Beauty Marks and Blemishes: The Coed Prison As a Microcosm of Integrated Society

Abstract

New York). She wishes to thank the staff of the Office of Research, Federal Prison System, for their assistance with this project.A decade ago, an apparently new type of federal prison appeared on the scene: an institution for adults housing both male and female inmates, known as a co-correctional or integrated facility. The opening of a co-correctional prison at Fort Worth, Texas, in 1971 revived the debate raised 100 years earlier about the assets and liabilities of integration or separation for women prisoners. In the eighteenth century, men, women, and children were housed together in prisons and asylums. Some separation occurred in the nineteenth century, when women were placed in one corner of the men's facility. Angered by the idleness, male staff brutality, and absence of programs, late nineteenth century penal reformers, particularly women, worked to create separate institutions for women offenders run by women administrators (Lekkerder, 1931:90-110). _ By 1971, there were 36 all-women's institutions -34 state and two federal facilities (Ross, 1977:10). Thus, the opening of the coed prison at Fort Worth represented the first reintegration of prison inmates in more than a century. However, while nineteenth century reformers segregated men and women solely as part of a rehabilitative effort, their twentieth century counterparts were motivated by economic exigencies as well. Fort Worth (and later that year the Federal Youth Center at Morgantown, West Virginia) was opened partly as an economic measure to make program delivery and services cost effective, to deal with the high cost of incarcerating a relatively small proportion of women (approximately 4