Success in finding the file for a particular adult female inmate depends on the period when she was incarcerated, the institution where she was imprisoned, and her age. In general, because of their smaller volume and the special circumstances and attitudes about women prisoners, documentary coverage in the Archives is much more complete for women than for men, completely covering the adult female population from 1943 to 1983 and almost completely documenting women prisoners for the period 1921 to 1943.
Pre-1921
Prior to 1921, women were imprisoned at Waupun, the Milwaukee House of Corrections, and various county jails. There are no case files for women imprisoned during this period, although some case file-like personal information is included in the Waupun Prison Inmate Conduct Records (Series 1379).
1921-1954
Coverage improves with the construction of the reformatory for women at Taycheedah in 1921 and the creation of a new institutional series of inmate records. Series 2081, the Institutional Case Files, and Series 1397, the Case History Books, document all women housed at that institution. However, this series does not represent all women prisoners of that era. Older women (those over 30) and more serious female offenders continued to be housed at Waupun until 1933 when the Wisconsin Prison for Women, also at Taycheedah, was opened. Thereafter the files about this population was included in Series 2081. There are no case files, however, for these women either in the Waupun or Taycheedah records for the period before 1933 although the Parole Officer's Case Files for Women Prisoners at Waupun (Series 2380), contains some information on a few inmates.
For the period 1921-1942 the Series 2081 files are alphabetically arranged; after 1943 they are arranged by T-number and indexed by Series 2101. This T number is also essential for access to most later cases files.
Two Central Office series contain supplemental information for women prisoners during the pre-1954 period: Series 2084, Probation and Parole Case files, 1940-1951, and Series 2083, Case records of parolees and inmates of correctional institutions, 1945-1950. Both of these series are arranged by T-number.
1954-1990
After 1954, coverage of women prisoners changes from institutional records to files maintained in the Central Office in which the records of women were grouped together with men in
“Institutional Adult Case files (Central Office), 1954-1967” and then for the period 1967 to 1990 with juveniles as well in “Adult and Juvenile Case files (Central Office)” (Series 2088).
From 1983 to 1990 the case files of women prisoners were sampled in the Archives, a practice that had previously been used to reduce the volume of case files for men. As a result, only 10% of the original female population was documented by individual files. Researchers should ask the Reference Room for the list of all retained T number files.
