In 1908, superintendent William Venn of the McGregor Mission, a philanthropic organization in Detroit, Michigan, championed a proposal for a female adviser in police court proceedings. Venn argued that an adviser would help female defendants avoid a sentence in the Detroit House of Correction, the city jail and state prison for incarcerated women. Venn described how a young Black girl, “a first offender on the usual charge” (i.e., common prostitution), who had been “given $5 or 30 days” by the judge, disdained the thought of going to prison. “She bore evidences of refinement, and the thought of going to the house of correction appalled her. She was a stranger in the city.” Venn emphasized that the girl was new to Detroit and could have been an immigrant arriving through Canada or a migrant from the South. Her incarceration underscored the limited choices many poor girls faced in Detroit’s criminal justice system at the turn of the twentieth century. The Detroit Free Press amplified penal reformers’ arguments that women needed forceful, maternal guidance to avoid the “temptations thrown in the way of young women seeking work in Detroit.” Venn contended that a female adviser could redirect the lives of so-called delinquent young women: “In all likelihood if a philanthropic woman had been present, willing to assume a mild responsibility toward the girl, the sentence would not have been imposed.”Footnote 1 Venn’s argument reveals the parameters of early twentieth-century penal reform. The girl faced an exorbitant fine or distressing conditions in prison. The proposal for a female guardian who could offer instructions on refinement illustrated emerging gendered understandings of morality, race, and punishment.
This article analyzes how Detroit’s nineteenth-century criminal justice institutions regulated, judged, and confined women to reveal the ways that state officials developed a more punitive approach to Black women compared to white women. The criminalization of women’s expression of autonomy in Detroit in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, a time when Black people could claim new freedoms after slavery ended, provides a valuable case study within larger national trends of criminal justice practices aggravating racial politics, urban poverty, and social boundaries.Footnote 2 Michigan legislators passed the country’s first indeterminate sentencing law, which allowed officials to extend women’s prison terms for highly discretionary reasons.Footnote 3 Criminal justice officials acted upon shifting ideas of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality, and they excluded women of color from the social and economic benefits of the growing northern city. Police encounters, court decisions, and women’s punishments are documented in court records, historical newspapers, and prison archives. This article, drawing from such sources, shines new light on the commonplace, violent disregard for Black women that laid a foundation for their differential treatment in the everyday operations of Detroit’s carceral spaces.
In the late nineteenth century, Detroit was a manufacturing destination and an emerging industrial city on the border with Canada, where criminal justice officials actively developed a punitive hierarchy that made Black women’s claims of social and economic independence unstable. Historians have examined the flow of laborers and the criminalization of immigrants along the southern border, but less has been written about criminal justice in northern border cities.Footnote 4 Located across the river from Windsor, Ontario, Detroit’s growing industrial sector made the city a magnet for European immigrants and migrants from the South.Footnote 5 Starting in the 1860s, many newly free Black people who had fled to Canada during slavery returned to the United States and settled in Detroit. In 1870, 79,577 people lived in Detroit, approximately half of whom had been born in another country. Less than 3 percent of the city’s population was Black.Footnote 6 By 1900, Detroit’s population had grown to 285,704 people, 1.4 percent of whom were Black. An estimated 12 percent of the city’s residents spoke a non-English language.Footnote 7 Detroit’s criminal justice actors worked to categorize this growing, heterogeneous population. Police, attorneys, and judges ferried women into jails and courts where women navigated a carceral landscape that galvanized penal reforms and made racial discrimination durable over time. Detroit’s Black population grew from 5,741 in 1910 to 40,838 in 1920, as the city became a major terminus in the Great Migration.Footnote 8 During the same decade, Detroit’s racial and ethnic demographics changed as people moved from Europe, the Middle East, Mexico, and the American South. Newcomers built neighborhoods, found work, engaged in leisure activities, and organized themselves.Footnote 9 By the mid-twentieth century, Detroit would become the nation’s fourth-largest city based on population.Footnote 10 This article argues that Detroit’s nineteenth-century criminal justice practices established a racialized and gendered hierarchy that, by the early twentieth century, bolstered white authority with detrimental results for Black women.Footnote 11
