Second Book Club Meeting Recap: “The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison” by Hugh Ryan

On Saturday, March 16, the Bail Fund Book Club gathered at 10 Forward in Greenfield for a conversation and Q&A about “The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison” by writer, historian, and curator Hugh Ryan.

We loved speaking with Hugh about his research process, the parallels between historic and contemporary policing of women, and much more. Hugh was incredibly generous with his time and knowledge, and we’re grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know him and his work better.

Here is a selection of our discussion questions about the book, prepared by volunteer Elizabeth Smith:

1.) How did the House of D shape Greenwich Village as a neighborhood?

2.) Hugh noted that writing this book shifted his thinking from supporting prison reformism to prison abolitionism. What does this text illuminate about the nature and limits of PIC reform? Why didn’t ‘reform’ work, and how were certain ideas of ‘social reform’ in fact integral to the rationale for and enactment of imprisonment?

3.) How would we characterize the gendered nature of imprisonment as it was practiced in the House of D and New York City more broadly during this time? What was the stated and actual function and rationale of imprisonment for people socially categorized as “women” in the eyes of the law? How did the PIC define and use imprisonment as a tactic to force “women” into their ideal of the docile, compliant feminine subject?

4.) As Angela Davis discovered in her time there, bail was a centrally important issue for people incarcerated in the House of D. What can we learn about bail – how it impacted incarcerated women’s lives, its role in the carceral state, and effective organizing around it – from the House of D?

5.) Sex work, waywardism, future criminality and eugenics: Again and again, we see “women” who don’t conform to white middle-class notions of respectable womanhood surveilled and arrested for an assumption of prediliction to future criminality – the eugenic idea that criminality is inborn and that people designated as “criminal” are a threat to dominant society that need to be cordoned off from the rest of of the world. How do we see this idea of criminality as identity and assignation of potential criminality being justification for incarceration and policing play out today? How has this idea evolved – or not?

6.) Spatiality: How did the location of the House of D at the center of Greenwich Village impact the social and political life that developed around it? How did the intimacy between imprisoned and free people that developed as a result of it impact people’s relationship to it, and its relationship to the city? How do we adapt our anti-prison organizing to our current reality of the highly spatially segregated imprisonment that exists today?

7.) The House of D, while it endeavored to shield society from disruptive women and transmasc people, also actually had the effect of concentrating gender, race, and class-marginalized people in the same place. What kinds of solidarities and relationships did we see develop as a result of this concentration? How can this inform our activism?