English Quaker Elizabeth Fry d 10/12 1845. From her first visit to Newgate Prison she saw conditions that filled her with shame and indignation—women crowded in fetid cells, in rags, sleeping on the bare floor. She saw a woman strip clothing from a dead infant to clothe her own.

She devoted the rest of her life to the cause of prison reform—vs. those who said this was no work for a woman, that prisoners were savages, that improving conditions would remove “the dread of punishment in the criminal class.”