Gabrielle Bruney

In May, the New York Times asked, "What Would a Feminist Jail Look Like?"—a question that takes for granted the existence of such an institution. The project that inspired the article is an effort to create a new jail for women and transgender people in New York City. Current plans for the closure of Rikers Island, the city's main jail complex, involve replacing its women's jail with a new facility in Queens that would be attached to a larger institution for men.

But some supporters of criminal legal system reform, including the Columbia University Justice Lab and Gloria Steinem, are advocating for a different approach. Under this alternate plan, the new jail for women and gender-expansive people would be a stand-alone institution in Manhattan, where it would be easier for inmates—70 percent of whom are mothers—to receive visits from family. Most women jailed in New York City suffer from mental health ailments and are domestic violence survivors, and proponents of this plan argue that the proposed Manhattan jail would also offer the opportunity to provide inmates with gender-responsive care.

History could be repeating itself. A woman's jail, created amid promises of kinder, gentler treatment for these especially vulnerable inmates, already once stood in the heart of Manhattan. In The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan traces the history of this jail through the stories of the queer women and transmasculine people forced to inhabit the Greenwich Village facility—and offers a convincing argument against the possibility of a "feminist jail."

With the help of little-before-seen archival social work files, Ryan reconstructs the lives of LGBTQ prisoners at the Women's House of Detention with a novelist's skill. He tells the story of women who fell in love and formed friendships, participated in the Stonewall uprising and the Black Power movement, and helped make Greenwich Village one of America's most influential LGBTQ communities. All the while, they were abused and deprived of their freedom, often while being subjected to virulent homophobia and transphobia. Some, like a transmasculine inmate who was arrested for wearing pants, had their lives derailed for actions that would no longer be considered remotely criminal. It's hard not to read their stories without wondering how many people are imprisoned today for offenses that will one day seem nearly as implausible.

Through these accounts, Ryan tells the story of the institution itself, as it made its way through the prison lifecycle. The House of D, as it was known locally, opened in 1931 as a state-of-the-art facility representing the supposedly bright future of incarceration before weathering decline and disinvestment and closing in 1972, after subjecting generations of disproportionately queer New Yorkers to abuses including severe overcrowding, rodent-infested food, and medical sexual assaults.

Today, prison-abolitionist feminists are opposing the new proposed Manhattan jail, arguing that no institution designed to cage people can ever be feminist and that the creation of new jails only incentivizes further mass incarceration. Ryan himself has said that writing The Women's House of Detention led him to support prison abolition, and the work lays bare the ways in which decades of well-intended piecemeal reform can fail to remedy the systemic injustices of the prison system. The book holds a message from the past, recounted with painstaking tenderness, that’s crucial to the present.

Stephen Dillon

As the fifty-year backlash to the feminist, queer, trans, anticapitalist, and antiracist movements of the 1960s and 1970s crescendoes into full-blown fascism, the final lines of Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention remind us of the possibilities that open up in impossible situations. In story after unearthed story throughout the book, Ryan highlights the ways forgotten women and queer people resist, refuse, ignore, take flight, or simply walk away from regimes of regulation, control, and brutality. Over and over again, Ryan shows how—in the face of the growing behemoth of targeted racialized, gendered, and sexual violence that would come to popularly be called “mass incarceration”—people negotiate the tedium, despair, and terror that compose everyday life in jail and prison. Describing such breathtaking resilience, Ryan ends the book by writing, “Desire is like a river. Build a dam, try to stop it—maybe you buy yourself a few decades. But the water is waiting, and one day, it will rise.” Ryan reminds us that the world-shaking power of mass movements, whose gains now feel like dust floating in the air, will return once again. But perhaps more importantly, he reminds us that the critique and tactics we require in this desperate historical moment lie in these forgotten, quiet moments he so beautifully recounts, as well as in the ones we will never know about but are indebted too nonetheless.

While reading, I kept coming back to a fleeting moment in Assata Shakur’s autobiography. She writes about her family visiting her in jail: “The next time my mother came to see me, my sister was with her. I was so happy to see them both. When i say ‘see,’ it is something of an overstatement, because in Morristown jail there are little windows that you and your visitors peek through, and there are little holes through which you are supposed to talk, but to make yourself heard you are obliged to shout.” In this short description, the architecture of the prison regulates the many feelings and sensations of the imprisoned (and her loved ones). Sight and sound are disciplined—reduced and contorted in the name of social death. While Shakur struggles to see and hear her mother and sister, touching them, feeling them, sensing them intimately is simply impossible. To the logics of human incapacitation, a kiss, a hug, a touch on the cheek, a hand on a knee are contraband. The prison attempts to eliminate these fugitive sensations before they arise. Vision must be concealed and sound deadened. Black women’s affects and feelings are a threat to the prison, and they are subsequently targeted for elimination by people with guns, a uniform, and an aluminum badge and by windows that conceal more than they reveal and barriers designed to kill the human voice. She continues, “In the visiting room on the prisoners’ side, there were no chairs, so you had to stand up and talk. I was so tired, i just couldn’t stand any longer. I sat down on the floor, leaning on the wall behind me so they could see me. I couldn’t see them, but we shouted to each other until the visit was over.”

