Doing Time

Institutional Rhythms of Women’s Industrial Reformatories (1850-1970)

 Prison is often described as a space of confinement, yet it is equally a system of temporal discipline. While architectural history has traditionally framed prisons as ‘timeless’ structures focused on spatial containment, this article examines how time itself was a mechanism of gendered control within industrial women’s reformatories, which emerged across North America, Australia, and New Zealand between 1850 and 1970. Racialized, disabled, working class, and Indigenous women were disproportionately targeted, particularly after 1920. Although Michel Foucault and Robin Evans have characterised reform architecture as an interconnected archipelago of institutions functioning within a carceral system, the gendered experience of time within these detaining spaces remains largely unexamined.

Exploring three key institutional examples – Bedford Reformatory (New York, 1901), Andrew Mercer Reformatory (Toronto, 1880), and Sherborn Reformatory (Massachusetts, 1877) – this study traces the spatio-temporal mechanisms shaping women’s incarceration. Challenging assumptions about prison as a static site, the article demonstrates that women’s reformatories structured carceral time by instituting the idea of the ‘family’ as a mode of governance. The indeterminate sentence imposed prolonged uncertainty, while ‘maintenance time’ was weaponized through institutional schedules, from labour cycles to moral training that mediated perceived relationships between inside and outside.  Reformatory architecture reinforced this system, creating spatial progressions that materialized reform; women moved from austere cells to homely rooms, mirroring the trajectory toward expected domestic reintegration.

Women’s reformatories disrupted and restructured worldly flows, assembling the ‘outside’ into controlled circuits that moved through grated cells, narrow passages, door slits, and the thresholds between individual spaces (cells, hospital rooms) and shared environments (visiting rooms, theatrical events, chapels). Broader surveillance networks funneled women into these institutions. Legal frameworks, such as the Vagrancy Act and the Female Refuges Act, criminalized women’s mobility, policing their movement through the city and channeling them into reformatories for moral ‘transgressions. Inside these institutions, the labour of reform – cleaning, mending, caregiving – blurred the boundaries between prison and domestic life, enforcing a disciplinary model of ‘family time’ that extended beyond incarceration. By considering the women’s reformatory through the lenses of indeterminacy, imminence, and movement, we can understand how time played a significant role in shaping women’s carceral space, bringing penal rhythms into contrast with inmates’ temporal and relational continuities.  

Prison is often described as a box outside of time, an architecture of walls, borders, and separation. Its euphemisms reveal the experience of enclosure: terms like the wire, box, and yard emphasize boundaries, while the hole, inside, and chokey evoke the depths of confinement and the separation of inmates from the outside world. Sometimes, the language of prison is rooted in action; penitentiary, for instance, derives from the act of penitence and regret. Less examined, however, are the temporal metaphors that shape carceral experience. Writing about his time on death row, political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal described prison as a temporal box, encapsulating how incarceration is measured in time: doing time, a lag, a stretch, or even life in prison¹. Other phrases gesture toward the deadness of time behind bars: behind the clock, hard time, dead time, flat time, frozen time. The American Psychiatry Association defines ‘chronophobia’ as the specific condition inmates develop when facing the prospect of prolonged confinement². Yet despite these temporal dimensions, architectural history has characterized prisons as 'timeless spaces' emphasizing spatial containment over carceral time³. Focusing on the industrial women’s reformatory – a detaining space that targeted North American women for reform between 1850 and 1970 – this article challenges assumptions about the gendered politics of time, labour, and reform, both inside and outside the prison walls. It reconsiders the architecture of women’s reform in temporal terms, highlighting the fraught conditions that emerge when values surrounding family, maintenance, and the regulation of women’s movement are mobilized as modes of penal governance.

In the late nineteenth century, a new type of women’s prison emerged in British and European colonies as part of new nation-building efforts: the industrial women’s reformatory. Spatial and temporal mechanisms had long been used to discipline and shape women’s lives; thus, these later reformatories are genealogically linked to earlier systems of containment. Early modern Beguinages were women’s communities with enclosed walls and systems of daily life at a remove from the host city. So-called Houses for Fallen Women (Casas de Arrepentidas) and various forms of reformatory prisons were also common across pre-industrial European cities, designed to remove and contain women perceived as threats to moral order⁴. Like Magdalene Laundries, which tarnished unconventional and marginalized women as “sinners”, many of these earlier antecedents of women’s reform architecture were managed by religious authorities. In the late nineteenth century, women’s reform became secularized with the rise of middle-class women’s philanthropic movements, such as the Women’s League, YMCA, and other grassroots charitable associations. Throughout England and the British colonies, former manors and houses were revamped into multi-unit night refuges and reform accommodation for short and medium-term stays, respectably⁵. Similarly, in America, women’s reformatories rapidly emerged in line with prison reform movements.