Punitive practices expanded as Detroit’s industrial capabilities grew, and many young women confronted criminal justice institutions shortly after they arrived in Detroit. Police and courts threaded together sexuality, race, and gender in ways that criminalized women’s expression of newfound freedoms. Historians have argued that the moral reform campaigns of the 1880s ostensibly worked to protect girls from sexual assault by increasing the age of consent in state statutory rape laws. However, by criminalizing sexual activity among minors, they also pushed allegedly “fallen women” into reformatories, industrial schools, and prisons.Footnote 12 Penal reformers focused on preventing newcomers from pursuing deviant behavior, as exemplified by the McGregor Mission in Detroit. Historian Douglas Flowe, who analyzes Black men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, argues that “much of American life was about movement as migrants, immigrants, and city dwellers sought social and economic fulfillment and access to the levers of modernity, both of which relocation to novel urban spheres promised.”Footnote 13 The movement of Black women and the development of criminal justice in northern cities, in light of gendered analysis, is ripe for further consideration.Footnote 14
Historians have studied the expansion of the state’s punitive power in the Progressive Era through the criminalization of Black women in the urban North. Cynthia Blair analyzes sex work in Chicago that reflected the economic hardships Black women faced. Blair’s conclusions are relevant to the ways in which local labor economies changed in other northern cities, including Detroit, where Black women had disproportionate contact with police, courts, and prisons.Footnote 15 Kali Gross and Cheryl Hicks, meanwhile, have argued that focusing on Black women’s histories helps us better understand the racialized and gendered logic of criminal justice practices as those institutions expanded in the twentieth century.Footnote 16 In her examination of Black women’s activism during the interwar years, furthermore, Victoria Wolcott argues that clubwomen in Detroit shifted their aims from respectability to independence and self-reliance.Footnote 17 By uncovering histories of police brutality, prison conditions, and penal reform, this article sheds new light on the ways criminal justice actors fostered gendered and racialized punishment. It breaks new ground by investigating the treatment of Black and immigrant women in Detroit’s experimental women’s reformatories, police courts, and discretionary police encounters. City officials buttressed structural inequality along lines of gender, race, and ethnicity through the enforcement of punitive laws, adjudication of criminal cases, and confinement of women and girls.
Searching for Freedom in the City of Straits and Michigan’s Three Years Law
In 1869, Michigan legislators passed the country’s first indeterminate sentencing law, which became known as “the Three Years Law” because it empowered the state to extend prison terms for up to three years for adult prisoners. The law represented the state’s use of criminal justice institutions as a form of social control for immigrants and women of color while embracing conflicting notions that females who engaged in crimes were especially depraved but also receptive to rehabilitation. For example, in 1865, the Detroit Free Press, a major daily newspaper, stated: “It is frequently imagined, and even publicly asserted, that convict women are so hopelessly bad that it is useless to attempt any reformation of their habits. Such options may have been founded on partial experience, or the very painful exhibitions of female vice in the police court among the many unhappy women who are lost to all sense of shame.”Footnote 18
The Detroit Free Press began in 1831 as the Democratic Free Press because of its support for the Democratic Party and President Andrew Jackson, but in 1848, it permanently changed its name to the Detroit Free Press. During the Civil War, the paper supported the Union cause while also publishing articles that criticized abolitionists and fueled racial stereotypes.Footnote 19 After the war, in the late 1860s, the paper embraced white penal reformers’ arguments that women were particularly receptive to rehabilitation, but that they required long sentences because of their weaker intellectual capabilities compared to male prisoners.Footnote 20
One of the strongest advocates of the Three Years Law was Zebulon Brockway, a white superintendent of the Detroit House of Correction who put Detroit on the map as an innovative place for the nation’s late nineteenth-century penal reform movement. One journalist exclaimed, “Detroit has every reason to point with pride to its many noble public institutions, and to none more justly than its House of Correction, where all the best features of modern prison discipline, suggested by experience, have been combined and carried into practical operation.”Footnote 21 Brockway arrived in Michigan in 1861 and boasted that he would develop ostensibly humane prisons in Detroit.Footnote 22 Originally from Connecticut, Brockway started working in prisons when hard labor was a central feature of American punishment. In the 1820s, New York legislators forced incarcerated laborers to build prisons or to labor in prison industries, agriculture, and public works. Other states, which profited from such labor schemes, followed New York’s lead.Footnote 23 Brockway subscribed to the principle of parens patriae, the state’s legitimate authority to protect dependents and steer them away from unlawful behavior. He urged legislators to confine prisoners until they demonstrated rehabilitation.Footnote 24 In 1863, Brockway convinced Michigan legislators to send prisoners from solitary confinement to work assignments.Footnote 25 One visitor reported, “The prisons are no longer pestilential abodes, destitute alike of light and air, overrun with vermin and abounding with filth, but most palatial structures, scrupulously clean, wholesome-lighted and ventilated in accordance with the latest directions of sanitary science.”Footnote 26 Brockway designed the Detroit House of Correction to implement humane punishment, which aligned with the rhetoric of penal reforms in the Progressive Era that upheld, at least in theory, scientific and objective approaches to social problems.Footnote 27 In practice, however, the ideal of humane treatment fell short.
