"She Keeps the Place in Continual Excitement:" Female Inmates' Reactions to Incarceration in Antebellum Pennsylvania's Prisons

Abstract

Western State Penitentiary, located in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, received its first inmate on July 31, 1826. Less than a year later, on March 29, 1827, an inmate, Hiram Lindsay, escaped from its confines. It was later discovered that Lindsay was aided by "the coloured woman" who from "feelings of humanity, on the part of her Keeper was not confined that night to her cell." Only one woman was in the prison at the time: Maria Penrose, twenty-one, born in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, and described as having a yellow complexion with black hair and eyes, arrived at the Penitentiary on September 6, 1826, to serve a sentence of two years for larceny committed in Bedford County. She would serve a little over one year and be discharged on December 1, 1827. Penrose was a typical female convict in Western State Penitentiary: she was young, African American, born in Pennsylvania, and convicted of larceny. While Penrose may have only been an accomplice in Lindsay's act of overt resistance to the prison system, her role exemplifies that female inmates were not always passive victims of the penal institutions but found ways to react to and challenge imprisonment.