Removed from the hustle of urban life, industrial reformatories could be found in most American states by the early twentieth century, until 1970, when the reform system—its legal apparatus and architecture – was dismantled. Unlike conventional prisons, these reform institutions were factories that trained women for reintegration into the feminized workforce as housewives, domestics, and servants. Women were subjected to a system of reform based on a rigorous schedule of domestic labour at various scales, both familial and societal. While some were trained in household activities, others laundered and mended uniforms for neighboring prisons and asylums in the massive industry-scaled workhouses⁶. Emerging from the prison reform movement and evolving alongside new legislation, women’s reformatories embodied conservative maternalistic ideologies that targeted ‘wayward’ women deemed likely to commit so-called crimes of morality. Not crimes so much as transgressions, acts such as marrying interracially, vagrancy, intoxication, sex work, and, in some cases, stubbornness, could result in young women being confined in these institutions. State archives document the lives of inmates; most women were working-class, of Irish and European descent, until 1920, when these systems of reform laid the tracks for more systematic incarceration of Black and Indigenous women⁷.

Although reform programming varied depending on the reformatory superintendent – some resembling traditional prisons more than others – they were state-operated and built to designs by public works architects. However, in their early years, networks of reformers from Canada and the northern United States collaborated to develop designs and programs for these reform institutions, with new ideas and information about women’s incarceration flowing across borders⁸. This article focuses on three key institutional examples, designed within a few decades of each other, that illustrate the web of power established by superintendents and reformers: Sherborn Reformatory in Massachusetts (1877), Andrew Mercer Reformatory in Toronto (1880), and Bedford Hills Reformatory in New York (1901) (figg. 1 and 3). Resembling asylums, prisons, and other institutional architecture, women’s reformatories took one of two forms. Some were congregate setting facilities, such as Sherborn and Mercer, holding two hundred, or more, prisoners in a sprawling campus (fig. 2). Others adopted the 'cottage system' program, especially after 1900, featuring smaller clusters of buildings that created a less overtly carceral environment for reform, as seen in Bedford, New York (fig. 3) and Niantic, Connecticut. Regardless of their spatial programming, women’s reformatories operated as self-contained societies, removed from the world yet replicating the functions of an idealized maternal society, with nurseries, clinics, a hospital, various types of cells designed for reform, recreation areas, and workhouses (fig. 4). Importantly, women labourers, including officers and superintendents, also resided collectively within these institutions, making them a compelling study of the intersection between care and power.

Despite extensive studies on carceral institutions, the spatio-temporal dynamics of women’s reformatories remain largely unexamined. Women’s reformatories operated within the framework of what Erving Goffman called the ‘total institution,’ environments that stripped individuals of autonomy through rigid routines, surveillance, and enforced conformity⁹. Goffman conceptualized the total institution as an architecture of walls and barriers, socially separating staff from inmates, and preventing communication between the inside and outside, realms conceived contrastingly as stasis and social mobility, respectively. Goffman’s conceptualization of carceral time as both vast and dead mirrors the spatial divisions of the total institution, which forms a rigid architecture of walls separating inmates from the outside world. Assuming prison time unfolds in a vacuum, he writes that “[i]n many cases having a lot of time is of little value to people who have no time of their own such as prisoners in a total institution¹⁰", which functions as a “dead sea in which little islands of vivid, encapturing activity appear”¹¹. These little islands of activity – courses or craft events, but also illicit events like sexual encounters, drinking and drugs, and gambling – puncture the crushing existential fog of “dead and heavy-hanging time”¹².

