Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States
Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds and Ruby C. Tapia, eds.
University of California Press: Berkeley
Softbound, 480 pages, $21.95
January 2010
Money quote:
For rural towns devastated by economic restructuring and free-trade competition, prisons seem to be a panacea for economic stagnation and population loss. Aid the farm bankruptcies and factory closures caused by the rise of corporate agribusiness and the influx of foreign products, the jobs and construction contracts offered by new public or private prisons have pitted small towns against each other in bids to offer the most attractive package of tax breaks, cheap land, and other incentives. Politicians and business elites in rural towns in the United States and Canada have promoted prison construction as a form of economic development, touting prisons as a recession-proof and non-polluting industry. Ultimately, however, prison towns fail to reap the promised benefits and instead suffer from inflated real estate prices, high unemployment, and environmental degradation.
-- Julia Sudbury, "Unpacking the Crisis: Women of Color, Globalization, and the Prison-Industrial Complex"
Author: The editors of this volume of essays include an historian, an attorney, a formerly incarcerated woman, a law professor and a professor of comparative studies. Contributors are equally varied, with more current and formerly incarcerated folk represented; there are also a few position papers/reports/recommendations from organizations involved in ensuring prisoner rights.
Basic premise: The bloated, mammoth and ever-growing prison industrial complex has been incarcerating women at nearly double the rate of men since 1985. Less than one-fifth of those female prisoners have been convicted of violent crimes; by far the largest majority are for drug offenses and non-violent crimes like fraud or larceny. Dumped into a system originally designed to hold violent male offenders, women's specific needs--from reproductive health care to giving birth in prison to dealing with sexual abuse trauma to maintaining parental rights and access to their children--are unmet. Criticism, observation and suggested modifications to the system are offered on a wide variety of specific issues, all filtered through the lens of the growing prison abolition movement.
Readability/quality: Best taken essay by essay (or section by section) rather than read as one long volume. Since offerings range from white paper reports to passionate (and often despairing) poetry, it's hard to assess overall. First-hand accounts of conditions endured are most moving; the autobiographical details of the deplorable health care and labor standards are gruesome, infuriating and clear calls to action.
Who should read it: Anyone interested in the prison abolition movement, women's issues or exploitive corporatism. Which, I would guess, covers most progressives.
Bonus quote:
Warehoused in megaprisons designed for economics of scale rather than rehabilitation, prisoners have become a commodity that is sold to governments, and ultimately to taxpayers, under the guise of "keeping us safe." And the corporations and their stakeholders that profit from these transactions in turn benefit from and actively promote criminal justice policies that guarantee rising rates of incarceration.
There are many disturbing aspects of Interrupted Life, from the exploration of holding immigrant women who aren't convicted or even charged with crimes, to the truly deplorable health conditions. In one account, a woman is left to die in her cell because the powers-that-be are so bureaucratic they can't find a way to get around paperwork requirements in time to deliver her medications instead of requiring her to traipse across hundreds of yards of compound to pick them up. HIV and Hepatitis C positive women in particular are shunted aside with shoddy treatment. Termination of parental rights is another infuriating area -- in some cases, women are shipped hundreds of miles from their home for incarceration and then discover their children are shunted into foster care because they haven't been able to visit within 150 days (seen as a form of "neglect" by the incarcerated parent). But for me, the most shocking aspect are the labor conditions. Most of us have been aware of corporate workhouses in prisons, but the suspension of all wage and labor protections within the walls of prisons are truly shocking. Twelve-hour shifts, payments in the range of $1-$2 an hour (with the prison docking the women for room and board out of that), toxic chemical exposure … it's not easy to avoid the conclusion that more and more women (and men) are being locked up simply to serve as indentured labor for electronics firms and jean manufacturers. Truly eye-opening stuff. Taken together, this group of essays shows the personal side of an economy in free-fall, where communities welcome these complexes for the jobs they create, and then in turn become dependent upon the perpetuation of an exploitive, soul-killing, inhumane system.
