Women's Prison Association

The Women's Prison Association (WPA), founded 1845, is the oldest advocacy group for women in the United States. The organization has historically focused on New York City and New York State issues. Since 2004 it has developed the Institute on Women & Criminal Justice, to focus a national conversation on women and criminal justice.

Most of WPA's clients in its early years were poor Irish immigrants with alcohol dependency. While the ethnicity of the clients of the association has shifted over time, the organization throughout its history has dealt with the effects of poverty and substance abuse.

The WPA has its origins in the Prison Association of New York (now the Correctional Association), founded by Isaac T. Hopper, who had also been active as an abolitionist Quaker. A task force was set up to investigate the conditions facing incarcerated women New York, and it was established in January 1845 as the Female Department of the Prison Association. Prominent members included Hopper's daughter Abigail Hopper Gibbons and novelist Catherine Sedgwick.

From the outset, the Female Department criticized New York City-area prisons as inadequate, urging that "a home needs to be provided for the homeless; other doors need to be open to them than those that lead to deeper infamy." By the summer of 1845, the Female Department founded Hopper Home, what would today be called a halfway house, focused on training and rehabilitation of former prisoners or homeless. The Home was originally on Fourth Street near Eighth Avenue in Manhattan; it later moved to 191 Tenth Avenue. In 1874, it was moved to its present building at 110 Second Avenue.

In 1853, the Female Department separated from the Prison Association and was chartered by New York State as the Women's Prison Association, with Abigail Gibbons as its leader. The association gained influence. Some of its battles—such as against overcrowded jails— have been perpetual, but WPA lobbying has achieved policy and program changes. For instance, female matrons were hired in all state penal facilities holding women prisoners, a separate reformatory for women and girls was established in Bedford, New York, and the policy was adopted that women prisoners would be searched only by female matrons.

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