History from the inside: Incarcerated women publish book on Indiana Women's Prison

As the young woman finished presenting her research to the virtual audience of historians and scholars, she shared a personal detail she hoped wouldn’t change their perceptions of her work.

It was a number, but not her age or phone number. It was her Indiana Department of Correction identification number: 130535.

Lara Campbell said she’d been nervous about revealing her alternative ID. But the audience didn't respond negatively. Instead, the crowd "went crazy," she remembered. Some of the scholars rose to their feet cheering. Others cried.

Rather than feeling unworthy or embarrassed by her DOC badge, Campbell said she felt strong and proud.

Campbell's participation in that 2016 presentation for the Hoosier Women in Work conference was tied to her role in a project documenting the history of the Indiana Women's Prison. The work started in 2013 with a group of at least 30 women at the prison and culminated in April with the publication of "Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920."

The book produced by the Indiana Women's Prison History Project offers a scholarly look at America’s first completely separate female prison. What the incarcerated researchers found is both illuminating and, at times, troubling. Among the findings: Tales of physical and sexual abuse, good intentions that led to forced labor and exploitation of women for money, and experimental surgeries and medical treatments.

A review in "The New Yorker" called the book a testament "to the enormous capacities and resilience of people who are incarcerated … and to the profound, sustaining power of education and collective inquiry." Jessica Neptune, director of national engagement for the Bard Prison Initiative, labeled it an "exceptional and completely unprecedented book."

“This book also reflects the widespread talent, capacity, intellectual curiosity, wisdom and insight of women and men locked away in our prisons and jails that is often ignored or underestimated," Neptune said. "There are incarcerated students who are doing intellectual and academic work both in history and also in every other academic discipline … at this caliber in prisons across the country.”

The history project came with its own, unique set of challenges, as the women researched and wrote a book mostly from behind bars. They had to work around prison restrictions and procedures for materials entering the facility. Computer equipment was outdated and, at times, glitchy. The movement of the women — some transferred to other facilities while others were released — created more headaches. As they trekked on over the years, there were times when others doubted the women and their work. Sometimes the doubt and uncertainty came from within the women themselves.

For much of the project's lifespan, the idea of publishing a book remained a hush-hush topic. Rheann Kelly, one of the women involved in the project, said some prison officials were fine with them delving into the prison's history, but not as comfortable with that research being published.

“For the longest time," Kelly said, "we weren’t even able to say the word 'book,' you know." Instead the women would make innuendoes or jokingly spell out the word using sign language.

In a statement to IndyStar the Indiana Department of Correction simply said: "Incarcerated individuals statewide actively participate in a range of creative activities, including writing books, poetry, newsletters, and more. The IDOC assists in facilitating these endeavors, while also ensuring safety and security measures are met."

The book project revealed much more than the history of the prison. The women also learned about themselves and, like Campbell after her presentation, many came away from the experience empowered and inspired.

What was the Indiana Women's Prison?

The Indiana Women's Prison, originally called the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls, was established in 1873 in Indianapolis. According to the book, it was largely staffed by women. Sarah Smith, the superintendent of the prison, was a Quaker and felt a calling by God to save "fallen" women.

Smith wanted to create a safe institution, specifically for women, where they could be rehabilitated into "married and/or domestic workers." This came from the fact that incarcerated women were experiencing sexual and physical abuse by male guards and staff at another facility in Jeffersonville. Smith's vision was to create a "homelike environment of routine," according to the book.

"The hoped-for results were 'a well-regulated family; good religious influence; rules willingly obeyed; duties cheerfully performed; little punishment necessary; the use of tobacco dispensed with … (that along with) the religion of Jesus, (would) subdue the most hardened,'" the book said.

But, as the history project women discovered, there was more to the story.

How did the project start?

The incarcerated women involved with the project first gathered in 2013. Many were taking college courses at the prison. The goal initially was to research and prepare a pamphlet on the history of the prison, which moved from its longtime home on Randolph Street to the North Girls School Road in 2009.

