The Farm was designed, Belknap writes, to be “homey,” the atmosphere built to encourage those incarcerated to be “good wives and maids.” (The Farm was indicative of many women’s reformatories of the time Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in upstate New York was once known as the Westfield State Farm. ![]() Instead, they sought to create prisons that would teach women how to appropriately enact their gender. Unlike men, women were incarcerated for offenses like adultery, prostitution and “public lewdness.” Reformers were not interested in challenging the validity of these crimes. According to scholar Joanne Belknap, the coalition’s arguments, however benign in appearance, were rooted in sexism. A coalition of suffragists and public health activists-alongside the conservative women’s group, Daughters of the American Revolution-argued that women who commit crimes should not be housed in prisons with men, even if the populations were held separately. The Farm was constructed during the early-twentieth-century women’s reformatory movement in Connecticut. Still, one could argue that the outlook of the writers in The Hour Glass is not entirely borne from remorse, but also frustration over their inability, lacking that crucial “ something else,” to measure time. ![]() Oleson’s Swiftian proposal reveals what we really want from punishment: not the time itself, but the prisoner’s awareness of its loss. Oleson once proposed an intentionally absurd thought experiment: what if instead of incarcerating people, we put them in a “punitive coma” for the duration of their sentence? Prisoners would simply wake to find themselves older, their time, or rather their punishment, having been painlessly extracted. The social scientist and criminologist J. Indeed, we expect remorse from those we imprison. One could argue that this is a form of apology, repentance for having slipped “down into the easy, dangerous ways which lead to disaster.” They don’t express hope for the new year, but rather focus on lamenting time lost, “as we look back over the twelve months and feel how little has been accomplished.” Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Hour Glass, 1935 In their introduction, they observe that while “the same sands” run through an hourglass, the hours they represent pass “forever.” The writers are referring to the year’s end, and, as they “tear off the last pages of the 1935 calendar,” their outlook is unusual. The writers of The Hour Glass seem acutely aware of this contradiction in measuring time. Instead, as illustrated by the clepsydra, “we are forced to have recourse to the measurement of something else.” One cannot simply “take a little ‘chunk of time’” and put it against a measuring stick, they write. One scholar, writing about the clepsydra and other early time-keeping devices, emphasized the quandary of measuring time, a concept without physical substance. In their introduction they observe that while “the same sands” run through an hourglass, the hours they represent pass “forever.” “To lose water” meant to waste one’s time meanwhile, the Greeks called the clepsydra, literally, “water-thief.” The devices were used in Roman courts, through which they entered common parlance. Similar to an hourglass, a clepsydra measures time through the transfer of water from one vessel to another. It’s prefaced with the descriptions of several time-keeping devices, among them a water clock called a clepsydra. The first issue of The Hour Glass was published in November 1935. “Duties are many and varied,” a woman named Ethel Cooper wrote in 1935, describing a typical day on the farm, “from planting tulip bulbs and roses in our garden to teaching a calf to drink.”īut three surviving issues of the Farm’s internal newsletter-called, evocatively, The Hour Glass-reveal familiar truths about how incarceration, in any guise, distorts a prisoner’s sense of time in ways that run counter to its intended purpose. Built on an old farm in Niantic, a coastal village in Connecticut, this early correctional facility made exclusively for women consisted of a few scattered cottages, a vegetable garden, and a dairy farm. The Connecticut State Farm for Women was a triumph of progressive reform when it opened its doors to twelve prisoners in 1918. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.
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