William Wilberforce: Fighting the Slave Trade Issue 53 | 1997 Purchase this issue

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Today many people worry that our society is too lenient on prisoners. In the early 1800s, Elizabeth Fry worried about the opposite—and for good reason.

England's prisons were infamous for filth, brutality, and extreme suffering. The idea was to punish not to reform prisoners.

In the women's division, where Fry would direct her greatest reform efforts, inmates were usually crammed into one room: those tried and those awaiting trial, those guilty of misdemeanors and those guilty of capital offenses. Typically a woman's children would accompany her to prison. Thus a woman who, with her children, awaited her trial for stealing an apple lived in the same crammed space as a woman who may have been convicted of murder.

All basic human activities—eating, sleeping, defecation—were performed in the same confined area. Women and children lived in destitute poverty and obtained clothes, alcohol, even food by begging or stealing. Many women simply sat around in a drunken stupor stark naked.

Most prisoners who were not cared for by families or charities remained clothesless or starved to death. Children often remained in the prison until their mothers died or were executed. They clung to their mothers and watched as they were led to the gallows and hung.

Elizabeth Fry was one of the few who sought to do something about all this.

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During her life, Fry worked with the homeless and helped establish a school for nurses. But her greatest legacy was prison reform, and she began that work with almost daily visits to Newgate prison beginning in 1811.

In 1816 she founded a women's society, An Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate. Its object was "to provide for the clothing, instruction, and employment ...