ABSTRACT
In 1881 the Jefferson City prison held forty women; by 1916, the number had risen to sixty. In 1926 Missouri again transferred its female convicts, this time to a nearby farm. At the thirty-eight-acre farm, owned by the penitentiary, women lived in a large house said originally to have been the home of a slave owner. Tennessee provides a case in point. Immediately after the Civil War, the number of prisoners of both sexes sentenced to the Tennessee state penitentiary increased rapidly. In 1930 Tennessee once again moved its female prisoners, this time to the Women's Prison erected on penitentiary property about a mile and a half from the main prison. Six independent women's custodial prisons were founded during the period 1870-1935, the first since the opening of the Mount Pleasant Female Prison in the mid-nineteenth century. Four of these operated in reformatory states, where they received women regarded as undesirable by the reformatories.
