Early prisons held mostly men because women lacked rights to lose

Evidence

But convicts punished by imprisonment in emergent penitentiary systems were primarily male. This reflected the deeply gender-biased structure of legal, political, and economic rights. Since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Dovetails with Davis’s prior argument about gender and with feminist legal theory on women’s civil death in marriage. — connects to: Solitary confinement was once seen as emancipatory, not torturous — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 121; Imprisonment only became conceivable once individual rights were recognized

Related

• Men’s prisons are gendered institutions, not the norm against which women’s prisons are judged (similarity 0.82)
• Male prisons functioning as the punishment norm drives women’s conditions toward greater repression. (similarity 0.80)
• Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible (similarity 0.79)
• Women have been punished more through psychiatric institutions than prisons (similarity 0.79)
• Formalistic equality with male prisons makes women’s prisons more repressive, not less. (similarity 0.79)
• Women face unacknowledged state punishment outside formal prison (similarity 0.79)
• Solitary confinement was once seen as emancipatory, not torturous (similarity 0.79)
• Liberal gender equality can reduce to demanding equal right to be shot by guards. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Imprisonment only became conceivable once individual rights were recognized #corroborates (0.55)