Bedford Hills Correction Facility
Within criminal justice circles, Bedford Hills
is a byword for its trail-blazing past and for the
imaginative correctional program it offers today.
Bedford is not so well Known to the general public.
It doesn't have the showy prison props. No
intimidating wall, no forbidding cell-houses. It
doesn't dominate the Hudson, like its neighbor Sing Sing;
instead, it sits hidden in an inland wooded swale.
But the real reason for Bedford's anonymity is that
its inmates are women and women do not usually inspire
fear and the attention that goes with it.
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Seen as insignificant in terms of physical menace,
and almost too few to be seen at all (only 3,500- or
one in 20 - of New York state's 70,000 prisoners are
women), females were an afterthought for most of prison
history. Bedford changed that in a hurry. Opening in
1901 as a reformatory for women aged 16 to 30 who were
convicted of lesser offenses, it soon became a showplace
embodying the most progressive correctional ideas of the
day: education, systematic psychological studies of
inmates in a state-of-the-art diagnostic clinic and
segregation of psychopaths and defectives.
Overcrowding and dwindling finances eventually
overcame the founders' zeal, however, and Bedford lapsed
into an unambitious program of custody. In 1933, a women's
prison was added, and in 1970, the reformatory was
discontinued altogether, After a brief transition period,
Bedford settled into its current role: in a statewide
network of diversifled institutions and programs for women
including medium- and minimum-security institutions, work
release centers and Shock Incarceration camps Bedford
serves as the system's only maximum-security facility.
While fulfilling its assigned function within the
system as a whole, Bedford maintains its own diversity.
Inside the security fence are more than 50 buildings in a
variety of styles and ages. Some of the women are housed in
cells in three-story brick buildings constructed in the
1960's. Some live in modern "cookie-cutter" dormitories.
Fiske Cottage, built in 1933, serves as "honor housing"
with individual rooms, to which the inmates hold the keys,
for 26 women. New mothers reside with their babies in a
nursery.
Bedford is the receiving and classification center
for all females sentenced to prison terms. An Office of
Mental Health satellite unit at Bedford provides
psychiatric services to all the state's female inmates,
and a statewide female regional medical unit is under
construction, with occupancy anticipated in June.
Bedford is the only women's facility to offer the
Family Reunion Program of overnight, private visits with
spouses, children or other family members.
From Newgate to Local Jails
In the early years of New York's prison history,
females were held either in the men's prisons or local
jails. At Newgate, the state's first prison, women were
housed in rooms apart from the men, but were otherwise
treated the same. Not so at Auburn, to which women from
upstate counties were sent. There they were taken to a
stuffy attic, whose windows were closed and darkened to
prevent communication with the men outside. Isolated,
ignored, with almost nothing to do, the women lived in
dreary misery. (The upside was that unlike the men who
were worked like animals they didn't live in fear of the
fore-man's whip.)
At both prisons, the women were guarded by male
personnel until 1832, when Auburn hired a matron in spite
of the Legislature's refusal to appropriate funds.
Starting in 1838, the state used a building at
Sing Sing as its women's prison. It was quickly overcrowded.
The chapel was converted to housing, but the inmates soon
began spilling out of the cells into hallways and offices.
Finally, in 1877, the state gave up trying to make room in
the men's prisons. The Sing Sing unit closed, and the women
were farmed out to county jails in Rochester, Buffalo and
Brooklyn. Crowded with young and old, pickpockets and
cutthroats thrown together indiscriminately, the local
jails were terrible places for anyone, but especially
for state-sentenced prisoners facing years of confinement.
Demand for Women's Reformatories
The situation of the women, now abandoned entirely
by the state, appeared even worse against New York's recent
triumph at Elmira. Opened in 1876, the internationally
renowned reformatory promised to salvage young men's lives
through a revolutionary program of education and parole.
Shouldn't the futures of young women also be of concern?
Influential citizens led by Josephine Shaw Lowell, the first
woman commissioner on the State Board of Charities, and Abby
Hopper Gibbons, president of the Women's Prison Association,
called on the Legislature to create reformatories for young
female misdemeanants. After 11 years, the Hudson House of
Refuge for Women opened; a western counterpart opened in
Albion in 1893. (Also in 1893, a prison was set up in a
building on the grounds of Auburn for women whose crimes
or ages were inappropriate for a reformatory.) Only the
downstate region lacked a reformatory.
