anymore - is it the one that goes on about how the first women's prisons were intended to make women more feminine?
(Anyone here suspecting that's just what the feminists back then told the men so that they would be allowed to found women-only prisons? I mean, I wish any modern woman could come up with something that would motivate men to back single-sex prisons. Anything. I don't care how bonkers it would sound, if it keeps women safe from rape in prison.)
I can only imagine what those women went through
An all woman prison system would be ideal, I don’t see how that could ever be a bad thing
I get that it might be hard to recruit, but they could work on that
I mean, one might find it handy to keep one or two men on staff to do the heavy lifting, or act as backup with really dangerous prisoners, but ... I cannot see how an absence of men would negatively affect the prisoners at all, or the guards, most of the time.
Yes, it'd be convenient to be able to cheat by having a strong female prisoner be handled by male guards, but you could also just use double the number of female guards. They do manage to deal with dangerous prisoners in men's prisons, too, despite not having the cheat option.
(And that's if you even ever GET the Hannibal Lecter kind of horror murderer in female version. I don't know that there ever was one, most female serial killers used poison, which is bad, but no one will put them in charge of the prison kitchen, so ...)
Id say, if possible, no men at all but I feel staffing would be hard
I just don’t think women are as attracted to police/prison guard work.
I’d find it very hard. I’d feel bad for people and I like making friends
Essentially I’d end up getting played by women ten times more clever than me
Can it be called an anniversary when women's right to women only prisons has been abolished again already? 🤔
Or am I misinformed and all those reports of men in women's prisons are from other countries? (I think I remember at least one scandal where they had to remove a man from women's prison? But there is so many, I tend to get confused.)
Thank you @vestalvirgin for your piece on Women’s history that led me here
Aaaand that's being undone