Criminology and Art at the Reformatory Prison for Women

Emily Hainze (Boston University) This paper examines the creative work incarcerated Black women produced at the Reformatory Prison for Women in Framingham, MA in the early 20th century. While Framingham was one of the... [ view full abstract ]

Emily Hainze (Boston University) 

This paper examines the creative work incarcerated Black women produced at the Reformatory Prison for Women in Framingham, MA in the early 20^th century. While Framingham was one of the earliest women’s prisons in the U.S., little attention has been paid to the role of “prison art” in the reformatory’s experimental educational system. The prison’s rehabilitative programming hinged on incarcerated women’s racial identities: for example, the reformatory institutionalized courses and clubs for Black women that featured writing on “race history” and minstrel performances.

Drawing on early case files, and later archives of prison art, I suggest that Framingham’s racialized programming distinguished between white and Black women’s rehabilitation, subjecting Black women to increased discipline and surveillance. Considering the racist coercion underpinning the prison superintendent’s observation that “the Negro girls can be the terror of Framingham or a very real asset in song, dancing, art and drama,” I examine how the reformatory mobilized art programming to surveil Black women and to measure and analyze their so-called “capacity” for reform. I also attend to the artistic experiments that Black women at Framingham generated to subvert the reformatory’s programming and research, exploring how their creative work imagines social life untethered from carcerality and anti-blackness.