Time was more central to Michel Foucault’s concept of the penal disciplinary process. Discipline and Punish traced the shift in Western carceral practices away from corporal punishment and toward the development of institutions that standardized reformative discipline¹³. Foucault described the carceral as a condition of modern society, linking it to the regulation of citizenship and the expansion of disciplinary control beyond prison walls. This system merged with other institutions, including orphanages, reformatories, hospitals, training schools, and migrant detention centers, embedding carceral logic within broader social structures. Relying on the structure of soft incarceration, inmates in reform institutions were encouraged to engage in a practice of mutual surveillance, swapping the visible apparatus of prisons, such as electric gates, fortifications, and locked doors for open, collective spaces, where the relationships between the powerful and passive are enabled through systems, rituals, and relational acts. Creating “docile bodies”, modern conditions expanded the penal system and weaponized time for disciplinary purposes¹⁴. Although Foucault did not address women’s reformatories directly, his theories about the role of time cannily captured the logistics of its reform system. Timetables ensured that time was segmented into strict blocks and schedules, ensuring reform-oriented and labour-based productivity amongst inmates. Each day was rhythmically regulated by cycles of work, rest, and moral training to discipline the body-mind. Over the course of a prison term, repetitive exercises were enforced to instill behavioural habits and create automized responses to the pattern of the outside world. Notably, the regimentation of these penal reform systems shaped how reformers envisioned temporarily and its role in the process of reform, conditioning inmates to internalize discipline as a continuous structure that was both self-imposed and self-regulated where inmates learned to monitor themselves even in the absence of direct oversight. From this perspective, time was not spent but rather invested; every scheduled task was banked toward a linear process of individual rehabilitation, making discipline appear as a natural progression instead of an imposed system.

Arguably, however, neither Goffman nor Foucault addressed the gendered dimension of penal reform, nor specifically women’s reformatories, where time structured all aspects of women’s spatial experience and functioned as a tool of control. Recently, Dominique Moran and Azrini Wahidin have shown that time organizes the carceral experience from the prison sentencing, internal disciplinary strategies, frictions between clock time and experiential time, and the stasis of dead time¹⁵. Prison is not a “terminal destination”, but rather “a spatio-temporal process” for inmates, who perceive incarceration as a stretch of time, comprising a negotiation between their lived experience of time and the rigid structures of prison time¹⁶. As Wahidin writes, “[t]ime in prison is mediated by the boundaries of the institution, imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rules, practices and procedures. The use of ‘time as imposed’ seeks to eliminate ‘choice’ and in turn instils dependency,” denying inmates “the capacity to create meaningful and symbolic relations with prison-time and external time in the free society”¹⁷. Deepening Doreen Massey’s framework of space/time, Moran and Wahidin argue that penal space is not merely a container for temporal systems but is dynamically shaped by them¹⁸. Arguably, as explored here, women’s reformatories manipulated time in distinctly gendered ways. Reformatories’ process of penal reform was governed by a type of ‘family time’ tied to conventional ideas about the order in which life events should unfold in the lives of young women, from marriage to family, and other socially acceptable sequences¹⁹. In the context of lifespan, reform institutions were framed as a discrete interruption, separate from the woman’s broader life course²⁰. At a more granular level, the acts of reform were embedded in labour processes that regulated inmates to the institution’s clock time. Within reformatories, time was not only a tool of discipline but also a mechanism for imposing class, racial, and gendered trajectories, shaping expectations about the roles of incarcerated women in society. 

Most women contained within reformatories were turned in by a civic official, social worker, or family member, while many inmates were taken directly from the streets²¹. Between 1870 and 1950, women from the southern states and rural areas were drawn to large North American cities to work in factories, in other people’s homes as domestic workers, and in department stores, believing these would be stepping stones to new opportunities²². Working class women and Black women disproportionately found themselves in these situations. Saidiya Hartman has written about how the movement of young Black women through the public sphere – whether strolling, protesting, or working – was perceived as a threat both to societal order and to women themselves²³. Because media depicted women as the most vulnerable targets for organized gang activity in thriving metropolitan underworld networks, from the 1870s, legislation, philanthropic organizations, and social work focused on the protection of ‘girls’, a term widely used to describe mobile single women²⁴. At that time, women passed through train stations, piers, docks and other urban spaces, which were key thresholds between women and the fast-moving networks of crime²⁵. By 1880, the Travellers’ Aid Society (TAS) was initiated by the philanthropist Grace Hoadley Dodge to form a vast network of women-to-women surveillance run by women social workers across the American northern states²⁶. Waiting at train and ferry stations to intercept and direct newly arrived women toward shelters or appropriate addresses, TAS workers’ interventions ranged from guidance to coercion, sometimes detaining single women in apartment-style shelters and involving law enforcement²⁷.