The Three Years Law encouraged judges and jailers to move away from the rule of proportionality that had guided short sentences for women, who were commonly accused of engaging in sex work, property crimes, fighting, and violent crimes.Footnote 28 Some sections of the Three Years Law placed girls who were fourteen years old or younger in extremely long terms of confinement. Section 6 stated that girls convicted of common prostitution would be sent to the Detroit House of Correction, “there to remain and be kept until they are twenty-one years of age.”Footnote 29 Section 7 stated that all girls convicted of any offense and under the age of fifteen would be confined to the House of Shelter, which the law justified as being “for the education and reformation of females” until they turned twenty-one and were no longer “refractory and incorrigible in their conduct.” According to Section 7, girls were not “to be subject to the restraints which govern adult prisoners.”Footnote 30 Section 8 empowered either a police court or a Wayne County judge to sentence a girl, fourteen years old or younger, and for any category of crime, to the House of Correction.Footnote 31 This law strengthened the prison as a tool for the social control of women and girls, years before the campaigns to reduce the age of consent gained popularity in many states.Footnote 32
With the Three Years Law, the state expanded its ability to police working-class women and poor girls. Immigrant and Black women who were new to Detroit could easily find work in service industries or as domestic servants. Others found themselves dependent upon philanthropic organizations. Some women pursued sex work as a means of survival, or for securing economic independence or supplementing menial wages.Footnote 33 By the end of the nineteenth century, almost every state had at least one prison section exclusively for women.Footnote 34 Historian Estelle Freedman, who analyzed the surge in separate prisons for women, found that white, upper-class female reformers championed ideals of rehabilitation through curriculums that encouraged incarcerated women to learn homemaking skills.Footnote 35 The segregation of prison populations by sex afforded women what criminologist Nicole Hahn Rafter has called “partial justice” because women received gendered rehabilitation that reinforced societal norms.Footnote 36 Americans expected women to remain in the home, offer care to children, and play a supporting role in maintaining the patriarchal social order. Women processed in the criminal justice system had defied those norms and were treated harshly for it.Footnote 37 Detroit’s history offers new insights into the transformation of criminal justice in American cities while revealing that local, urban institutions absorbed national trends of the penal movement in unique ways as civic leaders pushed for gendered models of punishment.
Police Courts and Social Control of Women
Women’s experiences in Detroit’s police court in the 1870s illustrate how the state deployed the Three Years Law to control women and girls, especially in cases of sex carried out across racial lines and outside the bonds of marriage. Historian Anne Gray Fischer has argued that sexual policing in the Progressive Era subsequently facilitated the rise of discretionary police power, which was particularly harmful for Black women and beneficial for the consolidation of white wealth and the advancing of segregation.Footnote 38 Detroit’s police courts, in which three judges presided over all lower-level criminal cases, illustrate a highly unreliable, discretionary administration of justice. Such police courts were common in late nineteenth-century cities. They regularly heard cases against women charged with offenses such as petty assault, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, larceny, prostitution, and other misdemeanor charges.Footnote 39 Police courts exemplified what historian Lawrence Friedman calls “rough justice,” or legal proceedings that were routinized but also informal, insofar as they sometimes lacked attorneys, juries, or judges with any legal training, which in turn made them a flexible form of justice with few restrictions.Footnote 40
In their treatment of women accused of sex work, police and courts worked together to maintain inequality according to gendered understandings of race and class.Footnote 41 In February 1871, for example, a group of sixteen Detroit policemen raided a dance hall that welcomed Black patrons. They arrested four female employees. The officers hauled the female workers into the city’s police court and accused them of sex work, making them eligible, if convicted, for sentencing under the Three Years Law. For instance, police arrested Annie Radcliffe and accused her of being a “common prostitute.”Footnote 42 An attorney represented her, but few records exist regarding what he did to defend her.Footnote 43 Newspaper coverage of her sentencing hearing is steeped in verbiage that drew connections between Radcliffe’s appearance and her alleged criminality, binding together her physical attributes with a potential for wrongdoing. The headline described her trial as “A Tilt between Justice and Total Depravity,” which underscored how white journalists and criminal justice officials categorized female defendants.Footnote 44 Officials quickly judged women, often based on scant evidence and uneven legal representation. The newspaper described Radcliffe as “a hard-faced veteran” who had “grown old in the worst and most degraded forms of debauchery.”Footnote 45 In court, she wore a threadbare calico dress, which the paper described as “too short to hide a pair of old cloth gaiters (so dilapidated as to afford her little, if any, protection from the cold) and much too small in the waist to hide the front of what had in time past been a white corset-cover.”Footnote 46 Her sartorial choices revealed her poverty.Footnote 47
The newspaper’s coverage of Radcliffe supported a false biological definition of criminality that was common for women processed in police courts. In the 1870s, criminal anthropologists like Cesare Lombroso in Italy and Alphonse Bertillon in France developed theories of criminal identification based on physical features and bone measurements. Criminal anthropology was popular and perpetuated the mistaken belief that criminality was an inherited trait and visibly marked on a person’s body. For example, the shape of a person’s skull, nose, eyes, and ears could be categorized, according to criminal anthropologists, in order to determine the likelihood of a person pursuing crime. Lombroso considered women to be especially depraved.Footnote 48 Many police departments across the globe implemented such theories. The Detroit Free Press, by articulating a misleading narrative that Radcliffe’s physical appearance betrayed her culpability, drew connections between her personal hygiene, bodily integrity, physical appearance, and criminality. The article described Radcliffe in this way: “An old, raveled and begrimed nubia was wound around her head, on the back of which was loosely stuck a greasy waterfall, about the size of a china sauce-plate. Long use of morphine had blackened her teeth, over which were tightly drawn a pair of thin, bloodless lips that now and then parted to give utterance to some derisive or defiant expression as she turned to scan the mocking crowd behind her.” This description advanced popular stereotypes of female defendants who struggled with drug addictions or intentionally dismissed gender norms. The newspaper noted that Radcliffe “bowed contemptuously” and thanked the judge “with a reckless don’t-care toss of her head” before she reclaimed her seat and likely contemplated her prison term.Footnote 49 Radcliffe’s refusal to cower before the judge could have also been a display of resilience or self-preservation, but observers appear not to have seen it that way. The judge wielded power that was so clearly stacked against her.
