In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women's Imprisonment: 3 (Gender and Justice) - Softcover

Owen, Barbara; Wells, James; Pollock, Joycelyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520288726 ISBN 13: 9780520288720

Verlag: University of California Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In Search of Safety takes a close look at the sources of gendered violence and conflict in women's prisons. The authors examine how intersectional inequalities and cumulative disadvantages are at the root of prison conflict and violence and mirror the women's pathways to prison. Women must negotiate these inequities by developing forms of prison capital-social, human, cultural, emotional, and economic-to ensure their safety while inside. The authors also analyze how conflict and subsequent violence result from human-rights violations inside the prison that occur within the gendered context of substandard prison conditions, inequalities of capital among those imprisoned, and relationships with correctional staff. In Search of Safety proposes a way forward-the implementation of international human-rights standards for U.S. prisons.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Owen is Professor Emerita at California State University, Fresno. James Wells is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. Joycelyn Pollock is Distinguished Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Texas State University.

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“For decades, Barbara Owen has provided incisive and authentic insights on the incarceration of women. This book shows the profound neglect and violence women face in the criminal justice system, and the unique ways in which gender compounds the punishment of confinement. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to see justice-involved women regain their human and civil rights in the United States and beyond.”—Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

“This is a masterful piece of scholarship, providing readers with a thorough understanding of the distressing conditions facing incarcerated women throughout the U.S. These authors have given us a comprehensive stock of information about women’s prisons while allowing ample space for the voices of incarcerated women to be heard. The effect is chilling and deeply moving.”—Katherine Irwin, coauthor of Jacked Up and Unjust and Beyond Bad Girls

“Profoundly humanistic and sensitively informed by the intersection of social, cultural, historical, and structural sources of identity and opportunity. In this remarkable book we see how cumulative disadvantages and harms associated with gender find their fullest, and often cruelest, expression in the state-sponsored harms meted out in prisons for women. The mix of methods and the theoretical sophistication found in this volume set a new standard for prison research, if not for social research generally. This book is destined to be a classic.”—Robert Johnson, coeditor of A Woman Doing Life and Life without Parole

“The authors have engaged in the best kind of research—the kind that is informed by rigorous fieldwork, courageous writing, and nuanced analysis. They clearly understand women’s and girls’ experience in custodial settings and are unafraid to amplify what is known but also to chart new and interesting territory.”—Brenda V. Smith, Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law, and former Commissioner, National Prison Rape Elimination Commission

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In Search of Safety

Confronting Inequality in Women's Imprisonment

By Barbara Owen, James Wells, Joycelyn Pollock

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28872-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
1. Intersectional Inequality and Women's Imprisonment, 
2. Pathways and Intersecting Inequality, 
3. Prison Community, Prison Conditions, and Gendered Harm, 
4. Searching for Safety through Prison Capital, 
5. Inequalities and Contextual Conflict, 
6. Intersections of Inequality with Correctional Staff, 
7. Gendered Human Rights and the Search for Safety, 
Appendix 1: Methodology, 
Appendix 2: Tables of Findings, 
Notes, 
Glossary, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Intersectional Inequality and Women's Imprisonment

When most people think about prison, they think about men. And this makes sense: men make up over 90 percent of the prison population in the United States and in most countries around the world (Walmsley 2015). In 2014, women comprised just over 7 percent of the prison population, 112,961 of the 1,561,500 prisoners in the United States (Carson 2015). As Britton (2003) argues, prisons are deeply gendered organizations. We build on this insight to employ an intersectional analysis (Potter 2015; Joseph 2006) in describing the gendered harms embedded in the contemporary prison. In documenting women's experience with imprisonment, we argue that threats to safety are bound by multiple forms of inequality within the prison itself. Women's lived experiences while locked up, we assert, reflect the multiple and cumulative disadvantages that condition their pathways to prison and continue to shape their choices and chances in the total institution of the prison. In confronting these inequalities, women negotiate myriad challenges to their safety inside prison by developing forms of prison capital. This capital can protect women from the threats in the carceral environment, in their interaction with other prisoners, and from the staff employed to protect them. Learning how to do time, we find, is based on leveraging prison-based forms of capital that can protect women from the harms of imprisonment.

