Gender, Prison and Reentry Experiences

Gender, Prison and Reentry Experiences PDF

Author: Silvia Gomes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1040026796

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This book explores the unique reentry experiences of incarcerated men and women who are about to be released from prisons in Portugal. By analysing gendered reentry experiences through the narratives of men and women, Gender, Prison and Reentry Experiences sheds light on current practices and strategies adopted in prisons regarding reentry and examines the structural, institutional, and personal barriers that infl uence the reentry outcome. Gender, Prison and Reentry Experiences examines the narratives built around an individual’s prison experiences, their perception of the prison’s impact on reentry, and their expectations after release. It reveals how men and women narrate and attribute meaning to their time in prison and how they navigate their ‘prisoner’ and ‘gendered’ identities. In doing so, this book demonstrates the importance of these identities in relation to recidivism and desistance, while also questioning the role incarceration has in further criminalising and obstructing an individual’s reentry process. It puts forward recommendations that aim to improve the lives of all incarcerated individuals within the current system, in addition to advocating for decarceration and prison abolition. It presents a novel contribution to the internationalisation of knowledge across multiple disciplinary subfi elds, namely critical reentry studies and feminist criminology, fi lling a gap in the current knowledge as few studies focus on prison experiences as a core aspect of understanding the reentry process. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, law, desistance studies, and those interested in gaining a unique insight into the experience of incarcerated individuals.

Interrupted Life

Interrupted Life PDF

Author: Rickie Solinger

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010-01-25

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0520944569

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Interrupted Life is a gripping collection of writings by and about imprisoned women in the United States, a country that jails a larger percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. This eye-opening work brings together scores of voices from both inside and outside the prison system including incarcerated and previously incarcerated women, their advocates and allies, abolitionists, academics, and other analysts. In vivid, often highly personal essays, poems, stories, reports, and manifestos, they offer an unprecedented view of the realities of women's experiences as they try to sustain relations with children and family on the outside, struggle for healthcare, fight to define and achieve basic rights, deal with irrational sentencing systems, remake life after prison; and more. Together, these powerful writings are an intense and visceral examination of life behind bars for women, and, taken together, they underscore the failures of imagination and policy that have too often underwritten our current prison system.

The Prison Experience

The Prison Experience PDF

Author: Merry Morash

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2002-12-02

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1478609745

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Confined to an institution and further burdened by patriarchal assumptions and stereotypes, incarcerated women struggle to retain a sense of self-worth for themselves and often for their children. Scholarship on the subject typically has either ignored or trivialized the role of gender as an organizing feature of society. The result is a lack of emphasis on the role played by gender in the lives of women in a correctional setting. In this theoretically informed and empirically grounded textbook, Morash and Schram explain the realities of prison life for women from a feminist perspective. The hope for reform begins with an informed public so that a system premised on deterrence and punishment can also offer opportunities for rehabilitation.

Gender, Social Ties, and Reentry Experiences

Gender, Social Ties, and Reentry Experiences PDF

Author: Jennifer Rhiannon Scroggins

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13:

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A great deal of research has been conducted on factors associated with successful prisoner reentry. However, except for a few studies on women's reentry, most studies have failed to examine the role of parolees' social ties in contributing to reentry outcomes. Additionally, most studies on prisoner reentry only focused on male parolees, and few addressed the influence of gender on reentry experiences. Thus, my goal in this dissertation is to understand the influence of gender on male and female parolees' social ties, and how the resources their ties provide shape their reentry experiences. My dissertation research examines men and women's strong- and weak-tie relationships and the resources available to them via their relationships to understand how these resources shape their reentry experiences. Study data, which were collected from indepth interviews with fifty men and women under parole supervision, showed that they underwent many changes in their strong- and weak-tie relationships during and after incarceration. Shifts toward closer and more positive relationships with families and the addition of pro-social weak-tie relationships resulted in more tangible and intangible resources that were considered by the men and women as important to their reentry success. Data analysis showed that the relationship patterns experienced by the men and women in the present study were largely consistent with gendered relationship patterns described in the literature, but that patterns of resource availability from their social ties were less consistent with those described in the literature. Findings from the study suggest the influence of gender on men and women's social ties, as reflected in different patterns of strong-tie relationships experienced prior to, during, and after incarceration, and also reveal some similarities between men and women with regard to increases in the number of weak-tie relationships with various pro-social individuals after incarceration. By showing the significant role of social ties, especially strong-ties, in providing tangible and intangible resources to parolees upon their release from prison, this study provides support for social control theory and highlights the importance of helping ex-offenders develop and maintain positive social ties with pro-social individuals to enhance the availability of resources necessary for successful reentry.

