In the Russian partitioned area, women who were sentenced by ecclesiastical courts to a one- or two-week retreat or by secular courts to several months of penance were sometimes sent to monasteries. In the latter case, the program included learning the catechism, one day of fasting a week, and daily participation in Holy Mass. and housework. The perpetrators most often committed adultery or prostitution. The archival materials used in this article concern approximately eighty people who, for these reasons, temporarily found themselves among the Benedictine nuns in Vilnius in the years 1815-1913. This monastery, designated by the tsarist government in 1843 for future dissolution, was already intended by the bishop in 1851 as a future correctional facility for former prostitutes. However, already in 1856, the government began to place nuns from convents of various orders there when they were closed down, and the idea of establishing a correctional facility was abandoned. The number of those serving penitential sentences never exceeded four or five per year, and usually not at the same time.