In the nearly 170 years since the first woman arrived at Iowa’s oldest penitentiary, in Fort Madison, women and juvenile females have been held in some of Iowa’s most well-known facilities, including the Additional Penitentiary at Anamosa, the Women’s Reformatory at Rockwell City and the site of the former Girls Industrial School in Mitchellville. Join Erica Stiller for this discussion about Iowa’s prison history and the time women were sentenced to penitentiaries before their own housing plans were established.
Erica Spiller studied English and theater arts at Virginia Commonwealth University and Simpson College. She was raised in central Iowa, where she currently works in higher education, writes, and volunteers as a resident lighting designer at a local theater company.