Many criminal justice reformers in Detroit opposed working-class women socializing across racial lines and especially discouraged interracial sexual relationships. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many Americans understood race as referencing culture, national origin, and markers of physical difference. By the late nineteenth century, white nativists started to emphasize cultural homogeneity and anthropological, or so-called “scientific” classifications, which clumped many European immigrants into a broad category of whiteness and treated race as a biological concept.Footnote 50 White nativists and the nascent eugenics movement acted upon racial ideologies in concert with criminal justice reforms.
After the judge sentenced Radcliffe, another woman named Annie Lemmon faced a degrading trial that took up most of the court session that day. Several police officers accused Lemmon of being a “common prostitute.”Footnote 51 Lemmon had been born in Michigan to Irish immigrant parents in 1852.Footnote 52 Five of the six police officers stated they had learned of Lemmon’s alleged sex work through conversations with fellow policemen. The Detroit Free Press reported, “Each one of those policemen—or at least as many of them as were put on the stand—testified that the prisoner, Annie Lemmon, bore the reputation of being what the complaint charged, nearly all of them having at some time heard some other policeman say so.”Footnote 53 Like Radcliffe, Lemmon was also sentenced to three years in prison.
In her appeal, Lemmon deployed advantages that the other dance hall workers could not. Lemmon had married Charles Lemmon, the brother of Peter Lemmon, who was described in court records as a “wealthy and respectable citizen of Detroit.” Peter Lemmon attended the trial despite tension with his brother and sister-in-law. Annie Lemmon alluded to the strained relationship by stating that she would “avoid him if was unnecessary.” She argued that her sentence was “unjust,” cruel, and based on insufficient evidence. She also declared that she had abandoned her prior “life of shame” and focused on her current circumstances: a commitment to her marriage, which she argued, “merited compassion for her past wrong doings – rather than the fearful punishment to which she is now subjected, for an offence for which she is not guilty and of which there was not proof of her guilt, or could not be.”Footnote 54 Lemmon criticized the length of her sentence and stated that she deserved “an opportunity of being relieved from a punishment [that amounted] in excess of what a punishment should be even were she guilty of this offense.”Footnote 55 Lemmon atoned for the crime of which she was convicted, but also maintained the gendered conventions of married life. The archival court records about Lemmon are incomplete, making it difficult to determine whether she won her appeal; however, we do know that her marriage survived her sentence. Lemmon appears in U.S. Census records and documents that she had built a new life for herself after her incarceration. In 1910, Lemmon and her husband owned and operated their family farm in Lenox, Michigan. They had three children, and their twenty-two-year-old son, George, worked for them on the farm.Footnote 56
Radcliffe and Lemmon faced similar charges but had different experiences because of their particular circumstances. Their stories demonstrate the ways criminal justice officials implemented laws that criminalized poor women of color. The witnesses to her trial scorned Radcliffe because of her physical appearance. Radcliffe seemed to disregard gender norms. Lemmon, though, contested her sentence through legal channels, arguing that she was happily married and had outgrown her wayward behavior. Lemmon pleaded not guilty but also amplified her ability to uphold social expectations for women and even presented her marriage certificate to the court.Footnote 57 Admittedly, the Lemmons may have existed in between racial categories in the late 1870s, yet historians have shown that Irish immigrants and their children were gradually claiming whiteness at that time.Footnote 58
Some Black women maintained their freedom after degrading ordeals in Detroit’s criminal courts, which sheds light on the ways that the criminal justice system’s construction of a punitive racial hierarchy was uneven. In July 1871, the state tried Ella Reeves with the charge of being a common prostitute in a house of “ill fame.” Reeves was a Black woman who had moved to Detroit from Toledo. The only witness at her trial stated he had personal grievances against Reeves. In her defense, Reeves listed the injustices leveled against her, and the jury found her not guilty.Footnote 59 Despite her release, simply being brought to court to defend herself must have been taxing. Reeves’s case draws attention to the ways some women disregarded social conventions. In her study on Black marriage and relationships in the nineteenth century, historian Tera Hunter has argued, “Freedom meant not just access to social conventions but also the ability to reject them.”Footnote 60 Law enforcement, judges, and penal reformers attempted to police boundaries of gender, race, and ethnicity, but were sometimes unsuccessful at a time when more women claimed freedom.