New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford
A bill authorizing a reformatory in Westchester
County passed the Legislature in 1892. The following year,
the 107˝-acre Cromwell farm at Bedford Station on the Harlem
Railroad line was purchased for $10,000. Ground was broken
in the spring of 1894, but appropriations were grudging.
Seven years passed before the reformatory was ready for
occupancy.
As a reformatory, Bedford did not fall under the
jurisdiction of the Prison Department, but was controlled
by a board of managers appointed by the Governor. The board
offered the job of superintendent to Katherine Bement Davis.
With a doctorate from the University of Chicago, Davis
represented a new breed of women administrators. During
her 12 years at Bedford, she hired other female scholars
and initiated scientific studies that would influence the
future of corrections here and in other states.
The unfenced Bedford campus consisted of an
administration building, laundry, power house, gate
house and stable. New inmates were housed in a reception
building with cells as well as rooms, and were later
assigned to one of four cottages, with a total capacity
of 238. The cottages were classified according to age,
marital status and behavior. Each had its own flower
garden and kitchen.
The first inmates arrived on May 11, 1901.
They were expected to work half a day in the laundry
building, in the basket and hat-making shops, or at
cooking or making clothing.
Davis stressed outdoor work and the "fresh air
treatment," partly for reasons of health, partly out of
necessity. Inmates milked cows, raised chickens and
slaughtered pigs, supplying all their own milk, eggs
and pork and much of their vegetables and beef. They
planted trees, shoveled coal, painted cottages and
put up fences. They drained a swamp, built a conduit for
a steam laundry and built a road. They graded an
embankment. They made an artificial pond and then
harvested the ice. After Davis herself learned how
to make concrete, inmates laid thousands of square feet
of cement walkways, floors and stairways.
The other half of the day was devoted to education.
(Davis accepted the superintendency, she said, on condition
she “could run it as a school and not a prison.") The three
R's were taught as well as mechanical drawing, stenography,
typing, chair caning, cobbling, book-binding, painting and
carpentry. Davis gave singing lessons, the assistant
superintendent taught a daily gymnastics class and the
physician gave a weekly talk on physiology and sex hygiene
A staff member directed inmate productions of plays and
Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. In summers, a recreation
director was employed.
Science and Riot
This idyllic program couldn't last. Within three
years, crowding was a problem, aggravated by the closing of
the Hudson reformatory (convened in 1904 to a school for
girls aged l2 to 15). Bedford was forced to double up the
rooms and to use corridors for makeshift dormitories.
Three new cottages were built between 1907 and 1911, but
by now inmates were sleeping in the gymnasium and dining
rooms. Seven more cottages were added in 1915, but it was
too late: Bedford was already slipping out of control.
There were too many inmates, and the wrong
kind. The new probation option was drawing off the most
promising prospects for reform, leaving drug addicts,
illiterates, foreigners and the "feebleminded." Davis
grew concerned about troublemakers and incorrigibles.
In the summer of 1909, a volunteer made psychological
studies of selected inmates, giving rise to the idea
of a comprehensive study to see whether the misfits
could be identified and segregated from the reformables.
Davis obtained a grant to hire a psychologist.
Genealogists and field workers were provided by private
parties who were determined to do something about rising
crime caused, they were convinced, by hereditary
feeblemindedness. Not surprisingly, the studies tended to
confirm the suspicion that the reformatory was flooded with
mental defectives.
At about the same time, Davis persuaded
philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to purchase a
71-acre tract of land adjacent to the institution.
Rockefeller built and staffed a 'Laboratory of
Social Hygiene," a diagnostic clinic where new
admissions would be screened for mental defect,
and put the laboratory at Bedford's disposal for
the nominal charge of $1 a year.
Davis departed soon afterward to become
commissioner of the Corrections Department for New York
City. Now under less inspired leadership, the inmates
became practically uncontrollable. the State Board of
Charities investigated the reformatory in 1915,
issuing a public report blaming the troubles on
mismanagement, abusive discipline, overcrowding
and the --scapegoat of the day--feebleminded prisoners.
they also cited "unnatural attachments" between black
and white inmates. The next year, ostensibly at the
request of black inmates, the cottages were segregated
by race something Davis had refused to do. They would
remain segregated into the 1950's.