One of the women gathered was Michelle Daniel Jones. A self-described leader and an advocate, Daniel Jones said she was "always on the beeline" for opportunities. She found one in the book project. In addition to researching and writing four chapters, the methodology and the conclusion, she is credited as the book's co-editor.

Kim Baldwin was also among those recruited to help at the beginning of the project. Baldwin said she had been told all her life she was smart, but she never believed it despite earning multiple degrees while in prison. Like Daniel Jones, she was part of the group of incarcerated women who pursued every opportunity behind bars.

According to the book's preface, Kelsey Kauffman, the first leader of the project, was working with volunteers and $5,000 from GoFundMe campaigns. There was no government funding. Materials were in limited supply and it often took months to obtain books needed for research through interlibrary loans.

The prison's library contained mostly romance books. But the prison also had a trove of valuable documents, including records on its founding, annual reports and a registry. The documents provided information on every incarcerated woman from 1873 to 1900.

These documents — and the details they contained — changed the trajectory of the history project.

What were some of the discoveries?

Daniel Jones had analyzed the registry. As a self-proclaimed "bit of a nerd" when it came to data, she poured over every detail in massive spreadsheets about the women who came to the prison from 1873-1900 — who they were, their race, education, literacy level and other facts.

Something interesting was identified when Daniel Jones found writing from a man in 1870.

"He talked about how there were prostitutes everywhere, crowding the streets everywhere ... their little prostitute-making sex huts … doing it everywhere," she said.

But no one in the registry she analyzed was in the prison for sex work.

More research led her to a newspaper article from the mid-20th century. It revealed prostitutes were not placed at the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls. Instead, they were sent to another facility called the House of the Good Shepherd. The two facilities opened the same year.

This revelation led to other discoveries, and eventually the history project became about more than just creating a pamphlet.

"In a little more than a year," Kauffman wrote in the book's preface, "the women in the project had moved from writing what I initially expected to be a glowing account of their own prison's founders to writing an increasingly sophisticated and well-received critique of the origins of women's prisons in the United States."

Another key discovery came in 2013 after Baldwin had to step away from the project. She typed up 25 pages of notes before she left, but something didn't make sense. Where was all this money at the prison coming from?

When Baldwin ran into Kauffman in a hallway at the prison three months later, she was told her "spidey sense" hunch was correct. Kauffman encouraged her to rejoin the project and Baldwin accepted.

“Kelsey has been described as kind of a badass, she is," Baldwin said. "So for her to be excited to see me, tell me I was right and ask me ‘Please come back,’ was huge for me.”

Baldwin said she "followed the money," mapping out Indianapolis as a monopoly board to see who the people at the prison were and why they were there. She eventually discovered many of them were not criminals. Along with Kelly, Baldwin also found the prison was earning money through labor the incarcerated women did.

"It's a great moral idea that they're establishing this for the betterment of society and the betterment of women," Kelly said. She said that because Smith needed more room to help more women, they needed more money and needed the women to work more. " ... So it becomes this cycle of oppression," she said.

Throughout the course of the project, Kelly at times experienced frustrated. She would frequently meet dead ends and her research topics changed frequently. Sometimes another woman wanted her topic; other times something caused her to change course.

There was even a point when Kelly said she felt like quitting and had to fight her own self doubt. She wasn't someone who could come up with ways to say things that were "succinct and catchy," and she was comparing herself to others. She didn’t like feeling “like I’m trying so hard and I’m still inadequate.” 

Yet, at other moments, she said she was overwhelmed by the ideas being thrown her way and needed the experienced scholars helping with the project to explain things more.

What opportunities did the women get from the project?

Throughout the project, the female scholars would write research papers on the specific topics they were examining. Often they would share their research, reading their papers at conferences via webcam. The first academic conference the women presented at was the Indiana Association of Historians Annual Conference in 2014.

