ABSTRACT
The early nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of one of the most dramatic innovations in the history of punishment: the penitentiary, a fortress-like institution designed to subject prisoners to total control. Women were punished in nineteenth-century prisons, but few officials tried to transform them into obedient citizens through seclusion and rigorous routines. New York's Newgate prison, opened in 1797 in the Greenwich Village section of New York City, was the first state institution established to hold felons only. One source of differential treatment was the simple fact that so few women were sentenced to state prisons. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women rarely made up more than 10 percent of a prison's population, often far less. As the phenomenon of Mount Pleasant demonstrates, the seeds of the women's reformatory had been sown by mid-century. At Mount Pleasant, women were confined apart from men and supervised by other women.