The Trial of Virginia Doyle: Gender and Race in Criminal Cases
The criminal trials of Black women charged with violent crimes sharply illuminate the ways the intersection of gender, race, and citizenship contributed to the differential treatment of Black women in Detroit. In March 1870, the state charged Virginia Doyle, an African American widow, with attempted murder of her mother, Catherine DeBaptiste. Her trial took place during the Reconstruction era, when Black marriages in the United States were newly sanctified in law.Footnote 61 Doyle’s legal ordeal offers a window into the ways the state scrutinized Black families and women of color who appeared to shirk marital and maternal expectations.
Historical analysis of criminal trials sheds new light on women pushing against the constraints in their lives. Doyle may have been searching for her own independence, wanting to free herself from the confines of marriage, but she went about it in a troubled way. Witnesses described how Doyle had mixed arsenic in a glass of port wine she then offered to DeBaptiste. Historical records described Doyle as a “mulatto” woman with a form of palsy or paralysis in her hands. Doyle’s first husband had passed away suddenly from a mysterious and painful illness when her only child, George Taliaferro, was a baby.Footnote 62 In his will, Taliaferro’s father left the house to him, and he grew up there with his mother and grandmother. The state theorized that Doyle had tried to kill her mother for the ownership of the empty lot next to the family home, which she would have gained after DeBaptiste passed away.Footnote 63 After the death of her first husband, Doyle remarried in 1865. Three years later, in 1868, her second husband also died from a swift, unknown illness. The Detroit Free Press described Doyle’s second husband as “a strong, hearty man” who experienced “burning pains in the stomach” during his final days. He suspected his wife had poisoned him and asked a lodger to have his body examined, although an autopsy was never conducted. Police suspected foul play and arrested Doyle, but eventually the state dropped the charges and released her. One witness claimed: “On securing her freedom [Doyle] went immediately home and hired a young lad to crawl under her house and bring out a small package, seeming to contain a powder, which she burned in the stove.”Footnote 64 Neighbors remained suspicious of Doyle’s possible role in her husband’s death.
At the trial, other people close to Doyle voiced their own theories of her crimes. Taliaferro, her nineteen-year-old son, testified for the prosecution against his mother. Media coverage depicted Doyle as a bad mother, a worse daughter, and an untrustworthy woman. Taliaferro stated that his grandmother had been ill for several days and requested porridge and port, which only made her condition worse. He went upstairs to his grandmother’s room, where he found Doyle “looking all around the room and under the beds.”Footnote 65 He took some of the wine from the glass, and a chemist found it contained arsenic of commerce, which was “much less soluble in wine than in water.”Footnote 66 Had DeBaptiste consumed the remnants of the liquid in the glass, the chemist believed, she would have died.Footnote 67
Local newspapers had a field day at Doyle’s trial and drew connections between her appearance, behavior, and alleged criminal tendencies. People had expected Doyle to voice sentimental, emotional denials of the accusations leveled against her. The Detroit Free Press reported that Doyle “denied everything, but not with that fervor which would come from an innocent person.”Footnote 68 Doyle’s reluctance to display strong emotions may have encouraged onlookers to doubt her claims of innocence. Journalists scrutinized her behavior and grounded their conclusions in gendered stereotypes of women being more emotional than men. DeBaptiste told jurors she grew suspicious when Doyle came to bed wearing a dark calico dress and a headscarf. James Ellis, a friend who had been staying with the family, also drank the wine and promptly became sick. Ellis stated, “I never heard her make any threats toward the old lady. Last winter, I heard her say that she had one more deed to accomplish and then she would be free. I told her that she had better be praying and get her soul converted.” DeBaptiste described how Doyle had comforted her and slept next to her when she fell ill. DeBaptiste, in contrast to Doyle, displayed motherly tenderness toward her adult child and confirmed, “I have no hard feelings against my daughter.” Doyle begrudgingly defended herself on the stand: “I am entirely innocent of what I am accused. My mother is a passionate woman and so am I, and we have occasionally had disagreements, but I don’t know anything about putting poison in her wine. In fact, I never saw arsenic but once, and that was when my first husband Talliaferro [sic], brought some home and sprinkled it on a piece of bread for rat poison.”Footnote 69 Doyle acknowledged her relationship with her mother could be tense, but insisted she was innocent. She described meager living conditions in a poorly maintained house in which rodents made themselves at home. In the end, the jury found Doyle guilty.
