The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women begins in 1918 when Nina McCall was told to report to the local health officer for an STI examination. Confused and humiliated, McCall did as she was told, and was quickly diagnosed with gonorrhea. Despite her insistence that she could not have an STI, she was coerced into committing herself to the Bay City Detention Hospital, where she endured three months of hard labor and humiliation. McCall was one of the vast number of women detained under the "American Plan," a program which empowered officials to incarcerate women–often without due process–on suspicion of prostitution, carrying STIs, or mere promiscuity. Though the "American Plan" persisted from the 1910s into the 1950s–with vestiges lingering into the 1960s and 1970s–the laws which undergirded it remain on the books to this day.
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