Multiple forms of inequality and disadvantage find direct expression in women's pathways to and within prison. While racial and class inequities constrain the life chances of many before they land in prison, understanding the experience of women requires a separate examination. In their examination of "gender-specific explanations of prison violence," Wooldredge and Steiner (2016, 12) find: "Although incarcerated men are disproportionately drawn from more impoverished populations, incarcerated women tend to be even more disadvantaged and face multiple deficits in social capital (inadequate job training, spotty employment histories, and economic marginalization)."

Our analysis builds on the intersectional inequalities that increase women's vulnerabilities to crime, violence, and imprisonment (Belknap 2015; Crenshaw 2012; Pollock 2014; Potter 2015). For women whose pathways lead them to prison, such disadvantages are replicated and often magnified inside prison, which, in turn, increases the threats to their already tenuous sense of safety and well-being. In addition to gendered disadvantage, our analysis introduces the notion of prison capital. We define capital as any type of resource, or access to a desired resource, that can keep a woman safe while she does her time. In addition to prison forms of social capital (who you know) and human capital (what you know), other specific expressions of cultural, emotional, and economic capital provide the foundation for the search for safety as women do their time. In the context of irrationality and inequality, women navigate these challenges embedded in prison life by marshalling their stores of prison capital. Women who develop and deploy their stocks of prison capital survive, and sometimes thrive, as they serve their prison sentences. Most can do their time safely by gaining economic capital, earning the cultural capital of respect and reputation, increasing emotional capital, and developing social capital through connections with nonthreatening and supportive prisoners and staff.

In documenting women's experiences with incarceration, we explore the ways these multiplicative and cumulative disadvantages create the context for gendered troubles, conflict, and violence within the framework of intersectional inequalities and constrained choice. Reframing the lives of incarcerated women's lives in terms of the gendered harms of imprisonment directs attention toward the consequences of structural inequities and away from individual pathologies as explanations of prison conflict and violence.

Threats to safety and well-being are embedded in the world of the prison. Standard operational practice can threaten women's well-being through "gender-neutral" policies. Material needs and desires, unmet in the scarcity of the official economy, feed economic conflict and the subterranean economy through illicit trafficking and trading. Drug use and other risky behaviors inside also contribute to these potentials for prison violence. Relationships among women prisoners and with staff contain the possibility of risk, conflict, and violence. Prison culture may require women to resort to forms of aggression to protect themselves and their reputations as they do their time.

Women's safety is further compromised by the many contradictions embedded in the contemporary prison. We demonstrate how prisons manufacture risk and sustain unsafe conditions, contradicting the stated mission of "care and custody" of their prisoners. Existing prison conditions, such as inadequate housing, untreated disease, minimal medical care, and inferior nutrition create a context of risk and threat to women's well-being. Aspects of operational practice, such as gender-neutral classification systems and lack of women-centered services (Van Voorhis 2005, 2012; Bloom, Owen, and Covington 2003, 2004), also undermine women's ability to live safely inside prison. We claim these harms are unnecessary and constitute gendered human rights violations when viewed through the lens of international human rights standards for the treatment of women in prison. The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders (2010), or the Bangkok Rules, serve as international standards intended to relieve the iatrogenic damage of imprisonment and better prepare women to reenter their communities. The Bangkok Rules, and other international human rights instruments, however, have gained little traction in U.S. prisons. We return to the promise of the Bangkok Rules in our conclusion.

GENDER AND IMPRISONMENT

The concept "gender" is used here as a sociocultural category, as opposed to the biological concept "sex" (West and Zimmerman 1987;Belknap 2015). In summarizing work on gender as process, Wesely (2012) shows that gender is a socially constructed identity through social, cultural and psychological accomplishment. Gender is thus organized and managed within social structures and institutions (West and Zimmerman 1987; Belknap 2015). Wesely (2012, 11) outlines the ways gender socialization and different expectations of gender identity are "inextricably linked to unequal levels of social value, prestige, or advantage" in patriarchal societies. In challenging the assumptions of the duality of the social construction of "female" and "male," Wesely ties these artificial dichotomies to the assumptions of a patriarchal culture in which girls and women are subordinated, oppressed, and seen as "less than" boys and men. We see gender as "an ongoing and contradictory historical and interactional process, not as an attribution of individuals" (Martin and Jurick 2007, 29).