Gendered and racialized views of female defendants fueled a low public opinion of Doyle.Footnote 70 The trial judge expressed his disapproval of Doyle’s “fiendish and inhuman attempt to destroy the mother who gave her being, and declared that ordinarily he should consider it a case where the full punishment should be inflicted.”Footnote 71 The judge’s focus on motherhood illustrated the ways perceptions of femininity and family determined the treatment of women in criminal courts. The judge described how he was tempted to sentence Doyle to life in prison but decided that a twenty-year sentence would suffice. He noted Doyle’s palsy that required regular medical care and, therefore, granted some leniency.Footnote 72 The tension between the state offering women a benevolent punishment while also stressing the severity of Doyle’s transgressions was on display at the sentencing hearing. The judge declared that he acted mercifully, yet the twenty-year sentence was harsh.Footnote 73 The trial shed light on tension between Victorian ideals of femininity and the shifting ideas of race, gender, and criminality that were on display in criminal courts.
The focus on Doyle’s criminality confronted normative expectations of women, especially Black women, to be complacent and obedient in courts and prisons. The Detroit House of Correction forced Doyle to adhere to standards of white femininity. In 1870, state legislators had lauded Superintendent Brockway’s kindness toward Doyle. When Doyle started her sentence, she “could neither walk nor perform any kind of labor with her hands” because of her disability. Matrons sent her to the prison hospital and later forced her to work in the sewing factory, where she stitched linens and uniforms for the incarcerated and workers in other city agencies. One legislator remarked, “Her work is light, her surroundings almost home-like, and it is rarely that she is locked up.”Footnote 74 Prison work in sewing rooms was traditionally reserved for nonwhite women, and the historical record fails to reveal how Doyle perceived her labor while having to simultaneously manage a disability.
In 1871, the Detroit House of Correction incarcerated ninety-eight women and two hundred seventy men.Footnote 75 State legislators were surprised that Doyle was not locked in a cell, a position betraying their perception that Doyle was a dangerous prisoner. Doyle’s case gave the state momentum in demonstrating the possibilities of punishment and capacity for reform. Kali Gross has argued that “black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized, justified, and anchored a host of urban reform initiatives that affirmed white middle-class authority.”Footnote 76 Gross’s analysis applies to Doyle’s incarceration because it helps us understand the instrumental aspects of a sensational case against a Black female defendant. The state used Doyle’s incarceration to showcase penal reform that harmed women of color and benefited white women.
Doyle’s time in the Detroit House of Correction outlasted Zebulon Brockway’s tenure as superintendent. Brockway butted heads with state legislators frequently enough to make his career untenable in Michigan. Special committees conducted several investigations of Brockway’s management at the Detroit House of Correction and eventually pressured him to resign in 1872.Footnote 77 The House of Shelter closed in 1873. The Detroit House of Correction Women’s Division absorbed many of its practices.Footnote 78
By the early twentieth century, almost every state had separate wards for women, and a handful of states had established standalone women’s prisons.Footnote 79 After the passage of the federal Comstock Act in 1873, police departments homed in on issues of public decency, sex work, and women’s morality. With new fervor, police emphasized interracial sex in ways that protected white women from lasting punitive action while criminalizing Black women.Footnote 80 Officials viewed female prisoners as needing more guidance than men because of nineteenth-century expectations that limited women to roles as mothers, homemakers, and caretakers. At the same time, women challenged these constraints, especially in workplaces. In 1884, a philanthropic author noted, “The dry goods ‘avenue’ is only one of many in which the willing and self-dependent women of Detroit travel on their daily round of employment. See what a lot of healthy and happy-looking young women are in the pay of the sewing machine agencies that are to be found all over the city.”Footnote 81 By the 1880s, women in Detroit were working as clerks in shops, packers in cigar factories, and laborers in textile mills, in addition to a host of other manufacturing jobs. One writer critically noted: “[Women] are invariably well dressed: I see them often at the theater; and they are among the most regular and liberal patrons of the roller rinks. Don’t look very much like misery and oppression and starvation wages, does it?”Footnote 82
At the turn of the twentieth century, Detroit was a destination for Black migrants, European immigrants, and women seeking opportunities outside of the rural Midwest.Footnote 83 Detroit’s economy transitioned from small-scale production to industrial manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, metals, and transportation, setting the foundation for the large-scale automobile industry that would soar to new heights by the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 84 Detroit’s population grew by an estimated 146 percent between 1880 and 1900.Footnote 85 In 1890, the U.S. Census included statistics on prisons and social scientific data that connected race to criminality. The “condemnation of blackness” endured while white European immigrants were able to distinguish themselves from popular notions of criminality.Footnote 86 The expansion of the state’s punitive power grew alongside the rise of industry and the movement of people to Detroit.