“It’s something about reading your work out loud that causes your brain to think about what you're saying, it helps with your argument making ... ," Daniel Jones said. "So I started giving my papers with little notepads on the side … because I was having new ideas while I was reading my paper, which is cool and exciting.”

From these conferences, Kauffman wrote in the preface, people started coming to the women's aide — including academic colleagues who became mentors. The outside supporter provided the women with new opportunities, including two who were accepted into a graduate seminar.

Through courses, Daniel Jones said she was able to develop interdisciplinary scholarship. She would use ideas from sociology, history, French philosophy and "(move) around to make (her) arguments."

Natalie Medley, an incarcerated woman initially skeptical of the project, said she didn't want to be used for the prison's benefit. That changed when she saw an article Daniel Jones wrote.

“It legitimized the fact that incarcerated people may have opinions, thoughts, education, that something might be worth publishing or the hard work could pay off,” Medley said. “Or that here is a context and an environment where I might be judged based off of how hard I work or, you know, what my thought process is versus something else.”

Medley joined around 2015 and began writing, too, even when it wasn't easy. She remembered sitting on the floor of her cell, handwriting an article on a tote where the incarcerated women would keep their items. She had to take footnotes without having the source book in the cell, use a physical dictionary and rewrite mistakes while her research was sprawled on the floor in front of her collecting hair and dirt from the ground.

How did the women interact with each other in the project?

Campbell, who shared her DOC number at the Hoosier Women in Work conference, said women involved in the project supported each other during these conferences. This was different from some other experiences she had in prison.

"In the history project, we all celebrated," Campbell said. "So, if we had a conference and not all of us spoke, we still supported each other and we would go and listen to the paper being presented, and I think celebrating each other's achievements was a big thing."

She said she was best friends with Daniel Jones and was not a researcher or scholar by nature. She didn’t light up at the sight of a database or become compelled by stacks of history books. Instead, she liked human stories.

Around 2015, she joined the project after Kauffman introduced her to the memoir of a girl named Minnie, who had been admitted to the House of the Good Shepherd around 1907 under the lie she'd be helping younger children.

Prior to the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls, the House of the Good Shepherd opened in 1873 with the same idea of saving the "fallen" women. According to the book, the mission was to "reclaim fallen women, give a home to those who have reformed and preserve young children, who might, as they grow older, be tempted."

One of these young children at the facility was Minnie.

“(Minnie) said (in her memoir) she could still feel the energy and she saw these creepy hands reach out from the bars," Campbell recalled. That brought back her own memories.

"I just remember how young ... and terrified I was when the jail door slammed," she said. "I was so scared, (but) this little girl's like 10 or 11."

Campbell said Minnie's story got her "hook, line and sinker."

Michelle Williams joined the project in 2017 through a college class she was taking at the prison. After agreeing to submit her work for the writing competition, she was put with the women in the history project. She was new to the facility at the time, and said things felt heavy. But that changed to camaraderie she experienced the last day preparing for the contest.

She remembered the laptops and research spread out in the room where she and others worked from first thing in the morning until evening time. She also remembered how "everybody (entered in the contest) just flowed," on that final day.

"For a moment, you're not in prison," she said. "You're in a research room full of your colleagues and you're doing the work and when you get done, you can just breath and rejoice together."

How did the book come about and what was the process like?

The day after Daniel Jones was released from prison in 2017 she was on a plane to New York to attend student orientation at New York University.

Later that year, on a ride back to Manhattan, she was in a car with an editor at the New Press. This chance meeting and the conversations that followed culminated in an opportunity 2018 to send a book proposal to the publisher. Four years later, the women's book Who Would Believe a Prisoner? was finally published.

Piecing together the material from all the different contributors wasn't easy, Daniel Jones said. There were many chapters that didn't make the cut, including some of her own.

"I basically almost had a book on my own ... and I chose to share the mic," she said. "We only had 80,000 words. 80,000 words means Michelle cannot have five chapters in this book."

