The Women’s Prison Association
is the nation’s oldest service
and advocacy organization working exclusively
with criminal justice-involved women
and their families.
Over the past 160 years, WPA has remained
committed to its clients as it has adapted
to serve their changing needs. WPA has
worked determinedly to bring women’s
perspectives to systems in which they
are often absent or ignored.
WPA was founded in January 1845 as an
offshoot of the Prison Association of
New York [now known as the Correctional
Association.] The Prison Association
of New York was a fledging advocacy organization
when a group of women met with founder
Isaac T. Hopper, an abolitionist Quaker,
to establish a task force to investigate
the conditions facing incarcerated women
in nineteenth-century New York. After
visiting New York City-area prisons,
the women found that incarceration was
often an inadequate response to criminality
among New York’s swelling immigrant
population. Their recommendation was
straightforward: “a home needs
to be provided for the homeless; other
doors need to be open to them than those
that lead to deeper infamy.”
These women founded the Female Department,
a “regularly constituted body” of
the Prison Association, dedicated to
the “amelioration of the condition
of female prisoners.” Among the
group’s leaders were Abigail Gibbons,
Hopper’s daughter, and Catherine
Sedgwick, a well-known novelist who would
eventually become the agency’s
first director.
Six months later, Hopper Home, a residence
for criminal justice-involved women designed
to impart training and encourage rehabilitation,
was established on Fourth Street near
Eighth Avenue. (Hopper Home later moved
to 191 Tenth Avenue and in 1874, to 110
Second Avenue, its present location.)
At that time, most of WPA’s clients
were Irish immigrants struggling with
alcohol dependency – an addiction
exacerbated for many by the extreme poverty
that they faced. Gibbons and her staff
worked tirelessly to provide these women
with a place to stay, a supportive community, and practical skills
training. Hopper Home was a self-supporting
community of women until the mid-twentieth
century.
In 1853, the Female Department separated
from the Prison Association and Gibbons
obtained a New York State charter for
her group, now known as the Women’s
Prison Association.
With each passing decade, the influence
of the agency grew. Under Gibbons’ leadership,
WPA undertook an aggressive program of
legislative lobbying: WPA supported a
mandate requiring female matrons in all
state penal facilities holding women
prisoners, protested jail overcrowding,
urged the creation of a separate reformatory
for women and girls in Bedford, N.Y.,
and demanded that women prisoners be
searched only by female matrons.
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By the early twentieth century,
WPA’s mission included prison outreach
and grassroots lobbying carried out by
a corps of volunteers and a small paid
staff. As the federal government began
to increase its investments in local
criminal justice issues in the 1960s,
WPA received its first governmental funding.
And, in the 1980s, WPA shifted its service
emphasis to using Hopper Home as a federal
work release facility. The organization
terminated this contract in 1990.
In the early 1990s, criminal justice-involved
women faced mounting challenges: the
United States prison system was in the
midst of unprecedented expansion—and
women were the fastest growing segment
of this population. There had never been
a greater need for WPA’s services. WPA
set about a course to reinvent itself
as a large-scale provider of services
by creating a continuum of care responsive
to the diverse and interconnected needs
of its clients.
In 1992, WPA renovated Hopper Home and
reopened the facility as a residential
alternative to incarceration (ATI) program
for women facing substantial state prison
sentences, usually for drug charges.
One year later, WPA opened the Sarah
Powell Huntington House (SPHH). Huntington
House is a groundbreaking program that
provides a transitional residence with
supportive services to aid homeless,
criminal justice-involved women in reunifying
with their children. In its first ten
years of operation, SPHH reunited over
300 women with their children.
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While launching these residential programs,
WPA also developed a variety of programs
for the 25% of criminal justice-involved
New York women who are HIV-positive.
WPA staff worked in the city jail, state
prisons, and the community providing
HIV education, discharge planning and
case management services.