Women in Prison

Women in Prison PDF

Author: Barbara H. Zaitzow

Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9781588262288

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It is old news that the conditions and policies of women's prisons are different from those for incarcerated men. Less evident, however, is how gender differences shape those policies, and how gender identity and roles shape women's adaptation and resistance to prison culture and control. The papers in this collection explore how the gender-based attitudes that women bring to prison frame how they respond to the prison environment -- and how gender stereotypes continue to affect the treatment and opportunities of incarcerated women today. It looks particularly at how the personal and social problems imported into the prison setting become part of the intricate web of prison culture and how extensively women's prison experience reflects the control and domination they experienced in the outside world.

Women, Reentry and Employment

Women, Reentry and Employment PDF

Author: Anita Grace

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-23

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 100053054X

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Women, Reentry and Employment: Criminalized and Employable? explores the conflicting discourses about employment for women who are exiting prison. It empirically outlines the landscape of employability supports available to reentering women, the ‘steps to employment’ women are directed to follow, and the barriers to employment they face and theoretically explores the subject positions of criminalized and employable women. This book offers a contemporary contribution to the scholarship of the past three decades that has queried, monitored, and challenged practices and policies relating to women’s corrections in Canada. Based on data gathered about community-based employment supports available to reentering women in Ontario, Canada, exploring how language constructs the subject positions of criminalized and employable women, and bringing into conversation the extensive body of work about women’s employment and employability and reintegration, the book marks a unique but important intersection of these empirical and theoretical domains. Central to the book is the juxtaposition of two key subject positions mobilized in women’s corrections. One is that of the criminalized woman, a subject whose experiences of trauma and marginalization have rendered her emotionally and mentally broken; she is constrained by her past and incapable of acting towards her future. The other subject position is that of the employable woman who is future oriented, confident, and ‘responsible’ for her own socio-economic inclusion. How do reentering women experience, inhabit, and resist these incompatible subject positions? Challenging the invisibilization of women’s experiences in the criminal justice system, Women, Reentry and Employment will be of great interest to students and scholars of Criminology, Penology, and Women’s Studies.

Harsh Punishment

Harsh Punishment PDF

Author: Sandy Cook

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 1999-12-22

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9781555534110

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A pioneering collection of personal accounts from criminal justice scholars, practitioners, and activists, and from current and former prisoners themselves.

In Search of Safety

In Search of Safety PDF

Author: Barbara Owen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-01-24

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0520288726

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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.

The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma

The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma PDF

Author: Andrea M. Leverentz

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0813562295

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When a woman leaves prison, she enters a world of competing messages and conflicting advice. Staff from prison, friends, family members, workers at halfway houses and treatment programs all have something to say about who she is, who she should be, and what she should do. The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma offers an in-depth, firsthand look at how the former prisoner manages messages about returning to the community. Over the course of a year, Andrea Leverentz conducted repeated interviews with forty-nine women as they adjusted to life outside of prison and worked to construct new ideas of themselves as former prisoners and as mothers, daughters, sisters, romantic partners, friends, students, and workers. Listening to these women, along with their family members, friends, and co-workers, Leverentz pieces together the narratives they have created to explain their past records and guide their future behavior. She traces where these narratives came from and how they were shaped by factors such as gender, race, maternal status, age, and experiences in prison, halfway houses, and twelve-step programs—factors that in turn shaped the women’s expectations for themselves, and others’ expectations of them. The women’s stories form a powerful picture of the complex, complicated human experience behind dry statistics and policy statements regarding prisoner reentry into society for women, how the experience is different for men and the influence society plays. With its unique view of how society’s mixed messages play out in ex-prisoners’ lived realities, The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma shows the complexity of these women’s experiences within the broad context of the war on drugs and mass incarceration in America. It offers invaluable lessons for helping such women successfully rejoin society.

Outlaw Women

Outlaw Women PDF

Author: Susan Dewey

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1479887439

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A journey into the experiences of incarcerated women in rural areas, revealing how location can reinforce gendered violence Incarceration is all too often depicted as an urban problem, a male problem, a problem that disproportionately affects people of color. This book, however, takes readers to the heart of the struggles of the outlaw women of the rural West, considering how poverty and gendered violence overlap to keep women literally and figuratively imprisoned. Outlaw Women examines the forces that shape women’s experiences of incarceration and release from prison in the remote, predominantly white communities that many Americans still think of as “the Western frontier.” Drawing on dozens of interviews with women in the state of Wyoming who were incarcerated or on parole, the authors provide an in-depth examination of women’s perceptions of their lives before, during, and after imprisonment. Considering cultural mores specific to the rural West, the authors identify the forces that consistently trap women in cycles of crime and violence in these regions: felony-related discrimination, the geographic isolation that traps women in abusive relationships, and cultural stigmas surrounding addiction, poverty, and precarious interpersonal relationships. Following incarceration, women in these areas face additional, region-specific obstacles as they attempt to reintegrate into society, including limited social services, significant gender wage gaps, and even severe weather conditions that restrict travel. The book ultimately concludes with new, evidence-based recommendations for addressing the challenges these women face.