I was looking for a relative in the United States Census, 1910 and came across a census return from a Catholic institution called the House of the Good Shepherd in Brooklyn. It was located on Hopkinson Avenue and Pacific Street.
Here’s a link to a page of the census return (the site is free but you may have to be signed in to view it):
[United States Census, 1910; FamilySearch: Sign In]
Page after page of “prisoners” and “inmates”, working as seamstresses, laundresses or sewing machine operators. The words “Inmates of a correctional institution” are written vertically on the page.
I am familiar with the general concept - we had Magdalen laundries in Ireland. My factual questions are:
What is the difference between “prisoner” and “inmate”?
How can there be prisoners in a church institution? Are they truly prisoners in the sense of having been convicted by the state or federal authority following due process? Or just de facto prisoners in the sense of being held against their will and not free to leave?
Are the “inmates” minors? They may have been remanded to a reform school/workhouse (determined by the child’s presumed religious affiliation) by a court.
I’d assume ‘prisoners’ have been sentenced by a court and are working their way through a custodial sentence. When you consider modern options of prisoners on work release or at-home detention and privately-run prisons, there is nothing inherently inconsistent with them being ‘imprisoned’ by working at a Magdalen asylum and running out the clock. Inmates would then differentiate other inhabitants [presumably apart from free staff].
There is no difference, inmates are prisoners, sentenced by the court… But there may be workers who are free to leave at any time, they are neither inmate or prisoner.
Here is an article that talks about the use of “inmate” and various other words used to describe them to avoid calling them prisoners or convicts like a regular jail would call them.
According to Wiktionary, the word “inmate” was starting to be used as a euphemism for “prisoner” around 1970. In 1910 it just meant that they lived together in the House of the Good Sheppard.
I’m not saying they weren’t prisoners–just that the word “inmate” was intended to disguise that.
According to this and some other articles , it seems that the House of the Good Shepherd functioned as what we would call an “alternative to incarceration” or a “halfway house” which might account for use of the word “prisoner” for some people - and in 1910, it wouldn’t surprise me if religious institutions were used for those purposes. “Inmate” in the past was used for those who lived in any sort of institution - hospital, jail/prison. orphanage, “poor house” and would have been used for anyone living at Good Shepherd who wasn’t a convict.
I worked on a book a few weeks that was about the Good Shepherd. All about it’s history and life there and stuff. I can’t remember the particulars at the moment. I will check the job archive next week.
Thanks everyone - that’s really good and interesting information. I thought it was strange that convicted prisoners would be in a convent rather than a prison but apparently not.
The thesis linked to by Isilder sheds a lot of light but is mainly focused on the education of adolescent girls.
Family or clergy brought in girls considered incorrigible and hard to manage for various confinements ranging from several months to several years. Admission criteria in the early twentieth century limited admission to girls thirteen to eighteen years of age.
Remand by the judicial system was a common practice because female prisons were crowded and could not accommodate the needs of adolescent girls.
However, the majority of women in the Brooklyn institution in 1910 were adult women, up to their 70s and 80s.
I am also wondering if some of the women were “voluntary” inmates - people who checked themselves in to the convent as a last resort because they were destitute and had no good options for food and shelter.
Example: Katie Quinn was married to my great-grandmother’s brother. They lived in the Bronx and had 7 children. Her husband died in 1907. In 1910 she is a 45-year-old widow and an “inmate” (not a “prisoner”) in the House of the Good Shepherd in Brooklyn.
I don’t know what happened to her children when she was admitted - I can find no trace of them in the 1910 census, but 5 of them turn up in the 1920 census, some married with children.
Tangentially related to this, there’s a nonprofit facility near my mom’s house. It was originally a “rehabilitation” facility for women (and from what I can tell from reading the history, really was focused on short-term residency and reintegration into society), then turned into a “respectable” place for young single women to live while attending college in Cleveland, but many of the residents just never moved out, and so it gradually turned into a senior living facility.
I think that most of the prisoners there were sentenced for prostitution, which only occurred because the women in question needed a way to get a roof over their head and 3 meals a day. So sending them to the Good Shepherd where they could get these would appear to be a good and humane solution. As you suggested there may have been women on the streets who were unable to provide for themselves and decided that they could submit themselves voluntarily, get their room and board, and avoid the prostitution step.