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Edna Mahan
Abstract
Edna Mahan served as Superintendent of the New Jersey Reformatory for Women for forty years (1928-1968). She rescued the reformatory tradition of separate, rehabilitative institutions for female offenders as it was beginning to flag and sustaining it into the 1960s. She served as a link with the original philosophy of female prisons and is a model for those who, today, seek to rehabilitate, not punish. She was one of the most powerful and successful of twentieth century women's prison superintendents.
The article is based on my biography of Edna Mahan, Excellent Effect: The Edna Mahan Story, published in 1994 by the American Correctional Association. It draws on institutional board minutes, reports, and studies; Mahan's diaries, correspondence, and professional papers; American Correctional Association publications; interviews: and my personal acquaintance with Mahan.
... The Edna Mahan Correctional Facility (Edna Mahan or ECMF), New Jersey's only all-female state prison, is named after the former superintendent who ran the facility from 1928 to 1968 in the spirit of an "open institution" with "student" (prisoner) governance and women housed in "cottages" (Schuman 2020). By the 1960s, however, overcrowding and incidents of violence by prisoners brought calls for more secure confinement (Hawkes 1998 In 1999, two women incarcerated at EMCF sued top prison administrators for "deliberate indifference" to a risk of sexual assault by guards, one of whom repeatedly raped both women between 1997 and 1999. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals, however, upheld the district court's summary judgment for the defendants in Heggenmiller v. Edna Mahan Correctional Institution (2005). ...
In recent years US prisons have failed to meet legally required minimum standards of care and protection of incarcerated people. Explanations for the failure to protect prisoners in the United States focus on the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and lack of adequate external oversight. However, very little scholarship empirically examines how different systems of accountability for prisoners’ rights work (or do not work) together. In this article, we introduce an accountability framework that helps us examine the prisoners’ rights “accountability environment” in the United States. We then compare two post-PLRA case studies of failure to protect incarcerated women from sexual assault in two different states. We find that the prisoners’ rights accountability environment is a patchwork of legal, bureaucratic, professional, and political systems. The patchwork accountability environment consists of a web of hierarchical and interdependent relationships that constrain or enable accountability. We argue that ultimately the effectiveness of prisoners’ rights accountability environments depends on whether protecting prisoners’ rights aligns with the priorities of dominant political officials. Our argument has implications for efforts to improve prison conditions and incarcerated people’s well-being.
This essay provides an overview of the life of Kim Pate, a Canadian activist who works with and on behalf of criminalized women and girls. Highlights of Kim's commendable personal, occupational, political and academic contributions and achievements in both Canada and abroad are presented. Featuring pivotal occupational achievements in Kim's life simultaneously offers a glimpse into the state of affairs in the past decade facing women in Canada's criminal justice system. This essay is based on interviews held with Kim, her colleagues and friends, and my personal acquaintance with her. It brings to life how Kim has and continues to challenge and progress the Canadian criminal justice system as an activist, and how her success is rooted in her extraordinary character as an individual.
To What Extent Can Open Institutions Take the Place of the Traditional Prison?”. Paper presented at the Twelfth international Penal and Penitentiary Congress
- Edna Mahan
American Correctional Association (1973), and Superintendent, Ohio Reformatory for Women
- Martha E Wheeler
- President