Mid-nineteenth century law enforcers struggled to preserve social order. This task, however, often entailed managing crime rather than eliminating criminal or disruptive behavior. For example, in order to address the crime, disorder, and immorality associated with the municipal police attempted to regulate or control illicit sexual activity.1 Such a strategy encouraged law enforcers to arrest some fallen women but to protect others. Ironically, the police often supported and assisted those women who engaged in the sex trades most consistently and who were, by middle-class standards, most depraved, while they vigorously pursued and apprehended women who had scant contact and often no contact at all with illicit or illegal activities in the city. Immoral or disruptive women posed special problems for nineteenth-century policemen and policymakers. Many city officials believed that fallen women were extraordinarily dangerous. Not only did such women commit immoral and often illegal acts, but their behavior also contaminated innocent young men, many of whom subsequently became drunkards and criminals.2 Thus municipal officials held fallen women responsible for much of the crime committed by men. Arresting these women, therefore, promised to reduce violence, disorder, and property crime, as well as immorality. But midSnineteenth-century public officials were poorly prepared to battle women criminals. Legislators expected men to commit most offenses, and they framed laws in order to address male criminals.3 Statutes designed to eliminate wanderers, for example, often specified the punishment for the wayfaring man; laws concerning pauperism, vagrancy, and drunkenness frequently contained similar language.4 Regulating the moral conduct of women posed considerable difficulties as well. The moral indiscretions that frightened middle-class reformers often seemed unimportant to working-class policemen and trivial to judges struggling to maintain social order. Similarly, the machinery of the criminal justice system remained ill suited for female offenders. Although women began to be arrested and incarcerated in increasing numbers during the antebellum period, neither prison facilities nor the regimen imposed as punishment seemed appropriate for these criminals.5 Few states, for example, had institutions for