Alderson: Reclaiming
the Vision
By Clare
Hanrahan
Seventy-five years
ago, the first federal prison for women opened in Alderson, West
Virginia, as the Federal Industrial Institution for Women. The
founding vision was for a “community of women working together
under the guidance of other women.”
In the early 1920’s
a prison reform movement grew out of concerns of imprisoned activists
in the Women’s Suffrage movement who experienced harsh prison
conditions for acts of civil disobedience. These women returned
to speak of the indignities and abuse they endured when held as
captives in men’s prisons.
Alderson prison was
the culmination of the vision and work of women in twenty-one
national organizations. The American Association of University
Women, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s
Clubs, the American Federation of Teachers, the Daughters of the
American Revolution, the League of Women Voters, the Republican
and Democratic National Committees, and the national Women’s Christian
Temperance Union were among them. These prison reformers sought
to protect women inmates from the exploitation of male inmates
and staff and to provide a homelike communal setting with provisions
for nurseries and childcare to women sentenced to prison. Alderson’s
campus-like prison included residential cottages named after social
reformers, such as Elizabeth Frye, Jane Addams and Mary McLeod
Bethune.
Dr. Mary B. Harris,
the prison’s first superintendent, held a doctorate in Sanskrit
from the University of Chicago. She believed that women prisoners,
when treated with dignity and provided with educational opportunities,
could "build within themselves a well of self-respect" and learn
the skills that would enable them to earn their own living “without
dependence on a man or the community.”
But this vision for
a place of education and rehabilitation for prisoners was not
long lasting. Alderson
Federal Prison came under the authority of the US Bureau of Prisons
in 1930 during a time of rapid increase in federal prisoners due
to Prohibition laws, that era’s failed war on drugs.
By the end of World
War II, a military model of prison administration had taken hold.
Soon male wardens, correctional officers, and administrative employees
predominated. Today, over seventy percent of correctional officers
in women’s prisons are men. Over the years, a power and control
model has replaced the “women’s sphere” envisioned by Alderson’s
founders.
At first sight, even
today, Alderson Federal Prison Camp resembles a college campus.
There are no bars, no razor wire fences, and no armed guards.
But this minimum-security prison now operates with much of the
destructive dynamic present in abusive family relationships —
self-esteem is undermined with insidious intent, and control is
maintained through isolation and the threat of more severe reprisal
for resistance or defiance. Stepping outside the virtual walls
at Alderson can result in “a fine up to $5,000 or Imprisonment
up to five (5) years.” Escape is a felony offense.
Last year I was one
among Alderson’s nearly 1,000 captive women, just one more number
in a criminal justice system that presently incarcerates close
to two million. I slept in the top bunk of cinderblock cube 042
— a nine by twelve foot stall in a massive and austere concrete
building holding 500 women. This warehouse-like barracks, and
a second one now under construction, will replace many of the
vintage 1927 campus-style cottages, demolished to make room for
a growing population of women prisoners, the fastest-growing —
and least violent — segment of the prison population nationwide.
The Bureau of Prisons
operates with a military style chain of command, unlike the cooperative
clubs designed for self-governance that were part of Alderson’s
early vision. Many of the correctional officers and administrative
personnel at Alderson and throughout the federal Bureau of Prisons
are former military. They enforce the petty and demeaning rules,
patrol the corridors, guard women while they sleep, and walk in
and out of the sleeping quarters, shower and toilet rooms of captive
women at will.
At Alderson women are
subjected to head counts six times daily, and during midnight
and early morning bed checks, male officers often pull back the
sheets of sleeping women with the excuse, “We must see flesh,
ladies,” to verify the head count.
Women are stripped
of all personal items on arrival and issued ill-fitting men’s
military-khaki shirts and jackets as work uniforms and oversized
white cotton T-shirts as sleeping gowns, and in the winter men’s
thermal underwear. Medical care at Alderson and throughout the
Federal Bureau of Prisons is minimal, often delayed, seldom results
in restoration of health, and sometimes is the cause of further
medical problems.
Drug and property related
nonviolent crimes are responsible for the majority of convictions.
Most, as many as eighty percent at Alderson, and the majority
of all women felons, are caught in the wide net called conspiracy.
Prisoners of the domestic war on drugs, they are held for five,
ten, even twenty years on mandatory minimum sentences at a cost
of at least $22,000 per person, per year. Billie Holiday, a heroin
addict and Alderson inmate in 1947, wrote in her book, Lady
Sings the Blues: “People on drugs are sick people. So now
we end up with the government chasing sick people like they were
criminals...the jails are full and the problem is getting worse
every day.” But access to the drug treatment program at Alderson
is limited and far more women apply than can ever be served.
Alderson is a work
camp. The labor of captive women is critical to the operation
of the prison. Our innocence or guilt was irrelevant to our keepers.
We were a profitable commodity, especially to UNICOR, the prison
industry, where hundreds of women sew army jackets for a pittance
— as little as 27 cents an hour — in a locked and loud factory,
hunched over the machines day after day.
Alderson has strayed
far from its founding vision, expressed best by its first superintendent,
Mary
Belle Harris. She believed that “control through care and
compassion, rather than terror was most efficacious,” and she
helped create an environment of cooperation emphasizing self-governing
principles to provide every inmate “an equal chance to develop
as far as her endowment permits and become a law-abiding and self-supporting
member of her group.”
The famous labor organizer
and socialist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn charged under the Smith Act
for expressing dangerous ideas, and imprisoned at Alderson from
1955 to 1957, in her book The Alderson Story: My Life as a
Political Prisoner, called on the founding organizations to
take another look at Alderson.
“It would be well,”
she wrote, “if these same organizations would check on the discrepancies
between the original plans and the fine work of Dr. Harris as
compared to the conditions at present. Practically all of her
methods and ideas have been discarded.”
I will add my voice
to the challenge. Over the years many women of courage, commitment
and integrity, the famous and the obscure, have contributed to
Alderson and its rich history, both as keeper and kept. We must
not forget the women of Alderson. Before the Bureau
of Prisons succeeds in destroying what remains of the legacy
of Alderson’s founding visionaries, women must reclaim Alderson
as a place where our imprisoned sisters can find healing, education,
treatment and support. Only in this way will they be enabled to
“claim independence and equal rights upon release,” as Alderson’s
founding mothers intended.
Clare Hanrahan is an
Asheville, NC writer and antiwar activist. She spent six months
at Alderson prison as a consequence of peaceful protest against
the US Army School of Americas. Her first book, Jailed for
Justice: A Woman's Guide to Federal Prison Camp, is available
from the author.
Clare's newest book is Conscience & Consequence: A Prison Memoir, a highly personal account of her six-month incarceration inside Alderson prison, the oldest and largest US Federal prison for women. The book exposes some of the devastating abuses of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Clare can be reached at: www.celticwordcraft.com
This article first
appeared in the February/March, 2003 edition of Western North
Carolina Woman, volume 2, issue 1