The concept of intersectionality (Potter 2013, 2015; Crenshaw 2012; Joseph 2006) informs our work by underscoring the overlapping inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation and identity that underpin women's status in the free world. Women's prisons provide a stark example of these intersecting and hierarchical forms of discrimination against women, the poor, and communities of color. Richie frames this argument precisely.

I cannot imagine a place where one might stand and have a clearer view of concentrated disadvantage based on racial, class and gender inequality in the country than from inside the walls of women's prisons. There, behind the razor wire fences, concrete barricade, steel doors, metal bars, and thick plexiglass windows, nearly all the manifestations of gender domination that feminist scholars and activists have traditionally concerned themselves with — exploited labor, inadequate healthcare, dangerous living conditions, physical violence, and sexual assault are revealed at once. That gender oppression is significantly furthered by racism and poverty is undeniable from this point of view. Women's correctional facilities constitute nearly perfect examples of the consequences of the multiple subjugation and the compounding impact of various stigmatized identities. The convergence of disadvantage, discrimination, and despair is staggering. In fact, it could be argued that prisons incarcerate a population of women who have experienced such a profound concentration of the most vicious forms of economic marginalization, institutionalized racism, and victimization that it can almost seem intentional or mundane. The pattern is clearly evident in almost every crowded visiting room, in every sparsely decorated cell, and in the stories of each woman held in degrading and dangerous conditions that characterize women's prisons and other correctional facilities in this country. (Richie 2004, 438)

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAME OF THIS BOOK

We draw on multiple, overlapping concepts to frame and present our data. The constructs of pathways, gender inequality, intersectionality, community, capital, prison culture, human rights, and state-sponsored suffering guide our analyses.

Expanding the Pathways Perspective

The story begins in women's pathways to prison. Deeply informed by feminist theory, the pathway perspective examines gendered experiences that lead women to prison. The pathways approach draws on life course and cycle of violence theories to trace, retrospectively, the paths traveled by justice-involved girls and women (Lynch et al. 2012; De Hart 2005; Belknap 2015; Pollock 2014). It focuses on the lived experiences of girls and women and their multiple marginality from conventional institutions, such as work, family, and school (Owen 1998), and the patterns of violence and victimization throughout their life course (Bloom, Owen, and Covington 2003; Pollock 2014; Belknap 2015). These pathways are often shaped by punitive policies toward women. Sharp (2014, xiii) locates the high incarceration rate of women in Oklahoma in the legal and social climate of "mean laws," arguing that "to truly understand why Oklahoma imprisons women at such a high rate, we must look beyond the women themselves." The mean laws that have propelled women into Oklahoma prisons illustrate the punitive nature of U.S. prison policies, with disadvantage, discrimination, and despair (Richie 2004) embodied in these pathways. As Enos (2012) and Sered and Norton-Hawk (2014) suggest, prisons have become the default system for managing marginalized people disadvantaged through intersectional inequalities.

The notion of agency is critical to understanding women's experience (Bosworth 1999; Batchelor 2005; Miller 2002). We offer the idea of constrained choice to describe the limited options available to many marginalized women and emphasize the cumulative disadvantage rooted in structural and historical forms of inequality that produce oppression, trauma and subsequent harm. We argue that the pathways and choices that bring women to prison continue to shape their lives inside.