By the time the book was being finalized, some of the other women involved in the project had dispersed: they either had left prison or been moved to a different prison in Indiana. Baldwin was sent to Rockville Correctional Facility and, ultimately, said it was hard to let go of the ghosts of the women she encountered in her research.

“I saw these people as I was writing about them, literally in my mind. I put a face and skin and bone on the person I was writing about. They became real to me, it’s not just a name in a newspaper article. This was a real human being who lived and breathed and existed in this world," Baldwin said. "And (I was) writing about them and telling their story without their permission, hoping I got it right, trying to honor them by telling their name.”

How did outside people react to the project?

Early in the project, the incarcerated women would publish research papers. These papers and eventually the published book would get reactions from those outside of prison.

The group won awards, including the Outstanding History Project award from the Indiana Historical Society in 2016. Williams received an honorable mention for best undergraduate history paper in a statewide competition in 2017 and Daniel Jones received the 2020 Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship, among other awards individuals in the project received.

The women also created a play based on their research called “The Duchess of Stringtown.” The play was presented for invited guests and the prison population. Later, the women authorized an adaptation of the play at Indy Convergence and a producer and director ran a workshop on the script with paid actors and playwrights in August 2020.

Daniel Jones said artistic endeavors were an important piece of the project: she didn't want their work to be extractive and wanted to give that research back to the incarcerated community. Since not everyone wants to read papers, presenting that research in different art forms is important, she said.

Although Baldwin appreciated all the honors the project received, she said it was different being an incarcerated individual and getting these awards. When she got her degree, she said she didn't get to hold an actual diploma. Likewise, with the awards, Kauffman accepted them on the women's behalf because they couldn't leave prison.

How did the women feel about the published book and the end of the project?

When the project culminated, some of the women said felt they could do anything they put their mind to. At the end, when the book was published, they got to reflect on their experiences.

Medley said she read through the book almost within two nights. At the beginning of the project, she wondered what the dominant narrative said about incarcerated individuals like her. She said she discovered a new sense of truth from the project.

"It wasn't just the lawmakers, it wasn't just the dominant narrative, it wasn't just the people who worked there, and it wasn't just the incarcerated people," Medley said. "… Only in taking into account all the voices can you figure out the truth.”

Personally, Medley said she broke through her "defensive postures" and became less self-deprecating. Kelly said she was proud of herself for persevering through challenges and doubt.

Williams said she is now able to make more connections and see interconnected systems. She has come to understand and see people as a whole, without hidden biases.

“Education does something different for you that I never even realized it could do," Williams said. "It shapes the way you view things, it challenges everything that you ever thought you knew and it makes you want to know truth versus what you heard or what you were told.”

But Williams also gained a connection with the women she worked with on the project. When she felt accepted by the group, she said it made her feel like she was coming into the new version of herself. Now, she wants to impact those who come after her in the same way.

"Besides my children," she said, "the work I've done in here is the most important (thing) that I've ever done in my life."

Daniel Jones recounted the first time she held the book in her hand. It had her name as co-editor and a real ISBN number from the U.S. Library of Congress. Other than the research, editing and collaboration skills she gained, she also was able to avoid letting her past define her. She had made changes to her mindset that allowed her to step into the project with the confidence she could do something meaningful.

She wants the book to not just be on the shelf but used in classrooms and "have standing in the field." One thing she is passionate about is this project not being looked at as rehabilitating those incarcerated.

"This book represents what it means to get access to resources and opportunity so that we can be who we innately are," she said.

For Campbell, she said she felt like passing out when she first saw the book. The project taught her she could do anything and she said it was huge to do something good after having made mistakes.

“When (my parents) got the book and they read my writing, that was probably the best part of the whole project,” Campbell said. “Because I made them proud instead of being a disappointment or making another bad decision."

Elissa Maudlin was a 2023 Pulliam Fellow at IndyStar.