ABSTRACT
The history of women’s imprisonment has generally been subsumed within the larger history of male prisoners. It is still unusual for women prisoners to be the entire focus of historical studies and there remains a tendency to relegate their story to a discrete chapter within a publication, rather than seeing that record as an integral part of any history of incarceration. While there are honourable exceptions to this pattern in Europe (see Dobash et al. 1986; Zedner 1991), much of the most commonly cited historical literature, focusing entirely on women, derives from North America (see Rafter 1985; Freedman 1981). Until relatively recently (see Hannah-Moffat 2001) the larger geographic component of North America – Canada – was not considered a likely source of such information, largely because, historically, the country has had relatively few prisons for women. Canada’s sole women’s federal penitentiary, 1 the Prison for Women, was never seen as an exemplar, yet its history, and the reasons for its final closure, offers present-day prison reformers an instructive lesson. Indeed, this story reflects what Cohen warns against: that the ‘well-intentioned plans of reformers (conscience) are systematically transformed by the obdurate nature of social reality’, leaving reforms channelled ‘in directions diametrically opposed to the original vision’ (1985: 92).