Legislation governed and regulated women’s mobility in the late 19th and early 20th centuries combined with surveillance networks and detention, while also delaying their autonomy. The Vagrancy Act established a body of legislation, adopted in Canada and the U.S. from England, that regulated who could occupy and move through public space²⁸. By 1900 most provinces and states enacted ordinances prohibiting certain public acts that promoted “incivility, immorality, or disorder”²⁹. Although scholars have demonstrated that these laws targeted Black and working class men and women, they were also tools to control women, especially “common night walkers” (sex workers), “persons wandering or strolling around from place to place without any lawful purpose or object, habitual loafers”, or those “habitually spending their time by frequenting houses of ill fame”³⁰. These laws made lingering without purpose illegal, but their ambiguity gave police officers authority in interpreting their moral valence. For women, loitering, lingering, or simply being present in high-motion or fast-paced public spaces was considered a violation of the Vagrancy Act. In 1893, the Canadian Female Refuges Act allowed judges to commit women to reform institutions for moral transgressions, such as public intoxication or vagrancy. Between 1893 and 1919, the law was amended multiple times to expand the list of transgressive acts – including asking for money in the street and being a non-compliant daughter – while also broadening enforcement, allowing anyone to report a woman. These laws reinforced the feminine chrono-normativity of ‘family time’, a phenomenon that Tamara Hareven has referred to as the designation of family values to the timing of life events, such as marriage, birth of a child, leaving home, and the transition of individuals into different roles as the family moves through its life course³¹. When the sequencing of family time was violated, women were often sent to reformatories, which institutionalized the role of family³². These laws targeted women who were out of sync with society’s conservative temporal norms – ‘fast’ women were perceived as deviating from the expected rhythm of feminine life.

Reformatories imposed a “bundle of legal, political, and social practices of exclusion” on working class, racialized, non-gender conforming, and disabled women identified to have the potential to commit moral transgressions³³. Unlike prison, women incarcerated in reformatories were held with “indeterminate” sentences that expanded or contracted at the whim of the superintendents and officers. With a determined sentence, time is counted down. But with an indeterminate one, the boundaries of space and time blur, creating a sense of prolonged uncertainty. Influenced by Alexander Maconochie’s Mark System, the concept of the indeterminate sentence aimed to promote rehabilitation over fixed punishment. A British penal reformer, Maconochie developed the system to reward prisoners for evidence of reformed behaviour through labour and education by allowing them to swap marks for privileges. Ultimately the focus on marks shifted penal practice from a fixed collective punishment to individualized rehabilitation³⁴. For this system to function, reform institutions adopted practices that mimicked – albeit in a distorted form – those of the outside world. Believing that women’s prison and homelife should be conceptually porous, reformers argued that routines and social structures, such as diet and recreation, should reflect ordinary practices. Inmates would go to school, learn trades, work, and be medically treated within the walls of the micro-society. Their beds should have sheets, pillowcases, and bedding allowing for the ‘softening’ of youthful women inmates. It was thought that deviant women should be subjected to new physical habits, allowing for “new neural paths” to be “made and connected”³⁵. These ideas undergirded the reformatory movement, influencing the design and organization of the first women’s reformatories at Indiana, Sherborn, Mercer, and later, Bedford.

On the other hand, though architects imagined these societies of penal reform as imprints of the world, they also designed systems that regulated the flows between the actual world outside and the space within the prison³⁶. Documents from both inmates’ memoirs and procedural reports tell us that women did not enter these complexes through the front door³⁷. At the Mercer Reformatory women were first brought into a receiving room, where they were held for several days in a threshold space that acclimatized them to the penal environment³⁸. After 1917, Mercer’s solitary confinement cells acted as the receiving rooms, where women were checked for sexually transmitted diseases before being released into their own cells on the upper floors. Similarly at Sherborn Reformatory, receiving rooms constituted a narthex, or threshold, that mediated the pace of outside space (fig. 5). Receiving officers developed an inventory of each woman’s personal belongings, which were removed and stored in a warehouse room. Among these belongings were timepieces and watches, ensuring that the institution’s clock time became a dominant penal apparatus.  

