Davis, Katharine Bement (1860–1935)

American penologist and social worker . Born on January 15, 1860, in Buffalo, New York; died on December 10, 1935, in Pacific Grove, California; eldest of three girls and two boys of Oscar Bill (a businessman) and Frances (Bement) Davis; graduated from the Rochester Free Academy, 1879; taught for ten years at the Dunkirk High School before entering the junior class at Vassar College in 1890, graduating with honors, 1892; attended Columbia University, 1892–93; attended the University of Chicago (spending one year abroad at the universities of Berlin and Vienna), graduating with a Ph.D. in economics, 1900.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, Katharine Davis spent her childhood in Dunkirk and in Rochester, where she graduated from the Rochester Free Academy in 1879. A family financial crisis delayed her college education for ten years, during which time she taught school while taking night courses. In 1890, she entered Vassar as a junior, graduating in 1892 with honors. She went on to study food chemistry and nutrition at Columbia while teaching science at Brooklyn Heights Seminary for Girls. In the summer of 1893, she was director of the New York State Exhibit of a model worker's home at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which demonstrated how a family could maintain adequate dietary and living conditions on a small salary. That same year, she became the head of the St. Mary's Street College Settlement in Philadelphia, where she put the Chicago model into practice within the settlement's low-income black and immigrant population. In 1897, she began doctoral studies in political economics at the University of Chicago, which incorporated a year abroad at the universities of Berlin and Vienna.

After receiving her Ph.D. in 1900, Davis was appointed superintendent of the newly opened Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, New York, a post she would hold for 13 years. During her tenure, the reformatory was cited as "the most active penal experiment station in America." Davis was instrumental in establishing a prison farm, a cottage system of housing, and vocational training courses for the women inmates. Her pioneering work in identifying and separating reformable from repeat offenders so impressed John D. Rockefeller, Jr. that he established the Laboratory of Social Hygiene in 1912 on property adjacent to the reformatory, with the purpose of furthering her research.

During a European trip in 1909, Davis received international recognition for organizing an emergency self-help relief program following an earthquake in Messina, Sicily. For her efforts, she won medals from the Red Cross and the Italian government, as well as a Papal commendation.

In 1914, she was appointed commissioner of correction for New York City by the newly elected reform mayor John Purroy Mitchel, making her the first woman to serve at a cabinet level in that municipality. Davis quickly moved to improve conditions within the city's penal institutions: she established the New Hampton Farm School for Boys in Orange County, removing delinquents from the confined city reformatory and providing them with open-air work; initiated plans for the New York City Detention Home for Women (which opened in 1932); took steps to abolish striped clothing among city inmates; and worked to eliminate narcotic peddling within the city's institutions and to upgrade dietary and medical facilities. In the summer of 1914, she was instrumental in suppressing a riot among convicts at Blackwell's Island, through her intelligent and sensitive handling of the situation. In 1915, in response to her efforts, the New York legislature enacted a program of indeterminate sentencing and parole supervision, and named Davis first chair of the city's parole board, a post she held until the end of the reform administration in 1918.

From 1918 until her retirement in 1928, Davis was general secretary and a member of the board of directors of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, a branch of the Rockefeller Foundation, where she continued the bureau's work in investigating commercialized vice and prostitution. She directed research into narcotic addiction and the "international white slave trade," as well as the broader fields of public health and hygiene. During World War II, she headed the women's section for social hygiene of the Commission on Training Camp Activities. After the war, she crossed Europe on an inspection tour for the Young Women's Christian Association and raised over $2 million in relief funds. An active contributor to scholarly and professional journals, she published a study, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women, in 1929. In 1930, Davis moved to Pacific Grove, California, where she took up residence with her two sisters. She died there on December 10, 1935, at age 75.