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Miriam Van Waters

Miriam Van Waters (October 4, 1887 – January 17, 1974) was an American prison reformer of the early to mid-20th century whose methods owed much to her upbringing as an Episcopalian involved in the Social Gospel movement. During her career as a penologist, which spanned most of the years from 1914 through 1957, she served as superintendent of three prisons: Frazier Detention Home for boys and girls in Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall for girls, and the Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Framingham, then called the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women. While in California, Van Waters established an experimental reformatory school, El Retiro, for girls age 14 to 19. In each case, Van Waters developed programs that favored education, work, recreation, and a sense of community over unalloyed incarceration and punishment.

Born in Pennsylvania, she grew up in Portland after her father, a clergyman and Social Gospel advocate, accepted a position there as rector of St. David's Episcopalian Church. As the eldest daughter of an ailing mother, she often served as a surrogate mother, as she did later as a supervisor of imprisoned women and children. After graduating from secondary school, Van Waters attended the University of Oregon, majoring at first in philosophy and graduating in 1910 with a master's degree in psychology. Three years later, at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, she completed a doctorate in anthropology.

Van Waters' public-speaking skills, assertive manner, and charisma drew national as well as local attention to her methods, and she was supported financially by philanthropists including Ethel Sturges Dummer, who helped pay for El Retiro and for leaves of absence from her supervisory duties to work on two books, ''Youth in Conflict'' (1925) and ''Parents on Probation'' (1927). Another wealthy philanthropist, Geraldine Morgan Thompson, supported Van Waters financially and emotionally from the mid-1920s until Thompson's death in 1967. Eleanor Roosevelt, a first lady, and Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor and then a Supreme Court justice, were among Van Waters' many admirers and political supporters, but her methods drew the ire of opponents who viewed them as over-lenient and ineffective. Opposition in Los Angeles led to her departure from California in 1932 and to much-publicized hearings in Massachusetts after she was fired as Framingham superintendent in January 1949. Re-instated in March, she continued running the reformatory until 1957. After retiring, she remained in the town of Framingham, living in a woman-centered household, as she had often done, until her death in 1974. Provided by Wikipedia