‘No one’, argued Mary Carpenter, the great prison reformer, ‘can calculate the amount of crime which may be saved to the country by the rescue of a single woman from a vicious life.’ Her words did not go unheeded in Ireland either by prison reformers or philanthropists who sought to rescue ex-prisoners from returning to their ‘vicious lives’. Women prisoners benefited from the reforms implemented in the Irish prison system throughout the nineteenth century. Much of this reform was brought about by men. Female philanthropists had little impact on prison policy but they did play an important role as prison visitors and also set up independent refuges to cater for the needs of ex-prisoners. Several areas are of interest in relation to Irish women prisoners: their conditions within the general prison system and the attempts made to rehabilitate them within that system; the origins and implementation of a separate prison system for women; the development of an intermediary prison for women convicts and finally the establishment of refuges, by philanthropists, for women who had left the prison system. Like so many other areas of the social history of the nineteenth century the incarceration of women in prisons deserves to be looked at in greater detail. The following gives only a general impression of the situation as a background for the initiatives taken by women philanthropists in this area. Before looking at the formal prison system some evidence regarding the level of female criminality in nineteenth-century Ireland will place the subject in context.