Punitive Policing, Self-Preservation, and Resistance in the Twentieth Century
Tensions between reformers, criminal justice actors, and civic leaders, all of whom policed women and girls, are well-documented in historical newspaper coverage and existing criminal court records. At the turn of the twentieth century, the state disproportionately subjected Black defendants to heightened surveillance, harsh policing, and punitive sentences that criminalized race and gender. The growing carceral reach of the state became a tool for inequality by excluding Black women from the benefits of Detroit’s urban, industrial growth. At the same time, ideologies of race were shifting. Historian Ashley Johnson Bavery has analyzed the ways Detroit police targeted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in the early twentieth century and highlights the coalescing category of whiteness in American cities.Footnote 87 The state’s punitive treatment of women of color aligned with the growth of harsh policing that accelerated in the twentieth century.
Legal ordeals of Black women and girls expose the brutality of punitive policing and incarceration. In 1894, a group of police officers descended on a barn on the outskirts of Detroit and found a group of white men and boys who had trapped a young Black girl, Lizzie White. White told police she was fifteen years old, but the newspaper suggested she appeared younger. The police interrupted what the paper described as “a shocking case of depravity,” a euphemism for sexual violence. White’s male assailants all pleaded guilty, and the police court sentenced each of them to three months in jail. The court, though, sentenced White to a six-month term. The judge stated his desire to whip the men and hand down a longer sentence to White.Footnote 88 The state criminalized White, despite her youth and victimization.
Instances of Black women resisting law enforcement highlight the ways women fought for their dignity and freedom, while also bringing to light police brutality and miscarriages of justice. In 1897, Maggie Jackson, a seventeen-year-old Black girl, was a domestic servant for Ida LaFontaine when her former employer, Julia Nelson, accused her of stealing seventy-five dollars and a skirt worth approximately thirty-five dollars. Nelson noticed that several articles of clothing went missing while Jackson worked for her. Nelson had given Jackson leave to care for a sick sister, but sent police to Jackson’s home when she realized her clothing was gone. The Detroit Free Press reported that “a highly respectable white family” lived at the address and did not know Jackson. Police eventually found Jackson, who asked for a change of clothes before appearing in court. Denied the request, she entered the police court wearing the missing skirt. Nelson, outraged, encouraged the state to elevate the charges to grand larceny, and the court confined Jackson on $500 bail.Footnote 89 Jackson’s wrongdoing may have stemmed from poverty, a need to survive, and a sense of obligation to her parents. She had sent the stolen cash to her mother, who lived in Ontario, likely trying to supplement her mother’s living conditions. The swift actions of the police court obscured a fuller picture of her socioeconomic circumstances. However, the case displayed the white employer’s reliance on police power to protect her property.
Some children resisted potential punishment. In 1908, a twelve-year-old Black girl, Verna Thompson, fled her house as she prepared to bathe. Her parents told the press she was “incorrigible,” a term that justified punishment under the Three Years Law, and that they wanted authorities to send her to the reformatory for girls.Footnote 90 Thompson’s father searched for her through the night before calling the police. A male neighbor watched her scale a fence as she ran away. Verna’s motives to escape were not clear. She might have been fleeing a difficult relationship with her parents or their inability to care for her. She could have been fearful of being placed in a reformatory. Whatever her reasons, the media coverage of her departure highlights the instability some Black children navigated at home. The Thompsons were willing to publicly label their daughter a truant, which builds upon Cheryl Hicks’s analysis that families of rebellious Black girls would sometimes distance themselves from their daughters and call police, especially when their reputations as respectable families were at stake.Footnote 91
Criminal justice officials laid a foundation for differential treatment of female defendants by making explicit connections between growing Black and immigrant populations and crime and punishment. In 1910, Judge Harry Hulbert of Detroit’s juvenile court spoke to an audience of 3,000 women from the Detroit Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization that represented thirty-eight women’s clubs.Footnote 92 Hulbert told them: “There are more delinquent girls in Detroit than in any city of its size in the country … This is due to our tremendous and very quick recent growth, a growth which comes mostly from without and is not the result of a natural expansion from within.” Hulbert’s description of demographics and crime rates knit together the movement of people and the gendered, racialized stress that criminal justice officials placed on new residents. Hulbert argued, “The manufacturers have imported many families,” and so parents could not properly watch their children, which in turn made youth more likely to engage in crime. Hulbert called upon clubwomen to support the expansion of police and schools to control young people. He argued, “Many of our schools are having only half day sessions and half day sessions mean delinquency.”Footnote 93 Hulbert’s concerns aligned with growing white nativist impulses that connected immigration status and race with criminality.
