Green Backs

Anon.

Green Backs, 1961

Salem cigarette wrappers and boxes

Indiana Women’s Prison, Indianapolis, Indiana 

Green Backs is a satchel with a fold-down lid and a carrying-strap. It is woven from bands of packaging that bore the brand name “Salem.” The title refers to the green cigarette box color that is relieved only by the short gold and white borders that counterbalance partially visible word fragments within gold edged ovals.

Opened in 1873, the Indiana Women’s Prison was the country’s earliest maximum-security women’s correctional facility. It was built in response to the horrific accounts of physical and sexual abuse, rapes, and impregnations that women suffered at from male prison guards at the co-ed Indiana State Prison at Jeffersonville. Rhoda Coffin and Sarah J. Smith, both Quakers, were moved by the abuses and felt called by God to take action. They lobbied for the construction of a correctional facility for woman only.

Sarah J. Smith had been a minister and nurse during the Civil War and later became Indiana’s first women’s prison superintendent as well as the nation’s first female superintendent. She encourages programs and classes in the domestic trades and thereby established a new direction in female corrections.