As California seeks to expand its rehabilitation systems, it might look to its first women’s prison as a model. The Correctional Institution for Women in Tehachapi, Calif. was the state’s first women’s prison, and for a short time it exemplified many of the characteristics the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation now seeks to build in its facilities.
CIW, as it was known, was built in 1931 to house only women. Before that, women prisoners were housed at San Quentin along with male offenders in the old hospital building known then as the Women’s Ward,” according to a column in Tehachapi News by journalist Jon Hammond.
Both the architecture and approach was unlike anything other prison that existed in the state.
Three large two-story “cottages” housed the inmates in dormitories that included a kitchen, dining and living rooms, the story said. The facility looked more like a “small college or elite boarding school.”
Inside, unarmed female employees known as “matrons” were in charge of directing and managing more than 300 prisoners.
Jobs were voluntary and ran the gamut from the sewing shop to working in the gardens. For example, the women at Tehachapi were not issued uniforms, but they were given a variety of fabrics and colors from which they made their own clothes. By 1948, more than 95 women worked in sewing shop.
The women also farmed to supply their own meat, such as poultry and eggs, and they prepared their own meals. Dairy goods came from cows they milked and kept in the barn.
Some of the women were minor offenders, while others were felons. That included Juanita Spinelli and Louise Peete, who spent years at CIW prior to their execution in the SQ gas chamber.
Still, Hammond’s great-aunt worked at CIW as a matron, he wrote, and “she told me that the demeanor of the prisoners was generally respectful and pretty relaxed, and it was definitely not a violent place.”
The prison’s eventual demise came not as the result of any political decision but via the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake. Many of the prison buildings were heavily damaged, and the women were moved to a new facility in Chino CA.
When the facility was rebuilt, it became a conventional men’s prison, and the experiment in what Hammond called “a different kind of incarceration” came to an end.
But the facility’s history continues to provide an early model of rehabilitation in incarceration and what’s possible when prisoners are treated with “more respect and compassion,” he concluded.
