The Framingham Reformatory Prison for Women, founded in 1877, catalyzed women’s carceral reform. Nineteenth-century reformers advocated for separate prisons to address women’s needs, but by criminalizing certain behaviors and promoting others through domestic skills-based programming and a strong culture of surveillance, women’s prisons became powerful enforcers of white, middle-class norms of gender and sexuality.

Built in 2007 and expanded in 2012, Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center, the state’s newest jail for women, was similarly justified as necessary to meeting women’s “distinct needs". While officials champion the jail as “gender responsive,” activists reject this notion. Women have been shackled during childbirth, denied proper prenatal nutrition, videotaped during strip searches, and many lose custody of their children. As a result of the Drug War, mandatory minimum sentences, and the decimation of the social safety net—and compounded by racism, sexism, and economic injustice—women are the fastest-growing incarcerated population in the United States.