This article explores how cultural intersections between modern crime, law, and health operate differently, for gender-related reasons, in prison spaces for women. It seeks to contribute to the existing historiographical studies of health, gender and penitentiaries by focusing on the first penitentiary built exclusively for women in Puerto Rico, the Escuela Industrial de Mujeres Vega Alta (EIVA). This prison opened its doors in 1954 – two years after the Commonwealth Constitution entered into effect – when it began to operate as an institution of social control. The opening of the EIVA was a product of the convergence of five main factors. First, the limitations of the penal infrastructure at the time resulted in dire overcrowding, and therefore hygiene and health problems that required urgent attention. Second, the interest of women’s group, like the Spiritist Ladies' Club and the Association of Social Workers, in the problem of overcrowding in mixed penitentiaries. Third, a process of resignification of criminality – and specifically women's criminality – as a social problem, that was as much cause as it was effect of the disarray generated by capitalist modernization. Both the “crisis” of overcrowding and the “problem” of growing criminality, including female criminality, confronted the young State, through the lens of its emerging discourses and practices of social control: in this context, penal reform and “rehabilitation”. Fourth, the political tensions surrounding the creation of the Commonwealth, which came to fruition in the Nationalist Revolt of 1950, in which several prominent women leaders participated (and were jailed as a result). And Fifth, EIVA attempted to fulfill the objectives of laws through which it was created: to rehabilitate female inmates, first, for family life, and second, for society. Within EIVA, as part of the “rehabilitation” process, gender roles considered appropriate for the female inmates were reinforced. However, female inmates' bodies were not domesticated in a homogenous way. On the contrary, this process was very complex. Although there are examples of “successful” domestication, there are also examples of resistance and negotiation.