By design, reformatories controlled how the outside world flowed into the prison by banning personal effects, limiting commodities in prison canteens, providing a supervised room for visitors, and ultimately ensuring that the carceral interior remained both physically distant and temporally disjointed from outside. Bedford and Sherborn’s state archives contain letters intended for prisoners, often withheld by superintendents³⁹. Moreover, the rhythm of inmates was highly controlled, linking movement between cells, workspaces, dining halls, and recreation to the individual process of reform. As women demonstrated compliance over the course of their sentences at Mercer Reformatory, they were gradually moved from austere brick prison cells near the entrance to spaces deeper within the building, eventually reaching larger homelike rooms, with white-painted walls and a window. Inmates would take different paths through the facility, depending on their status in the process of reform. As a result, many women described these institutions in temporally fragmented ways, with little objective sense of the building’s spatial layout, knowing only certain short paths – from the cell to the hospital, from the clinic to solitary confinement, from the cell to the chapel (fig. 6). Their sense of carceral reform space was shaped by these brief, structured durations of controlled movement. Other temporal experiences were strictly standardized: pulleys embedded within the walls regulated food distribution, moving through ventilation ducts and minimizing interaction between confined inmates and others. Small slots in the doors of solitary confinement cells in the basements allowed trays of food to be passed through at regimented times⁴⁰. Inmates who died in captivity were contained in the death room before being transferred with the most direct route to the exit (fig. 7). The most extreme form of containment – solitary confinement – was a banishment from clock time. Women inmates were punished by sending them to solitary cells to “have a think”⁴¹. George Ropes, the architect of Sherborn Reformatory tucked the solitary cells away on the ground floor (fig. 8). Public works architect Kivas Tully’s drawings for the Mercer Reformatory locate these isolation cells in the basement, removed from the activities of the reform society. 

The industrialization of women’s reform incorporated capitalist strategies from factories and mills, imposing regimented schedules and labour discipline. E.P. Thompson has argued that this type of control, or ‘time-thrift’, that fuses time with economic rhythm and the logistical and disciplinary movement of bodies is organized by “the time-sheet, the time keeper, the informers and the fines”⁴². At both Sherborn and Bedford, women’s reformatory superintendents made use of time ledgers to manage labour, punishment, and privileges⁴³. However, the prisoners’ experience of time was profoundly shaped – and distorted – by the rhythms of care labour: cleaning, washing, and mending. Men’s prison reform also centralized labour, though most of it was productive work: making objects, furniture, and commodities that would later enter the economy of the outside world. Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt distinguished between the repetitive, non-productive labour of women’s work, which sustains systems, objects, or human life, and the more generative, inventive male-associated work typically associated with the political realm of the public sphere⁴⁴. Arendt characterized labour as the embodied processes that comprise the sphere of reproduction responsible for maintenance and sustenance – cleaning, dusting, caring – leaving nothing lasting behind⁴⁵. Its cyclical nature is both transient and necessary, requiring that it persist, always needing to be redone. Because reproductive labour operates outside the direct production of commodities and services, its value has remained marginalized and its praxis invisible, especially when carried out within institutional confinement⁴⁶.

Industrial reformatories merged two distinct temporal experiences: the indefinite deferral of release and the unrelenting present of continuous labour. Labour traditionally performed in the home became the basis for what constituted ‘a day’, blurring the boundaries of home and prison. Domestic labour was scaled to the class and race of inmates; young white women were often taught how to manage their own homes, while Black and working-class women were trained as servants in the homes of others. Spaces of care labour occupied the centre of these institutions: hospitals, clinics, laundry rooms, kitchens, workrooms, and closets. Sherborn’s massive workhouse occupied an entire wing, housing a factory where women performed industrial labor focused on urban-scale domestic maintenance, such as baking and laundering. In Toronto’s Mercer Reformatory, the factory extended perpendicularly from the institution’s core, where women laundered clothing for men’s prisons and asylums. Inmates deemed able to eventually maintain their own families were allowed to work in smaller domestic rooms at the ends of the cell wings (fig. 6). In the long galleries in front of the cells, they engaged in family-scaled domestic practices such as setting tables, knitting in armchairs, and other forms of household labour. 

Homelife and care labour has the creative potential to be identity affirming and transformative, as bell hooks, Iris Marion Young, and Joan Tronto, have argued⁴⁷. Care ethicists have offered the mother-child paradigm to suggest that care plays a significant role in establishing reciprocal relationships of mutual growth and creativity, even though the mother is undeniably participating in reproductive labour and maintenance practices⁴⁸. Moreover, Silvia Federici has demonstrated that care practices have meaningful value in ‘commoning’ strategies, particularly when embedded in collective processes⁴⁹. However, because women’s industrial reformatories enacted penal reform through domestic work, they offered none of these frameworks for the development of meaning through acts of maintenance.