***
Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire
By Lynne A. Haney
University of California Press: Berkeley
Softcover, 304 pages, $24.95
Feburary 2010
Money quote:
The policies of mass imprisonment, which systematically remove so many women from their communities, seem to signify a shift in how state regulation is conceptualized and practiced. While poor women have always had their lives regulated by the state indirectly, through social policies, laws, and encounters with caseworkers, more of them are living and raising children quite literally within the state--often for long stretches of time. Moreover, through parole, probation, and "community-based" corrections, the penal system remains in these women's lives for years after release. The state's methods of control also seem to rely more heavily on direct modes of intervention characteristic of total institutions. And these modes of intervention appear to be based on restrictive models of citizenship and forms of claims-making.
Author: A professor of sociology at New York University, author of Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary.
Basic premise: The author looks at two programs set up in California as "community-based prisons" for mothers to be housed with their children in alternative, less institutionalized settings. One program, Alliance, was researched in the early 1990s, when the focus of social programs was moving toward insistence on self-reliance instead of the "welfare state." With this cultural imperative in the background, the program focused on emphasizing job and life skills acquisition in a boot camp-like setting (punctuality, chores, classes were all emphasized). In the second program examined a decade later, Visions, the author notes the shifting of cultural priorities--instead of prepping individuals for the basics of taking responsibility for themselves practically in society, now young mothers are coached in a brand of therapeutic self-governance, heavily reliant on 12-step methods and confessional mode. In both cases, society-wide injustices are swept under the rug; solutions are located in the individual alone, in the case of Alliance as a lack of job/life skills, in Visions as a pathologized internal child. The author examines the daily routines of both programs, their effects on the women and the growing hybrid of public/private institutions that make regulation and benchmarking difficult.
Readability/quality: Relatively free of jargon, engaging when exploring the daily routines of these young mothers in each setting, thoughtful about the implications for wider society, the book is a relatively smooth read from an assured expert who clearly has spent a career looking at the issues tackled.
Who should read it: Same as for Interrupted Life (in fact, one of the essays in the previous book is by this author, short and focused on only one aspect of one of these programs)--those interested in women and society, incarceration, alternative programs, children's issues.
Bonus quote:
It matters that the women in Visions confronted a discourse of desire as opposed to a discourse of need. First and foremost, it matters because of the institutional practices that accompanied this discourse; the women at Visions received counseling not education, group therapy not job training, and treatment for personal addiction not preparation for social integration. While not all women accepted these practices, few could disrupt them in a consistent or collective way. Unlike the young women at Alliance, who used the prevailing needs talk as they challenged it, the women at Visions turned on themselves and one another. Although some Visions inmates tried, few were able to move the emphasis from personal to societal failings. At Visions, the discourse of desire seemed like a channel through which claims to social justice and fairness were silenced; the women subjected to this discourse seemed one step closer to a state of disentitlement.
Both Alliance (skills-based) and Visions (therapeutics on steroids) sound like a nightmare. Alliance, presented first in the book, has an understandable rigidity given that these women were convicted of something (mostly drug crimes), but Haney points to the inherent contradiction in the program--even as counselors and staff are harping non-stop on self-reliance to these women, they are confiscating their AFDC aid and pooling it for survival. The women, once they get a few skills under their belts, recognize this and being reporting conditions to public agencies, spurring investigations. From a sociological point of view, Haney was in the right place at the right time to document the formation of blocs of resistance, but alas, they come to naught for various (predictable) reasons. As bad as Alliance comes across, Visions is much worse--the constant pressure to confess confess confess and to have more horror traumatic abuse stories than your fellow prisoners is appalling; women turn on each other viciously, using information gleaned in group self-help sessions, and the whole program comes across as a Jerry Springer-like emotional "Lord of the Flies."
Ironically, both programs were conceived with the best of intentions: to allow women to serve time with their children, in a softer setting than normal, in a place of emotional safety and practical learning. Both programs were supported by staunch women's advocates. And both ended up mired in truly appalling dynamics. The bottom-line problem with both is the diminishment of the role of connection and empowerment; problems are always and forever seen as individual crosses to bear and hurdles to overcome. Haney's book is also a warning about the blurred area of unaccountability created by these public/private entities.
Not the subject of the book, but one that would be a welcome follow-up by some author: the effect on the children of growing up in these programs.