Meanwhile, the clinic's social scientists
found a new classification of troublesome women:
"psychopaths" people who, though intellectually normal,
could not and would not get along anywhere. To subdue the
psychopaths, the Laboratory of Social Hygiene still using
Rockefeller money established a Psychopathic Hospital
in 1916. Among the treatment facilities was a
"hydrotherapy room," where patients in restraints could
be nearly totally immersed for up to two hours.
With disorder reaching scandal proportions,
Governor Alfred E. Smith ordered a second investigation.
In 1919, the Commission of Prisons heard testimony that
prisoners were shackled to their beds for days at a time,
that they were flogged and that they were handcuffed to
a wall with their toes barely reaching the floor while
their faces were pushed into cold water. Officials
admitted the charges in part, and with an explanation.
Prisoners were cuffed to the wall, "but never with their
feet off the floor." The faces of excited or hysterical
girls were sometimes "dip a solution to the "menace of the
feebleminded."
The next year, a Division for Mentally Defective
Delinquent Women (DMDDW) was created on the site of the
former clinic. The DMDDW could receive defectives direct
from the courts or by transfer from Bedford; in either
case, commitments were indefinite.
Inmates saw the DMDDW as another psychopathic
hospital: a way for the reformatory to get rid of
troublemakers. When they realized it also meant their
three-year reformatory sentences had become life terms
with the stroke of a psychiatrist's pen Bedford erupted
into riot. While baffling among themselves with knives
and clubs, 150 women held state troopers and town of
Bedford police at bay until they were finally "clubbed
into submission."
Though Bedford would continue to be called a
reformatory for another 50 years, the institution
envisioned by Lowell and Gibbons was dead. In 1921,
the law requiring a female superintendent was
eliminated so that a strong male hand could keep
the lid on. From then until the appointment of
Henrietta Addition in 1940, Bedford was run by men.
Reorganization: From Westfield State
Farm to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
With the appointment of Dr. Amos T. Baker as
superintendent in 1921, and with commitment to the DMDDW a
visible threat, order was restored at Bedford. Major
changes were not far off. On January 1, 1927, as part
of a reorganization of state government, the reformatory
was placed under the new Department of Correction, which
began preparations for the removal of defectives to Albion
in 1931, thereby making room for there-location of the
women's prison from Auburn to the "Rockefeller Group"
buildings in 1933. The prison and reformatory operated as
two distinct institutions, one-quarter mile apart and
separated by a road, each section enclosed by a fence.
The new complex was renamed the Westfield State Farm.
Except for an occasional escape (one woman
who scaled the fence was soon found in White Plains,
drunk and bloody from the barbed wire), Westfield
functioned uneventfully until the l970’s.
In 1970, Westfield State Farm was reorganized.
Females were removed from the prison section to make way
for males, while the reformatory became a general
confinement facility for women. The two sections
constituted a single institution, renamed Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility. The men and women were kept apart,
but a few coed activities were conducted, such as a
creative writing class and dances.
In December, 1973, the male section was
administratively separated from Bedford, becoming Taconic.
Then, in 1989, in response to the rapidly rising female
census, Taconic converted to a medium-security women's
facility, still distinct from maximum-security Bedford Hills.
New Programming Directions
In addition to the standard DOCS programs,
Bedford has developed new initiatives to help inmates
deal with persistent problems in areas including
parenthood, domestic violence and AIDS. What is
striking about these programs is that, though managed
by employees, they are staffed by inmates.
Bedford's nursery, where new mothers may
keep their babies for up to 18 months, is the oldest
prison nursery in the United States. There is also a
Children's Center with toys and books, arranged to
make children feel comfortable while visiting their
mothers. Both the nursery and the visiting center
are staffed with inmate child care workers. Other
services to mothers use inmate counselors, including
education and advocacy in custody and foster care
situations, and an education program using films
and intensive workshops to improve parenting techniques.
ACE (AIDS Counseling and Education) is
an inmate organization promoting safe behavior and the
elimination of fear and stigma associated with AIDS
and HIV. ACE conducts workshops on housing units and
every other area of the facility. ACE runs prograrms
for those living with the virus and encourages
expression through art, poetry and song. It also
works with outside groups to provide support to women
coming out of prison.
Several programs teach inmates alternatives
to violent behavior. Another helps inmates to cope
with domestic violence in their backgrounds.
Article is from DOCS TODAY May 1999
