Scholar of the Month

The Indiana Women's Prison History Project, which I coordinate, is a group of currently and formerly incarcerated scholars who publish original research on women’s carceral institutions in Indiana, and related issues of gender/sexuality and incarceration, correctional medicine, and reproductive justice.

I didn’t know much about prisons before beginning my work with the IWPHP in 2018, but I had a well-developed interest in institutions of confinement as well as the history of medicine. My PhD thesis (IU Bloomington, 2015) was a history of science at a French mental asylum in the years before World War I. I also worked at the Indiana Medical History Museum on the former Central State Hospital grounds from 2014-2017 before coming to IUI in 2018.

Around 2016, while I was still at the museum, I learned of an ongoing project at the Indiana Women’s Prison that was part of the educational programming there. Led by Dr. Kelsey Kauffman, the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project was a group of advanced students who were researching, writing, and publishing about the history of gendered incarceration in Indiana. I began as a volunteer for the project, visiting local archives and libraries to field research requests for the incarcerated scholars. When Dr. Kauffman moved to California in 2018 she asked me to take over as project coordinator – and the rest is history!

My skills as a researcher of the history of mental institutions transferred quite naturally to prison history, and I was really excited to see that many of the students’ interests fell squarely in the history of medicine – Anastazia Schmid for example was researching gynecological research that took place at the early prison in the 1870s, while Molly Whitted was exploring the intersection of incarceration and eugenics in Indiana in the early 1900s.

The IWPHP has a complex and interlocking set of purposes. In some ways our purposes mirror those of any other higher education program: preparing students for even higher levels of educational achievement and for careers. Michelle Daniel Jones’s outstanding work in the IWPHP, for example, was instrumental in her earning a place in the American studies Ph.D. program at New York University. In this way, the IWPHP scholars have upended common stereotypes regarding incarcerated people and demonstrate what they can accomplish when we remove barriers to education.

Further, the IWPHP is an example of a prison higher education program that centers humanities research as a liberatory pedagogy. By this I mean that the student-researchers used historical methods to critically analyze gender, violence, and the origins of mass incarceration. The IWPHP scholars present a critique of the “women’s prison” at its very foundation, as their work reveals the gendered violence and economic exploitation that have characterized such institutions from the beginning. Taking up the position of the expert, moreover, and contributing to national conversations was also a powerful psychological resource for students living in dehumanizing and isolated conditions.

With Michelle Daniel Jones (Doctoral Candidate, American Studies, New York University), who as an incarcerated student co-founded the IWPHP in 2015, I co-edited Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 with the New Press in 2023. The book features the contributions of ten currently and formerly incarcerated students. It was favorably reviewed in the New Yorker and recently selected as the winner of the National Council on Public History’s 2024 book award. My colleague Dr. Sue Hyatt (emerita, Anthropology, IUI) has asserted that my “collaborations with incarcerated and post-incarcerated individuals are advancing our thinking in the social sciences more broadly about how to adopt genuinely participatory methodologies, and about how to co-produce research with groups who too often are treated solely as the objects of study, rather than as creative thinkers…” Our work has inspired groups like Operation Restoration in Louisiana and Freedom Education Project Puget Sound in Washington state to create similar history projects inside prisons.

In addition to being a unique educational opportunity and intellectual contribution, the IWPHP provided a unique space for students to connect their lived experiences to wider social, political, and historical contexts. These explorations have informed the many forms of activism they’ve engaged in to improve the lives of currently and formerly incarcerated people, including sounding the alarm about atrocious conditions in Indiana prisons during the pandemic, outlawing the shackling of people giving birth, or building programs to provide women undergoing reentry with job skills and housing.

I have met some of the most incredible humans doing this work. All of the IWPHP students have been amazing - but I will mention especially Michelle Daniel Jones and Anastazia Schmid who have become close friends as well as colleagues. Also, the outstanding artists, activists, and educators I’ve met around the country who are doing so much to improve the quality of life for incarcerated people -  many of whom are also working to build a world where prisons are obsolete.

I like to read Agatha Christie novels, cook delicious food, play tennis, and hang out with my 11-year-old son.

The IWPHP is comprised of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated student researchers. IUI students have also been involved in the work. A $30,000 Charles R. Bantz Chancellor’s Community Fellowship (2019-2020) and an $12,500 Indiana Humanities Action Fellowship (2020-2021) provided essential support, allowing me to employ a recent graduate of the MHHS program and two undergraduates to work as research assistants for the IWPHP scholars; they met with students inside the prison and fielded their research requests at local libraries and archives.

The IWPHP is unique as a research project about the historical origins of mass incarceration which is led by incarcerated people themselves. This model – of providing space for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated members of our community to lead knowledge production has carried over into a new project I am working on, a movement to address mental health after incarceration – see question 8!

With IWPHP colleagues Michelle Daniel Jones (PhD Candidate, New York University), Anastazia Schmid (Independent Scholar, New Orleans), I teamed up with Jarrod Wall, also formerly incarcerated (PhD Candidate, Tulane University, NOLA) and William Boles, MD to found FIRE (Formerly Incarcerated, Radically Empowered). With funding from the Mellon Foundation, FIRE is launching a series of initiatives in 2024 that bring together post-incarcerated peer support leaders from around the nation to engage in research, policymaking, and advocacy.