Moments like this stunning insistence on shouting through exhaustion, glass, cement, steel, and psychic and physical degradation electrified me throughout Ryan’s writing. The names for these moments are countless—fugitivity, resistance, black radicalism, humanity, life, black feminist refusal, love, or simply stubbornness—but the lesson is the same. The accumulation of these moments refuses the brutality that so often passes as normal and opens up possibilities for a different way of living, where memories of such degradation are the rotten glow of a world we can no longer imagine.

Aviva Stahl

As a journalist who writes about prisons, I know how difficult it is to obtain (and tell) the stories of people behind bars: when people can access the phone, the calls are time limited and sometimes outrageously expensive; letters are “lost” and subject to arcane and ever-changing rules (several years ago all the Pride Month cards I’d sent out were returned because they included glitter); the private companies running email messaging services for prisoners even found a new way to make money – charging for “stamps.” At a time when the outside world lives under the illusion of instantaneous, unfettered communication, no such expectation exists for the millions of people behind bars. Unsurprisingly, these rules and restrictions make it harder for the public to hear directly from people who are incarcerated about what they’re experiencing. This reality has also contributed to the pernicious decentering of incarcerated voices in reporting about prisons, including the voices of women and trans and gender-nonconforming people.

But if uplifting the voices of people currently behind bars is a challenge, telling the stories of people who were imprisoned in the past is an even more difficult feat. That’s what Hugh Ryan endeavors to do in his new book about the Women’s House of Detention, which stood in Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974. The facility housed women and transmasculine and gender-nonconforming people detained for all kinds of offenses, from crimes of poverty to the crime of being improperly feminine. The aim of his project, writes Ryan, is to rewrite the history of the people who spent time in the House of Detention – a prison that, as he notes, had “an outsized role in queer life” – by writing about these individuals as more than just statistics, by describing them in their full and complex specificity. Of course, that’s not such a straightforward task—it’s not as though these individuals were invited to memorialize their lives or, contrary to the experience of some white gay men of the time, treated as subjects of historical importance. To overcome this archival silence, Ryan draws on a variety of sources, perhaps most crucially the social work files of the Women’s Prison Association, which provided social services to those who moved through the House of Detention. These records are imperfect analogs to the source material we might wish exists, he admits, yet “they are the closest thing we have to these women’s stories, told in their own words.”

Ryan should be lauded for bringing such richness to the lives of the people he tracks. We learn about couples who met behind bars or through the Women’s Prison Association – people who fell in love and wrote each other dirty letters and embarked on cross-country romantic getaways … then got bored of each other or fell out or met other people, just as the rest of us do in our own little lives. This summer, I was lucky enough to attend a wedding in a New Jersey prison between two incarcerated women. Writing about that event, and then reading Ryan’s book, enabled me to acknowledge how journalists like myself have contributed to the rhetorical flattening of prisoners’ lives. Prisons might be worlds unto themselves to some extent, but that doesn’t mean they are worlds bereft of intellectual engagement, sexual desire, or intimate connection. Failing to reflect that complexity contributes to prisoners’ dehumanization.

What most surprised me about Ryan’s book was to learn the role that the Women’s House of Detention played in fostering community and connection in the lives of women and transmasculine and gender-nonconforming people. Butches hung out in the entrance to the jail and cruised as women were detained and released. Lesbian-centered bars cropped up on nearby blocks. When the Stonewall uprising happened, Ryan writes, people locked up in the House of Detention “held a riot all their own, setting fire to their belongings and tossing them out the windows while screaming, ‘gay rights, gay rights, gay rights!’” I’m used to thinking about how communication barriers across prison walls enable these facilities to be erased from urban space. For decades, federal detainees were held in downtown Manhattan at the Manhattan Correctional Center, often in grotesque conditions. Until Jeffrey Epstein died, it seemed the vast majority of New Yorkers, even those who walked by the facility, did not even know it was there. For better and worse, the Women’s House of Detention was an integral part of queer women’s communities in New York City, and that made the facility visible. The outside/inside connections generated by queer life made the House of Detention material in a cityscape in which it might have otherwise been ignored. This insight sheds light on what it takes to recognize the prison industrial complex and work to undo it.

As I read Ryan’s book, I yearned to hear more details about the lives of the women and queer people he followed – what they thought about life behind bars, what it meant to live in their women-centered worlds, the sordid details they’d never share with a social worker. But that’s my experience of reporting, too: despite our most valiant efforts, the barriers to communication can never be completely superseded. Still, I take a cue from Ryan’s closing words: “Every day, something slips into history that we will never recover: a memory, a document, the sound of a dead women’s voice. Save what you can.”

