Hodder, Jessie Donaldson (1867–1931)

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Hodder, Jessie Donaldson (1867–1931)

American prison reformer. Born on March 30, 1867, in Cincinnati, Ohio; died on November 19, 1931, in Framingham, Massachusetts; daughter of William and Mary (Hall) Hodder; entered into common-law marriage with Alfred LeRoy Hodder (an author and journalist), in 1890 (died 1907); children: Olive (b. 1893); J. Alan (b. 1897).

Little is known about the early life of Jessie Hodder. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1867, and, after the death of her mother when she was two, was raised by her grandmother. Moving to New York in 1890, she met Alfred Hodder, then a student of philosopher William James, and entered into a common-law marriage. The couple lived in Germany and Italy (where their daughter Olive was born) until 1893, then they returned to the United States so that Alfred could take a position on the faculty at Bryn Mawr College. After the birth of a son, J. Alan, Alfred sent his wife and children to Switzerland, promising to join them. However, in 1904, he renounced his marriage and wed a fellow Bryn Mawr professor. Shortly thereafter, young Olive died, leaving Hodder in such deep despair that for some time she contemplated suicide. Encouraged by Alice Gibbens James , wife of William James, to return to the United States, Hodder settled in Boston in 1906 and began to reclaim her life.

With a letter of introduction from Alice Gibbens James to Elizabeth Glendower Evans , Hodder secured a job as housemother at the Industrial School for Girls in Lancaster, Massachusetts. A year later, she joined the social service department of Massachusetts General Hospital as a counselor for alcoholics, syphilis victims, and unwed mothers. Her compassionate work with the young girls, whom she counseled to keep their babies rather than give them up for adoption, led to her appointment in 1910 as superintendent of the Massachusetts Prison and Reformatory for Women in Framingham, where Ellen Cheney Johnson had begun a pioneering program of rehabilitation. Expanding on Johnson's work, Hodder turned the reformatory into a model institution. She first convinced the legislature to drop the word Prison from the name of the institution and then remodeled the disciplinary wing, unblocking windows to let in the daylight and views of the countryside. Shortening the prisoner's workday by half, she used the extra time for programs of recreation and education. She staffed the institution with trained instructors equipped to teach at various levels, from elementary grades through high school, and offered university extension courses in business, language, and domestic science. Her innovative recreational programs included outdoor activities, as well as music and drama. All the while, Hodder managed to increase production in the institution's established clothing, cattle, and poultry industries. In addition, she arranged for inmates to work outside the institution at regular jobs for which they were paid.

One of Hodder's most valuable contributions was in the study and classification of inmates. Aware of the experiments of Katharine Bement Davis at the New York Reformatory for Women, Hodder recommended that inmates receive medical and psychiatric evaluations and that the mentally ill and uneducable inmates be separated from the reformable population. Beginning in 1912, she appointed a resident social worker and established a research staff that maintained case records and follow-up studies which proved invaluable in later surveys to determine the social causes of delinquency. Although not an original theorist, Hodder succeeded where her predecessors had failed by swaying the legislature to support some of her innovations, and then using the funds allocated to her in a creative manner. A stately woman of great warmth and dignity, she charmed inmates and fellow workers alike. Her maternal instincts were such that she often opened her personal residence to inmates in crisis.

Hodder kept abreast of the newest ideas in penology through outside contacts. The reformatory was frequently visited by European leaders in the field, and Hodder made a tour of European prisons and reformatories in 1921. She was involved with the National Conference of Social Work and the National Prison Association and, in 1925, served as the sole woman delegate to the International Prison Congress in London. Hodder was appointed to the National Crime Commission by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927 and to a committee of the Wickersham Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement by President Herbert Hoover in 1929.

Jessie Hodder died of chronic myocarditis at her home in the reformatory at Framingham in 1931. That same year, criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck began their renowned study of the Framingham Reformatory and 500 of its women inmates. The work, completed in 1934, cited Jessie Hodder as a leading force in the transformation of the institution into a model facility.