Slice created from parent data set: Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Admissions Database 1910-1938

Data set of 2,370 individual female reformatory inmates admitted to the Virginia Home and Industrial School for Girls at Bon Air and the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls at Peake’s Turnout between 1910 and 1938. Created out of the unpublished and archived admissions books of these institutions. Due to Virginia’s 75-year privacy restriction, I stopped collecting at December 1938 for each institution. Data from the Home at Bon Air runs 1910 to 1938; from the Home at Peake’s Turnout from 1915 to 1938. Each reformatory kept separate books, which were archived into separate collections. There was enough similarity between the two books to transcribe the data into one large data set.

Reformatory administrators hand wrote basic administrative information about each girl into bound books. For incoming delinquent girls, they recorded: student number, name, birthdate or age at admittance, date of admittance, and committing jurisdiction (by county or city jurisdiction.) The books also recorded the individual’s parole history, including first parole (and up to her third parole on an individual’s performance) and any return dates; administrators recorded the destination of the first parole, but this was inconsistently recorded. The books note when and to whom inmates were married, usually after their official dismissal. Because transferring an inmate officially removed them from the responsibility of the reformatory, administrators recorded transfer information, including where they went and when. Lastly, the books recorded the official dismissal date and reason. Bon Air’s books were more consistent with recording dismissals and neither institution used consistent definitions of “transfer” versus “dismissal.”

I manually transcribed these books verbatim into a database. From this core data, I added categories of information to aid my analysis. These include: race, gender, and reformatory; calculations of either age or birthdate (Peake’s recorded birthdates, Bon Air only ages); parole year taken from the first parole date; parole type determined by me based on the parole destination, if recorded. To help me analyze transfer and dismissal information, I determined the “type” and “category” of each transfer or dismissal and added new categories. These allowed me to “rollup” the varieties of recorded data into fewer descriptive types and categories. Because administrators recorded only the institution name or location when girls were transferred and dismissed elsewhere, this allowed me to organize this info into 18 “types”: asylum, colony, court, death, department of public welfare, escape, family, honorable discharge, illegal commitment, maternity, orphanage, other, penal, private, reorganization (only used for Bon Air in 1914), sanitorium/hospital, venereal disease, and wages. These 18 “types” were then further distilled into 9 “categories” to capture the broadest possible categorization of the reasons why girls were transferred or dismissed: administrative, death, escape, mental, penal, physical, private, unknown, and work.

I have removed the names of the individual inmates upon publication. Researchers interested in using this data in their own work can contact me at erin@erinbush.org to request the versions that include full name fields. The Data Dictionary is also available upon request.

The contents of these data sets, as government records, I believe fall under fair use.

Full Collection

• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Admissions Database 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872019
• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Transfer and Dismissal Data 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872110
• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Parole Data 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872100