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In the early 1800s, English prisons were pits of indecency and brutality. Reform prisoners? Impossible! Everyone assumed prisons were to punish. Period.

So punish (mostly by neglect) they did. In the women's division at Newgate Prison in London, for example, women awaiting trial for stealing apples were crammed into the same cell as women who had been convicted of murder or forgery (which also was a capital crime).

Eating, sleeping, and defecating took place in the same confined area. Women begged or stole to get clothes, alcohol, and food. Many became despondent and sat naked in drunken stupors.

If an inmate had children, they often had to live with her, experiencing the same inhumane conditions. Children clinging to their mothers as they were dragged to the gallows was a horrible scene replayed time and again.

Elizabeth Fry was an unlikely candidate to change the entire criminal justice system, but she did.

Unusual calling
The daughter of an English banker, at 20 she married into another wealthy family. Children came quickly, eventually numbering eleven! It's a wonder she had time for anything else.

Yet years before, when she had rededicated her life to Christ at age 18 and become a Quaker, she had sensed a desire to help the downtrodden. While a young bride and mother, she gave medicine and clothes to the homeless and helped establish a nursing school. In 1813, at age 33, her attention turned to the female prisoners in London's Newgate prison. Elizabeth Fry had found her calling.

At first, Fry's friends and prison officials warned her of two major risks—disease and violence. But she waved the warnings aside and kept visiting, often spending hours inside.

Believing a combination of spiritual care and practical training would turn things around, Fry taught basic hygiene, as well as sewing and quilting (so the women might earn a living when they were released). She read the Bible to inmates and gave Bibles away. She intervened for women on death row. If her pleas were unsuccessful, she accompanied women to the scaffold and comforted them in their last moments.

In 1817, she founded the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate "to provide for the clothing, instruction, and employment of the women; to introduce them to a knowledge of the Scriptures, and to form in them, as much as possible, the habits of sobriety, order and industry, which may render them docile and peaceable whilst in prison, and respectable when they leave it."

Transnational transformer
To nineteenth-century observers, Fry's efforts produced a miracle: many of the reportedly wild and shifty inmates became, under her care, orderly, disciplined, and devout. Mayors and sheriffs from surrounding regions visited Newgate and began initiating reforms in their own jails and prisons.

As early as 1818, she was invited to the House of Commons to report on the state of English prisons, which contributed to the Prison Reform Act of 1823. Later she visited France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany and promoted prison reform throughout Europe.

Age did not dampen the blaze within her. At age 63, she still had the energy to visit every convict ship that carried women prisoners to British colonies. Fry's fire was extinguished only when she died in 1845 at age 65.

Today we expect prisons to reform prisoners—and certainly not to treat them with cruelty or neglect. Elizabeth Fry's faith played a key role in shaping those radical ideas and the prisons we have today.

Adapted from Christian History magazine. To subscribe to Christian History, call 1-800-873-6986.

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