Katharine Bement Davis
Katharine Bement Davis was a prominent American prison reformer and welfare worker born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860. She grew up in Rochester and pursued an impressive educational path, eventually graduating from Vassar College in 1892 and earning her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1900. Davis is notable for her leadership at the Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, where she implemented the Elmira System, a progressive approach that focused on education, skill development, and individualized sentencing for female inmates. This model significantly influenced women's reformatories in New York and beyond.
In 1914, she became New York City's first female commissioner of corrections, where she championed reforms that improved the conditions and treatment of women in the correctional system. Her work extended to various social issues, including the study of female offenders, public health, and the impact of prostitution. Davis retired in 1928 and spent her later years in California, where she passed away in 1935. Throughout her career, she authored several articles and a book, contributing to the discourse on women in the criminal justice system and advocating for systemic reform.
Subject Terms
Katharine Bement Davis
- Katharine Bement Davis
- Born: January 15, 1860
- Died: December 10, 1935
Prison reformer and welfare worker, was born in Buffalo, New York, the oldest of three daughters and two sons of Oscar Bill Davis and Frances (Bement) Davis. The family moved to Rochester in 1877, where her father managed the local agency of the Bradstreet Company, a credit-rating concern. After attending a nearby primary school, Katharine Davis entered the Rochester Free Academy, graduating in 1879, and then taught for ten years at the Dunkirk (New York) High School.
In 1890, after several years of independent study at night, she entered Vassar College as a junior, graduating with honors in 1892. She studied at Columbia University (1892-93) while teaching science at the Brooklyn Heights Seminary for Girls. Then Davis became director of a model home exhibit at the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. The exhibit was designed to show how a working-class family could live comfortably on a very limited income. Many of the lessons from this model home were put to good use by Davis during the next four years, after she had become head of the St. Mary’s Street College Settlement in Philadelphia: she bought four tenement houses in the predominantly low-income neighborhood and established model apartments, reading rooms, classes, and neighborhood clubs.
Davis left the settlement in 1897 to take her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where she studied with Thorstein Veblen, among others. After a year on fellowship in Berlin and Vienna, she submitted her dissertation (on the living conditions of Bohemians in Chicago as compared with Europe) and received her degree in 1900.
Early the next year she was appointed superintendent of the Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, New York. Under her management the reformatory adopted the so-called Elmira System, which was distinguished by the use of indeterminate sentences, the gradation of prisoners by their willingness to follow prison regulations, a system of merits and demerits that partly governed the time of release, and programs in general education as well as instruction in crafts that would give the inmates marketable skills upon release. Although this system had been evolving over the previous thirty years, this was the first time it was applied in toto to a women’s prison. Davis added the innovation of separate cottages for the best-behaved women. Bedford Hills inaugurated a new pattern for women’s reformatories in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
In 1914 Davis left her successful work at Bedford Hills to become New York City’s first female commissioner of corrections. Along with a close friend, Dr. Mary Harris, whom she appointed superintendent of the women’s division of the city workhouse, Davis initiated many basic changes in the city’s correctional system. She was especially attentive to the needs of women inmates, replacing their striped suits with gingham dresses, giving them properly fitted shoes, and engaging doctors to treat venereal diseases. She also established a work farm for delinquent boys. Under her leadership morale improved among both inmates and staff.
From 1915 to 1917 Davis served as chair of the city’s parole board, and in 1917 she was appointed general secretary and a member of the board of directors of the Bureau of Social Hygiene. The bureau, a branch of the Rockefeller Foundation, had since 1912 been conducting laboratory work at its facilities next to the Bedford Hills reformatory. It had been founded by John D. Rockefeller largely as a result of Davis’s work on identifying the various types of female offenders and their propensities for reformation. In addition, the bureau was active in studying prostitution. To these interests Davis added inquiries into narcotics addiction and the “white slave trade,” as well as investigations of public health and hygiene.
She retired from public life in 1928 and moved to Pacific Grove, California, to live with her two sisters. She died at the age of seventy-five of cerebral arteriosclerosis.
Aside from her one book, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women (1929), Davis wrote the introduction to Jean Weidensall’s The Mentality of the Criminal Woman (1916). Among her articles the most important are “A Study of Prostitutes Committed from New York City to the State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills,” in G. J. Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (1913) and “Why They Failed to Marry,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1928. The most complete biographical account is the sketch in Notable American Women (1971), which cites original and secondary sources. Davis’s place in prison reform is discussed in B. McKelvey, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (rev. ed. 1977). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1 (1944). Also useful are the obituaries in The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times, December 11, 1935.