Jess Whatcott

Within the first few pages of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan makes the case that the records of jails and prisons are the “oldest and most extensive records of queer history.” By centering the queer women and transmasculine people whose lives have been shaped by incarceration, Ryan crafts a queer history from below. This history occasionally intersects with dominant narratives about LGBTQ+ social movements, such as when people rioted in the titular landmark located in center of Greenwich Village on the night of the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Yet queer history from below often radically diverges from what has been canonized as LGBTQ+ history. What happens when historians center the Black folks, Puerto Ricans, Indigenous people, Asians, ethnic-minority whites, femmes, bull dykes, disabled and chronically ill people, drug users, and street youth who came through the halls of the House of Detention? The answer is that queer history diverges from well-worn tracks to include psychiatric hospitalization, gentrification, urban renewal, the drug war, Communist organizing, and the Black Panthers.

Any claims of novelty here must be met with circumspection. Calls to center incarcerated people within queer politics have deep roots. As Ryan himself recounts, the Gay Liberation Front was formed in part to protest the Women’s House of Detention. Where, then, does this book fit in the rich scholarship on the history of the imprisonment and criminalization of people assigned to the category of women? Much of this scholarship has been written by Black feminists, many of them queer—people like Beth Richie, Andrea Ritchie, Sarah Haley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kali Gross.  Ryan’s book is at its best when, like these other scholars, he tells the stories of some of the thousands of anonymous people who passed through the House of D, especially in the early decades. He accomplishes this by examining a unique archive, the records of the Women’s Prison Association, a nonprofit social organization that provided services to incarcerated and recently released people.

However, the clarity of purpose is lost when Ryan begins to investigate the queerness that (in his view) is missing from already published memoirs, like Afeni Shakur’s Evolution of a Revolutionary (written with Jasmine Guy). Ryan’s investigations consist of interviews with the lovers and friends of memoir authors, who claim to have the “real” story behind texts that were self-censored for a variety of reasons. I am wary of the politics of trying to prove that historical figures really did have sex with other people assigned to the category of female. As Black feminist, queer of color, and trans of color thinkers have argued repeatedly, even Black women who have heterosexual relationships and who fiercely adopt the markers of femininity have historically been constructed as sexually deviant and criminalized for it. Uncovering the “real” queerness of formerly incarcerated people by undermining their own narrations about themselves plays into racist discourses that depict Black women as untrustworthy narrators that are oversexualized and inherently deviant. This book cannot help us navigate the complexity of queer Blackness, nor address the reasons that we (especially white queers) might desire to know the details of which Black Panther and global hip hop icon’s mother was sharing a bed with which drug dealer. A deep engagement with Black feminist theory must inform our queer histories from below.

Hugh Ryan (photo by by M. Sharkey)

The best part of writing a book is getting to experience a wide world of other people reading, discussing, critiquing, and elaborating on my work; I am honored that Signs invited me to take part in “Short Takes,” and my deepest appreciation goes out to the thoughtful authors of the responses they have collected here: Gabrielle Bruney, Stephen Dillon, Aviva Stahl, and Jess Whatcott. All four have written insightful reactions to my work, and are, in their own writing, working to move the conversation around queer people and incarceration forward.

Today, approximately 40 percent of people incarcerated in prisons designed for women identify as LBTQ, as do 40 percent of people incarcerated in detention centers for girls. It is a crisis of incarceration that is rarely discussed, and while this statistic animates The Women’s House of Detention, my book itself largely ends with the razing of the House of D in 1974. So I am thankful to Bruney and Stahl for connecting this history to the crucial concerns of the modern abolition movement. I write history primarily for the way it can help us to better understand the present and prepare for the future, and I would consider my book a failure if it did not speak to the abolition moment we are in.

And what is abolition but a movement away from harm – state and individual – and towards care – collective, institutional, from below, and from above? For this reason, I was heartened by the focus on interpersonal relationships both Dillon and Whatcott brought to this conversation. The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated are so often seen as undeserving of care, and perhaps incapable of care, let alone love or joy. It’s true that the carceral system is a beast that eats happiness; yet over and over again, my research showed me that women, trans folks, and enbies resisted the despair of the prison to create vibrant – if violently controlled – lives. It is unfortunate that Whatcott reduces prison activist Carol Crooks down to a “drug dealer,” and sees her version of her relationship with Afeni Shakur as an attack on Shakur’s written version of her life; as Crooks passed during the COVID-19 pandemic, I would like to take a moment in these pages to honor her life as an activist, fellow Brooklynite, survivor, friend, daughter, mother, lesbian – and, yes, at one point, a drug dealer. I first met Crooks through Professor Amber Baylor’s work on women in prisoner’s rights litigation (specifically, on the heroic resistance Crooks led during the 1974 August Rebellion at Bedford Hills), and Baylor is yet another scholar my work lives in debt to.

Finally, I would like to thank the editors of Signs for creating the space for this dialogue. To everyone reading: if this conversation intrigues you, reach out to abolition organizers in your area, or check out any one of the number of incredible books on abolition being written by antiprison organizers currently. Let my work be backdrop to the urgent struggles of now.