A bit of the Albion History:  as you read, remember, Claude's ex-wife Harriet died in prison, October 21, 1931 while There.

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Josephine Shaw Lowell was a loud voice in a chorus arguing that "idiocy" was but one manifestation of a generalized "defect" encompassing insanity, pauperism, crime and virtually a forms of antisocial behavior. Since the defect was hereditary according to Lowell, the cause of social problems was "the unrestrained liberty allowed to vagrant and degraded women." She engineered the establishment in 1878 of the Newark Custodial Branch for Feeble-Minded Women openly designed prevent crime by curtailing the reproduction of "feeble-minded women of child-bearing age."

The new approach was eagerly seized upon by reformatory managers, particularly at Bedford and Elmira. They now had a answer to their discipline problems--"lock these incurables away," they seemed to say, "and let us work our magic on the deserving and the salvageable." A prolonged propaganda campaign finally resulted in legislation in 1920. It provided that women found "mentally deficient to an extent to require supervision, control and care," an charged with or convicted of crime, would receive indefinite life sentences. A section of the Bedford Hills reformatory was designate the Division for Mentally Defective Delinquent Women (MDDW).

When the women transferred to the Division for MDDW realize they were now imprisoned for up to forever, they became desperately disruptive. Meanwhile, the Albion reformatory was also finding defectives in their midst. Better, officials reasoned, to place the irremediable defectives in one institution and the reformable "normals" in the other, rather than to continue mixing then in both.

On July 1, 1931, the Albion State Training School (as there reformatory had been called since 1923) was redesignated the Institution for Mentally Defective Delinquent Women, a "sister institution" to Napanoch--the first such institution for women in the United States and probably in the world. 

A month later, Dr. Gordon F. Willey became the first male to head the institution. On October 1, special trains began transporting Albion's "normals" down to Bedford Hills and bringing Bedford's defectives back on the return trip.