Gender Inequality

We also build on the definition of gender and gender equality offered by the United Nations in Women and Imprisonment: The Handbook for Prison Managers and Policy-Makers:

Gender refers to social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female, including socially constructed roles and relationships, personality traits, attitudes, behaviours, values, relative power and influence. Gender equality refers to the equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities of women and men, and implies that the interests, needs and priorities of both women and men are taken into consideration. (UNODC 2015, 12)

Gender inequality finds expression in all aspects of women's imprisonment. It is a critical component of their lives inside and out, a foundation for the punishment philosophy vis-à-vis women, and a significant source of threat within the prison community. Such inequality intersects with other identities and social positions, particularly those generated by racial, ethnic, and class oppression, reproducing disadvantage and harm in their prison lives. In or out of prison, women's experiences with interpersonal violence and victimization must be contextualized within the frame of structural disadvantage and intersectional inequality, rather than dismissed as individual pathologies. We reframe the discussion of women's pathway experiences into and inside prison through our understanding of intersectionality and structural inequality.

Intersectionality: Intersections of Inequality and Identity

We are guided by scholarship articulating the dimensions of intersectionality (Joseph 2006; Burgess-Proctor 2006; Crenshaw 2012; Chesney-Lind and Morash 2013; Potter 2015). Potter (2013, 305) offers this definition: "Intersectional criminology is a theoretical approach that necessitates a critical reflection on the interconnected identities and statuses of individuals and groups in relation to their experiences of crime, the social control of crime and any crime related issues." With roots in black legal scholarship (Crenshaw 2012), this approach establishes that women must be understood in terms of the multiplicative social effects of an individual's identity "and the social forces that generate crime and reactions to crime" (Potter 2013, 305). Potter draws on Richie's concept of gender entrapment to show how the linked stigmas of gender, race, and economic and social class are amplified by "being battered women, being criminals and being incarcerated women" (2013, 311). Salisbury and Van Voorhis extend this argument:

Beyond the "triple jeopardy" many women offenders must face related to their race, class, and gender (Bloom, 1996), several unique experiences have been described by women offenders in narratives of their life experiences leading to continued recidivism. Among them are poverty-stricken backgrounds, lifelong traumatic and abusive events, serious mental illness with self-medicating behaviors as coping mechanisms, little social support, dysfunctional intimate relationships, and difficulty managing and providing for their dependent children. (2009, 542)

This notion of multiple stigmas and "oppressed and subordinated identities" (Potter 2013, 314) is central to our analyses. Understanding differences among women and critically analyzing the experiences of individuals based on their social positions is important to any study of women (Potter 2013, 316). As Georges-Abeyie (2015) further notes, communities of color should not be seen as an ethnic monolith. Women, too, must be understood in terms of their diversity, rather than heterogeneity. The intersectional paradigm unpacks the experience of women in prison by focusing on the multiplicative effects of these identities beyond a monolithic definition of gender. With real differences in women's lives mediated by social position, the additional subordinated status of "prisoner," "inmate," or "convict" adds another layer to women's oppressions and marginality as they do their time.

Potter's 2015 book, Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and Revolutionizing Studies of Crime, extends the argument by saying that since "intersectionality is a practice of understanding and interrogating the role of identities, we must understand the social construction of major identities categorized within our societies" (8). For individuals "who hold multiple intertwined identities at the lowest end of the social hierarchy, discrimination, microaggressions, and bigotry are multiplied" (35). We argue these intersectionally informed experiences continue to shape pathways and disadvantage inside prison.

Chesney-Lind and Morash (2013, 292) agree that intersectionality is key to transformational feminist criminology, stating, "The feminist perspective calls attention to gender (and thus masculinity) as something that is enacted in the context of patriarchal privilege, class privilege, and racism." They remind us that feminist theory concerns gendered organizations of social control that are "clearly implicated in the enforcement of patriarchal privilege" (289). The prison, as the locus of social control, reinforces and reproduces gender inequality and other forms of discrimination against women of color, those without capital, and those with non-normative sexual and other disdained identities.

Connecting the Free World and the Prison Communities

The idea of community influenced our work in several ways. Examining gendered inequality in the community structures of women's free world lives reveals the depth of struggle they experience prior to prison (Sered and Norton-Hawk 2014; Baskin and Sommers 1998). We were particularly influenced by the work of Sered and Norton-Hawk (2014) and Lipsitz (2012) as they emphasize the role of a spoiled medical status and housing insecurity in undermining women's safety in the free world community. Their work led us to consider how these factors contribute to safety inside prison.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520288726
• ISBN 13: 9780520288720
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 274
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar