Need of Women Doctors and Inspectors
Women doctors and inspectors should be appointed in all female prisons. Otherwise what can be expected of a woman of small mental resources, shut in on herself, often unable to read or write with any readiness; of bad habits; with a craving for low excitement; whose chief pleasure has been in the grosser kind of animal delight? The mind turns morbidly inward; the nerves are shattered. Although the dark cell is no longer used, mental light is still excluded. Recidivation is more frequent with women than with men. The jail taint seems to sink deeper into woman’s nature, and at Aylesbury numbers of the more abandoned ones are seldom for long out of the male warders’ hands.