WPA was selected to coordinate the inmate
peer HIV/AIDS education and support programs
known as ACE and CARE at the Bedford
Hills and Taconic correctional facilities,
respectively.
WPA also identified the acute need for
services to help all criminal justice-involved
women move successfully from incarceration
to the community. WPA began its efforts
to fill this need by offering “common
sense” services like discharge
planning and transitional services for
women who were not HIV-positive.
To address this important gap in service,
the New York City Council established
an initiative to provide discharge planning
services at Rikers Island in 2000. WPA was
selected to provide these services to
women in the jail system. As clients’ needs
changed, WPA’s Rikers Island initiative
adapted to these new circumstances.
In 2001 WPA had the opportunity to assume operation of WomenCare, a program providing
mentoring services to women leaving the
jail and prison systems. This capacity further enhanced WPA's ability to provide support to its clients.
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In 1994, WPA published the Rights and
Responsibilities of Incarcerated Parents,
written by the Inmate Foster Care Committee
of the Children’s Center at the
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
This groundbreaking publication became
the basis for a new project, the Incarcerated
Mother’s Law Project (IMLP), co-sponsored
by WPA and the Volunteers of Legal Services
(VOLS). IMLP provided workshops for incarcerated
mothers to aid them in dealing with visitation
and family court issues. The program’s
services began at state prisons, and
were subsequently expanded to the city
jail and then to women in WPA’s
community-based services. A collaborative
project, IMLP enjoys close working relationships
with VOLS, South Brooklyn Legal Services,
and the Center for Family Representation.
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In the late 1990s, research began to
show that most New York prisoners came
from one of a small number of New York
City neighborhoods. These same neighborhoods
were disproportionately affected by poverty,
poor housing, a range of health problems,
and child abuse and neglect.
WPA embarked on the development of a
neighborhood approach to addressing the
interconnected needs of women, families
and communities. We selected one
of the most distressed and under-served
areas in the city, the East New York
area of Brooklyn.
WPA initially established the Brooklyn
Community Office (BCO) in East New York
in 1999. The BCO’s first project
was a family preservation program that
provided intensive case management to
families in which the mother’s
substance abuse put her children at risk
of abuse and/or neglect, and thus of
removal from the home.
To address the lack of local substance
abuse treatment, WPA invited a private
drug treatment program, Realization Center,
to provide services at WPA’s Brooklyn
offices.
In 2004, WPA and Housing + Solutions
worked in partnership to open Sunflower
House, an affordable, self-governed permanent
sober residence for employed former prisoners.
Sunflower House, located just blocks
from BCO, houses eight women who pay
rent, maintain sobriety and employment,
and share responsibility in managing
the house.
In 2005, the Brooklyn Community Office
further expanded its services to include
case management and a structured day
program for criminal justice-involved
women living in East New York, as well
as in the adjacent neighborhoods of Bushwick
and Brownsville.
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As WPA entered the twenty-first century,
it continued to adapt to its clients’ changing
needs by identifying three key directions
its work: WPA began to develop new housing
opportunities for its clients. It enhanced
its ability to address the mental health
needs of clients. And WPA founded the
Institute on Women & Criminal Justice
in 2004 to create a national conversation
on women and criminal justice in relation
to families and communities.
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After 160 years of continuous service
spanning three centuries, The Women’s
Prison Association serves approximately
2500 women and their families each year.
While Irish immigrants no longer make
up the majority of the women we serve—today
they are more likely to be African-American
or Latino—poverty and substance
abuse remain the factors underlying their
involvement in the criminal justice system.
Current responses to crime do little
to reduce recidivism, especially for
women. Women involved in the criminal
justice system continue to face challenges
obtaining housing, employment, and healthcare
and maintaining their families.
WPA remains steadfast in its commitment
to empower individuals, strengthen families,
and connect criminal justice-involved
women to the community. Its success and
longevity is due largely to an approach
that honors each woman’s experience
and offers her meaningful opportunities
to see new possibilities for her own
life.
