MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By Barbara Owen

The book reports the results of ethnographic research conducted at the Central California Women’s Facility, the world’s largest female facility, including an overview of the theoretical context for the study. It describes the project site, research methods, and a feminist perspective used to collect and assess data. In addition, it describes the lives of women before imprisonment and suggests ways in which those experiences come to bear on prison culture; relationships women develop and maintain during imprisonment; and the ways women create a complex society within prison walls. Women’s cultures develop in ways markedly different from the degradation, violence, and predatory structure of male prison life. Women’s lives in prison are intimately tied to their lives before and after imprisonment. Although men on the economic and racial margins of society face oppression that contributes to their criminality, they do not share the same struggles with patriarchy or the pervasive sexual and personal oppression found in the lives of women.

NY. State University of New York Press. 1998. 231p.