Women were sometimes paid for their labour at the end of their prison sentence, allowing them to take some money with them upon release. However, most of the proceeds from their mending and washing were redirected toward the physical upkeep of the institutions⁵⁰. Lisa Baraitser has argued that maintenance carries a dual meaning, both sustaining life and propping up existing systems⁵¹. “Maintenance time” serves to keep “things functioning or in a steady state, allowing what already exists to continue or persevere, to carry on being.” Baraitser argues that maintenance exists within conflicting temporalities: a horizontal axis “stumbling blindly on”, and the “vertical axis of holding up”⁵². Women inmates performed maintenance work not to sustain their own families but to uphold a disciplinary ideal of family in the abstract—reinforced through the spatial organization of the institution, where dormitories, workrooms, and communal areas mimicked a patriarchal model of maternal domesticity⁵³. Therefore, the “holding up” of maintenance performed by inmates refers to the preservation of the idea of family as a disciplinary ideal. In these reform institutions, reproductive labour was labour without home, maintenance without direct relationality, and care work that sustained an abstract moral order rather than familial survival. 

Professional women also resided within these institutions, adding a complex dimension to women’s containment, while further eroding the distinction between home and prison. As one of the first types of institutions to give rise to new feminized roles in the workforce, from their inception, reformatories throughout North America gave rise to a professional network of women’s police officers, lawyers in the Women’s Court, social workers, and doctors specializing in women’s health. Reformatories also housed the matrons and officers, who lived in collective apartments within the institutional complexes (fig. 9). The superintendent’s home was often built into the institution, where she worked professionally without being fully ensconced in the public sphere (fig. 10). Caregiving labour within these institutions took many forms, entangling care with power and producing violent hierarchies between professional women employees and women inmates. Officers served inmates food, matrons cared for inmates' children, and superintendents adopted a maternal approach that framed the reformatory in familial terms, treating inmates as children in need of guidance and correction⁵⁴. For professional women, the experience of time was also shaped by the institutional rhythms of surveillance, discipline, and caregiving. While they occupied positions of authority, their daily routines were similarly structured by the demands of the reformatory, because as women working in fields ‘before their time’ they, too, had to be contained.

From the nineteenth-century, state-run and secularized women’s reformatories in North America structured the time and space of incarcerated women in new ways. While Foucault and Goffman have addressed institutions broadly in terms of reform, temporal discipline, and the containment of penal architectures, nither addressed the unique gendered history of these reformatory architectures. The imposition of disciplinary temporalities that dictated women’s movement, labour, and moral rehabilitation, was persistent both within and outside of institutions, reinforcing chrono-normative expectations about women’s roles in the domestic and social order. By merging the temporal systems inherent in industrial labour with the cyclical temporality of reproductive work, reformatories created a unique penal system in which women’s time was distinct from societal order. Women professionals employed by the reformatories were also subjected to the rhythms of containment, sequestered from the outside world. From women-to-women surveillance networks in the city to the family-like structure of reformatory systems, the idea of home was weaponized against incarcerated women.

While in the first few decades, these institutions targeted women of European descent, possibly because these demographics were expected to be reformed, they reserved soft punishment for white women, while harsher penal control targeted Black and Indigenous women⁵⁵. After 1950, many women’s reformatories functioned as prisons without the reform element⁵⁶. Twenty years later, the reform institutions that were not dismantled were transformed into prisons⁵⁷. Although intended to be adjacent to the prison system, reformatories laid the tracks along which penal systems have unfolded into our current day, contributing to violent practices that divide and oppress women along class and colour lines. By inviting middle class women to participate in penal reform as superintendents and matrons, reformatories enforced and normalized racial and class divisions between women. Much of the legislation developed to enforce feminine reform was “colourblind” on paper. However, Michelle Alexander has shown that detaining legislation was vague enough to be locally enforced through racially discriminatory customs, disproportionately targeting Black and Indigenous people – as seen in the vagrancy and mischief laws introduced (and persisting) after the dismantling of slavery⁵⁸. By controlling women and criminalizing non-criminal behaviour – loitering in the evening, marrying inter-racially, being in the wrong place with the wrong colour of skin – reformatories persisted earlier systems of inequity that were increasingly unacceptable in wider society. In the 1950s, women were increasingly imprisoned for civil rights activism and other political action that was deemed criminal in nature instead of a protest for human rights. Moreover, the systems of indefinite detention used for women would become widely used for the detention of immigrant populations. As Angela Davis has argued, we must not

ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls⁵⁹. 

Considering these institutions of reform as temporal-spatial strategies for controlling women, through architecture, legislation, and embodiment sheds light on the role of containment in nation-building practices throughout North America and beyond, but also serves as a warning about how penal architecture continues to shape the limitations of women's freedoms.