The white press bolstered racist stereotypes by describing Black women accused of crimes as violent, reckless, and deserving of punishment. Detroit police officer Andrew Phillips arrived at the home of Marie Mitchell, a Black landlord, in 1915 to retrieve rented lace curtains and a rug because Mitchell had fallen behind on payments. Mitchell locked herself in her room just before an officer kicked in the door and proceeded to attack her. Black tenants came to her defense and tried to restrain the officer when another white policeman, George Parker, broke up the tussle. Phillips accused Mitchell of cutting him with a glass vase so deeply that it required stitches, and Parker arrested Mitchell. The newspaper described Mitchell as wielding “a dangerous weapon” against an officer, and it prioritized the police by depicting Phillips as a victim assaulted by a Black woman.Footnote 94 Mitchell must have been terrified when white police arrived at her home and physically overwhelmed her. She was likely acting in self-defense. The rental company had deployed police to reclaim the curtains, a decision that underscored a disregard for the personal safety of Black women.
The indifference among the white officers to Black women’s safety sometimes had fatal consequences. In 1914, Marie Campbell, a thirty-two-year-old Black woman, was sentenced to thirty days in the Detroit House of Correction because she had fought another Black woman, Christiana Ellis, in the street. Campbell recounted her version of the fight in police court. The Detroit Free Press reported that witnesses were “amused at her recital of an altercation on the street with another Negress.” Campbell had covered her head with a large bandage and “admitted getting the worst of the argument.” After the judge sentenced Campbell, people in the courtroom released audible laughter at her expense. Campbell died within ten minutes of being transferred to the Detroit House of Correction, which sat next to the court building. The coroner reasoned her death was likely due to a blood clot in her head.Footnote 95 The court had prioritized Campbell’s criminal case over her physical well-being at a time when she needed critical medical attention. Kali Gross argues, “Reports of black women’s crimes presented a false, damning portrait of both black female criminals and black womanhood.”Footnote 96 In Detroit, Campbell had been assaulted and may have been trying to defend herself. Campbell withstood ridicule and covered her injuries, perhaps knowing that the mostly white audience would disregard her physical condition. Through cases such as Campbell’s, Detroit’s criminal justice system normalized this response to Black women.
Conclusion
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, changes in how criminal justice officials categorized people along boundaries of race, gender, and criminality can be found in historical newspapers, criminal trial records, and annual reports from the Detroit House of Correction. The cases of Annie Lemmon and Virginia Doyle highlight how criminal justice officials scrutinized women’s behavior, morality, and independence, all of which bolstered the state’s harsh treatment of women along racial lines. The experiences of Black women and girls like Maggie Jackson, Marie Mitchell, and Marie Campbell illustrate the ways criminal justice institutions sharpened the tools of social control in response to industrialization and the movement of people to Detroit during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Local criminal justice procedures and national shifts in ideologies of race and gender in the early twentieth century encouraged a punitive response to women of color and expanded the carceral capacity of states.Footnote 97 The police court in Detroit had been accountable to voters, who placed three judges in their positions. In 1920, the Michigan legislature replaced the police court with the Recorder’s Court, and the legislature expanded the jurisdiction of the Recorder’s Court to include all criminal cases in Detroit.Footnote 98 These shifts criminalized women’s expressions of freedom and expanded the reach of punitive practices.
Criminal justice reforms for women prioritized rehabilitative care for white female defendants while deemphasizing the treatment of Black women and children in encounters with police, courts, and prisons. After several highly publicized cases on racial integration and white mob violence in Detroit in the 1920s, the mayor assembled a committee on race relations that examined housing, education, employment, and criminal justice. In 1926, the committee concluded: “It is obvious from our report that general prejudices from which minority races throughout the world suffer at the hands of the majority are operative in this city, coloring the minds of both of the public and of the officials who are charged with the administration of justice, so that exact and even justice for the members of the minority race (in this case the Negroes) is still an unattained ideal.”Footnote 99
In the 1920s, white penal reformers across the country championed building new prisons for women that embraced humane punishment catering to white femininity. The Women’s Division of the Detroit House of Correction opened in 1928, and the differential treatment of women continued with racially segregated housing and harsh disciplinary practices for Black prisoners. The development of criminal justice in Detroit had lasting, harmful effects that were evident in the experiences of Black women and children at the turn of the twentieth century.
