This paper argues that official representations of female criminals’ femininity were central to the construction of a separate sphere for the imprisonment of women in the late Ottoman Empire. In the recurrent reforms of this era, government officials constructed an ideal image of the female prisoner that fell under a wider understanding of femininity. This can be seen in the gendered representations of female criminal identity and the centrality of femininity to the design of women’s prisons, which combined to create peculiar carceral practices. I follow the archival records to show a separate female carceral sphere that included and spilled outside of the prison to include temporary leased locations and imam’s houses. This separate female carceral sphere was a direct product of the gendered understanding of the late-Ottoman woman criminal. This paper reconstructs the identification of women’s criminal behavior in this era’s criminological imaginary. Penal studies of this era are in important resource for tracing cliché representation of women’s criminal agency, wherein female criminals were depicted as “victim” or “self-defender” offenders. However, this understanding derived from “androcentric” penal approach towards female criminality which identified female offenders as innocent, vulnerable, physically, and emotionally weak victims and desperate self-defender. This is an important background to the specific punishments and unique practices of incarceration which were developed as a result. Prison officials emphasized the peculiarities and uniqueness of the situations of female prisoners, even if they committed violent offences such as homicide. Their femininity also entailed their representation as more vulnerable, and thus as a result more deserving of the state’s male-centric care. As a result, state officials developed distinctive treatments which they presented as more tolerant and “lenient” punishments, especially for inmates who were also mothers. Young mothers were marked off, and the Ottoman prison system developed original and idiosyncratic approaches for handling pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. These punitive methods engendered the unique dynamics and prison politics for female inmates. Using archival cases, judicial records, penal studies, and amnesty records, this paper underlines the impact of the multilayered and gendered representations of female prisoners (as dangerous criminals, vulnerable mothers, infirm pregnant and old women) to show that these were central to the construction of the late Ottoman prison system.