ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of women's corrections in the United States, by highlighting how attitudes towards female deviance and race shaped, and continue to shape, their treatment in correctional systems. Rafter's classic history of women's prisons in the United States reveals how, dating back to the inception of the American "experiment" with confinement, women have received disparate and generally inferior treatment. Eighteenth-century America found women prisoners crowded into large open spaces, segregated from prison wings where men were held. A report prepared for the Women's Prison Association by Chandra Villanueva notes that the rising number of women being drawn into correctional systems has meant that pregnant women and women with dependent children are being incarcerated. The "get tough" era of American punishment, rationalized and fueled by the war on drugs, dramatically increased the numbers of women being held in jails and prisons in the United States.
