Miriam Van Waters (October 4, 1887 – January 17, 1974) was an American prison reformer of the early to mid-20th century whose methods owed much to her upbringing as an Episcopalian involved in the Social Gospel movement.

Van Waters' public-speaking skills, assertive manner, and charisma drew national as well as local attention to her methods, and she was supported financially by philanthropists including Ethel Sturges Dummer, who helped pay for El Retiro and for leaves of absence from her supervisory duties to work on two books, Youth in Conflict (1925) and Parents on Probation (1927).

Eleanor Roosevelt, a first lady, and Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor and then a Supreme Court justice, were among Van Waters' many admirers and political supporters, but her methods drew the ire of opponents who viewed them as over-lenient and ineffective.

[4] During these growing-up years, Miriam was strongly influenced by her father's love of books and scholarship, his participation in the Social Gospel movement, and his use of the rectory as a kind of settlement house open to everyone.

[15] Her dissertation, The Adolescent Girl among Primitive People, was influenced by Chamberlain's cross-cultural studies and her personal investigations of juvenile delinquency in Boston and in her home town, Portland.

[2] After a brief stint with the Boston Children's Aid Society (BCAS) as a probation officer for girls awaiting trial or sentencing in juvenile court,[17] Van Waters applied for work in Portland.

The detention center held boys and girls who, while in custody, were fed a poor diet, received scant medical attention, were given little to do, and were subjected to corporal punishment with straps and rubber hoses.

Despite health concerns, she took and passed a California civil service exam, then applied for the position of superintendent at the Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall, a detention center for girls.

[23] Assisted by many other women reformers, she worked to modify the detention center to include health care, counseling, psychological assessment, improved diet, recreation, and other social services.

[25] According to journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, El Retiro stood in sharp contrast to many early 20th-century prisons for women and children, where conditions were "foul, fetid and medieval".

Partly funded by Chicago philanthropist Ethel Sturges Dummer, the halfway house opened later in 1921 and over the rest of the decade served several hundred young women, each staying an average of four months.

Financed by Dummer, Van Waters took other leaves of absence during the 1920s to widely promote her ideas about child welfare and prison reform, citing El Retiro as a model.

[34] In 1928, she completed a second book, Parents on Probation, which repeated her assertions that juvenile delinquency stemmed from families that failed to provide children with adequate attention and positive role models.

[41] Her parents had by then relocated from Portland to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania;[42] the Harvard Crime Survey, with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was unfinished, and in November 1929 Van Waters agreed to direct the juvenile-delinquency division of the Wickersham Commission, formally titled the National Committee on Law Observance and Enforcement, established by President Herbert Hoover.

[45] During the latter half of the decade, Van Waters entered what was to be a strong, eventually intimate 40-year relationship with another wealthy philanthropist, Geraldine Morgan Thompson,[46] who supported prison reform in her home state of New Jersey and elsewhere.

[60] After the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, a conservative backlash against New Deal policies was accompanied by campaigns to portray liberals such as Van Waters as subversives who undermined the traditional social order.

[62] Dwyer concluded that the rumors were false, but his interrogations of staff and inmates led to broader charges of lesbian activity at Framingham,[63] and he leaked details about his probe to the tabloid press in Boston.

[65] In response to Dwyer's report, in June 1948 McDowell reduced Van Waters' authority, and the state legislature established an investigative committee to hold hearings on the matter after the 1948 elections in November.

[66] During the summer and fall, State Senator Michael Lopresti, Van Waters' most vocal detractor on the committee, likened her methods to those of communist regimes that ruled with an "iron hand", and he denounced her administration as "more damaging to the morals and mental health of young girls" than prostitution.

[68] An initial public hearing in November resolved nothing, and in December McDowell announced his intention to fire Van Waters in January, when office-holders, including a new governor, began their terms.

Believing that McDowell would rule against her, Van Waters, Cross, and other supporters used the proceedings as a platform to present her to the public as an exemplary person and to promote her methods of penal reform.

Housewives, off-duty reformatory staff members, college students, workers on their lunch breaks, and friends filled the auditorium each day; those who could not gain entrance weathered the winter cold as they gathered around the windows and doorways to catch a glimpse of the proceedings.

[73]Eighteen days of examinations, cross-examinations, and speeches produced 2,000 pages of testimony,[74] and on February 11, McDowell confirmed his decision to fire Van Waters on most of the charges he had brought against her, particularly her resistance to his authority as commissioner and to state law.

The panel members were Caroline Putnam, a Catholic charities worker; Robert Clark, a county district attorney, and Erwin Griswold, then dean of the Harvard Law School and later a U.S. solicitor general.

On March 11, the three-member panel unanimously reversed McDowell's decision to fire Van Waters, finding no evidence of irregularities or errors of judgment on her part that were not made in good faith.

[78] One of the board members, Katharine Sullivan, wrote a book, Girls on Parole, in which she claimed that older lesbians in prisons preyed upon younger newcomers and converted them to homosexuality.

[82] During this era, when accusations about homosexuality were often paired with those about communism,[83] Van Waters became close friends with Helen Bryan, who had been the executive secretary of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC).

Bryan had served time in prison for contempt of Congress after refusing to give the House Un-American Activities Committee a list of JAFRC members and the refugees from Francisco Franco's Spain that they had helped resettle in the United States.

She joined the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, an organization of Episcopalian women that promoted social justice, and she served as president of the local branch of the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Gladding, hired in 1932 to teach in the nursery at Framingham, served as the organist and choir director for the prison, led study groups, coordinated visitor activities, and became the institution's librarian in 1957.