Incorrigibles — Bearing Witness to the Incarcerated Girls of New York
The Municipal Archives has opened a new exhibit at 31 Chambers Street featuring images and information about “incorrigible” girls confined in the New York State Training School for Girls (1904–1975) in Hudson, New York. Artist Alison Cornyn is the director of a transmedia project that tells the stories of the “incorrigible” girls. Kathleen Hulser is the public historian for the project.
The “Incorrigibles” exhibit at the Surrogate’s Court building, 31 Chambers Street.
The box of documents that launched the Incorrigibles project.
In 2013, the owner of a thrift store in Hudson, New York, was parsing her way through a local yard sale for items to sell in her store. She stumbled upon a small cardboard box which contained documents from the 1920’s and 30’s—personal photos and letters, news clippings, medical records, intake forms, and parole paperwork. She purchased the box for five dollars and shared with me its contents. The stories and lives contained in this box were the impetus for Incorrigibles. These found documents all pertained to girls—as young as 12 and as old as 16—who had been incarcerated at the New York State Training School for Girls, an institution that today we would call a youth prison.
By bringing together documents from the box, archival research, artworks, and materials collaboratively developed with different communities, Incorrigibles offers a bridge from the past to the present of girls’ incarceration; a means for us to emotionally and intellectually engage with what has and has not changed in juvenile justice and girls’ detention over the last 100 years. Furthermore, the intimate nature of the source documents and firsthand accounts from women who are still alive today offer clear and uninterrupted insight.
Girl on Bench. Spread in artist book.
Unidentified girl poses for a photo on a bench at the Training School.
“Our chief task and aim, then, with delinquent girls is to protect them from the natural consequences of being girls.” Quote from Training School manager Annie Allen, from her treatise, How To Save Girls Who Have Fallen (1910).
The New York State Training School for Girls, originally known as the Women’s House of Refuge, dates from 1887. It was located on a green hill overlooking the Hudson River. Founder and social reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell imagined a gender-separated prison intended to cure “vice” through virtuous country living.
In the early years of the 20th century, such reformers advocated for special women’s courts, then for similar separate courts for families, young men and women. The Wayward Minors Court from the 1930s and 1940s featured in the exhibition tried to apply an “adjustment” approach, rather than criminalizing the young women brought to it, an approach that resonates with the “trauma-informed” and child-centered approaches of today.
Jewell Ward I. Pigment print on archival paper.
Jewell Ward and an unnamed girl pose for a photo at the Training School. Jewell was born in San Marcos, Texas, and sentenced to the Training School in 1921 for being a “disorderly child.” In 1923, she was discharged and sent to live with her mother in Manhattan.
The term “incorrigible,” which means “incapable of being corrected or amended,” was often used to describe girls who came into contact with the criminal justice system. This exhibition questions the language of stigmatization applied to girls who came before the courts, then and now. Close scrutiny of municipal sources on youth reveals a great fear of young women’s sexuality, a preoccupation with sexually transmitted diseases, and a long-standing de facto form of racial discrimination that largely consigned African-American girls to the harshest forms of imprisonment. Teenagers were frequently prosecuted in adult courts and convicted of crimes such as “pick-up,” prostitution, larceny, con games, “dishonest employee,” and shoplifting.
Language Sampler. Muslin and cotton thread wall hanging. Embroidery by Diana Weymar.
In the 20s and 30s girls at the Training School were trained in ‘Decorative Hand-work’ and ‘Cottage Home-Making’ among other things.This embroidery charts the ebbs and flows of words in culture (between 1800 and 2008) according to Google’s n-grams. While the label of being incorrigible is still used in NY as a subcategory of PINS (person in need of supervision) its overall popularity has decreased. In the current DSM we now have oppositional defiant disorder.
Mayor’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 1944. NYC Municipal Library.
Girls have long been criminalized for “incorrigible” or “defiant” behaviors—running away, fighting at home, or staying out late. These actions are often triggered by underlying problems, including physical or sexual abuse, commercial sexual exploitation and survival sex, and neglect.
As the country engages in a national dialogue around racism, sexism, and misogyny—and the convergence of these harsh realities in the lives of girls of color and LGBT/GNC youth—we must review with new urgency why girls were—and are—being pushed into the justice system.
The exhibit is part of an overall project that records and shares accounts of women alive today who were in the Training School. The records of confinement reveal the roots of today’s policies on juvenile justice and pose larger questions about society’s treatment of young women.
The “Incorrigibles” exhibit will be open through April 2020. It is located in an alcove off the lobby of the Surrogate’s Court building, 31 Chambers Street. It can be viewed during the building opening hours—Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Thursdays to 6 p.m.).
It is also open from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the following Saturdays: February 29, March 14, March 28, and April 11.