Search Results

The introduction explores Guyon's reasons for not publishing the Prison Narratives along with the rest of her autobiography and shows how Guyon's early reputation among Protestants outside France was shaped by this gripping account of her confinement—copied and circulated by her supporters—which revealed many of the religious and social forces behind the Quietist Affair for the first time. The introduction contests mainstream accounts of this important historical event in light of her perspective as the victim of a carefully orchestrated political conspiracy. It shows how Guyon's unusual situation as a female prisoner of conscience defies theoretical generalizations about women's prison literature and clarifies the literary strategy of Guyon's well-known Life by comparing it with her Prison Narratives. The introduction also analyzes Guyon's positions on several perennial theological issues, including the meaning of evil and suffering, the balance of activity and passivity in the spiritual life, and the means of the soul's progress toward union with God.

In April 2007, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) published a report entitled Reducing the Number of People in California's Women's Prisons: How “Gender Responsive Prisons” Harm Women, Children, and Families. The report was in response to the controversial policy that would expand the capacity of California's women's prison system—already the largest prison system for women in the world—by up to 40 percent in two years. The California prison expansion plan was first publicly proposed by the Gender Responsive Strategies Commission, established in February 2005 as an advisory committee to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In response to overwhelming evidence of unaddressed violence, medical neglect, and abuse, the CDCR, federal courts, and watchdogs are working to centralize control of California's prison system to increase oversight, address the myriad scandals within it, and ensure that people are treated equally no matter where they are imprisoned. However, real prison reform involves reducing the number of people in women's prisons by discharging the 4,500 people CDCR identified as no longer needing to be in prison.

Chapter 5: “A Different Story: Recreation and Cinema in Women’s Prisons and Reformatories” explores how women incarcerated in prisons and reformatories at the turn-of-the-last century first encountered modern media such as magic lantern slides, phonographs, and motion pictures and why film exhibition began later in the women’s prison than in male institutions. Using New York State Prison for Women in Auburn and Bedford Hills Women’s Reformatory as case studies, the chapter considers what alternative models of women’s recreation were deemed suitable and what happened on occasions when women were shown motion pictures.

This chapter presents powerful images and accounts that chronicle contemporary urban life in Mexico. The images discussed were captured by the photographer Maya Goded. These photographs and narratives chronicle the desolation of death, the world of the child and the bleak world of prostitution. In addition to these, the woman’s prison, the attractions of lucha libre (masked wrestling), the national lottery and games of chance, and the mass rallies of the Zapatistas, are painted vibrantly through chronicles and accounts. In these chronicles and photographs, the theme of poverty and the failure of the government to address the needs of the marginalized people form the unifying voice of these accounts. Prostitution, wrestling and the lottery became means for the people to escape poverty and the humdrum of everyday lives marked with difficulties. And the mistreatment of children, the trafficking of the rights of women in prisons and the lack of systematic identification of the victims of death reflect the failure of the government to produce laws and services that protect its people. However, despite the bleakness of the photographs and the chronicles presented herein, they nevertheless reflect the resilience of the Mexicans in surviving the challenges of life despite the feeling of being marginalized.

This chapter tries to reconstruct some critical parts of the decision to demolish the old Holloway prison, and it would be useful at the outset to give structural and political context to what was done. It recalls that the prison was part of the estate managed by the Prison Department's P4 division, and that P4 had its special features, being new, composite and mildly reformist. The division claimed to occupy an advantageous position, directing a few, uncrowded prisons which had an unusually favourable ratio of staff to prisoners, and whose inmates themselves served short sentences and were not thought to be dangerous, professional, or politically troublesome. The chapter touches briefly on the example of Everthorpe, but the focus is on a women's prison, and the treatment of women.

Chapter 5 examines the history of California’s women’s prisons. Women’s prisons have never been home to prison gangs like those found in some men’s prisons; norms are used instead to govern social and economic interactions. Some women also form fictive kinships, taking on roles as the mom, dad, and child. This chapter shows that decentralized social order operates because women’s prisons have always held relatively few prisoners. In such small populations, gossip, ostracism, and shaming work effectively, and at low cost, to punish bad behavior, and female prisoners have never had to invest in the costly, centralized institutions that men often turn to.

Chapter 3 analyzes women’s prison newsletters as a feminist counterpublic that enabled incarcerated women to communicate with one another and with anticarceral feminist activists in the “free world.” Two newsletters, Through the Looking Glass and No More Cages, which were produced by lesbian feminist collectives from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, document prisoners’ resistance and collective action against gendered and racialized violence. Addressing the chasm between a prisoners’ rights movement focused on men’s institutions and a feminist antiviolence movement increasingly enmeshed with the carceral state, these newsletters created solidarity between criminalized women and those outside the walls.

Chapter 2 examines the resistance of women prisoners and their supporters’ opposition to the use of medicalized behavior-modification regimes in prisons during the 1970s. The Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence, a broad-based, feminist-led alliance in Massachusetts that included advocates for the rights of prisoners and mental patients, blocked the construction of a locked treatment center for dissident and gender-nonconforming women prisoners who were labeled “deviant” and “violent.” Activists criticized the “prison/psychiatric state” for perpetrating violence against women while advocating alternative approaches to safety, accountability, and healing.

The author, an incarcerated woman, describes the kind of leadership that “experienced” incarcerated women in Alabama and Louisiana have been willing—and determined—to exercise in the interests of their community. She shows how the Longtimers/Insiders Activist Group at Tutwiler Prison in Alabama claimed a voice in decision making about a number of issues, especially about the new women's prison under construction. The participants in this group believe fervently that they can offer important, seasoned insights about the proper size of the new facility, its location, and its programs. The chapter shows that even in a domain governed by crude practicalities and politics, a group of incarcerated women can act on the powerful urge to introduce logic and lay claim to the dignity of experience.

In this chapter, the author narrates her encounter with a former prisoner named Leche, who at the time of writing is enrolled in an Alternative to Incarceration program. On her last bid in prison, the conclusion of which would have marked seven years served, she was accepted into an ATI program at the Women's Prison Association (WPA). Before the ATI, she had gone straight back to selling drugs after her release from prison. In her depiction, prison had offered little change from the social ills that women encountered on the outside. Leche had entered prison a hustler and continued to hustle on the outside, returning to prison four more times. Like Leche, more than 70 percent of New York's women prisoners are of Latina or African descent, and more than 80 percent of women who are incarcerated for drug offenses are women of color. Despite studies showing that drug treatment and ATI programs are healthier and more cost-effective alternatives to imprisonment, women continue to be imprisoned at staggering rates.

The draconian political climate in the United States has contributed to an evisceration of prison libraries and a substantial reduction in the educational and rehabilitative programs in prisons. Despite these bleak prospects for reading behind bars, the author of this chapter has discovered that some incarcerated women engage in highly resourceful reading practices with the limited materials available to them. As part of a larger study about cultures of reading in women's prisons, she has been conducting interviews and book discussions in a midwestern women's prison. In this chapter, she catalogues the reading habits of the incarcerated women she teaches and the roles of novel reading in their lives. She also provides snapshots of the varied and vital ways in which these women use reading as a means to re-story their lives: to learn about themselves, mediate their histories of pain and violence, gain knowledge and inspiration from other women, and narrate—and sometimes redirect—their own journeys.

In this chapter, the author recalls the time she was in prison for nine and a half years for a drug conspiracy. She feels like her life has been interrupted, and now she seeks some semblance of “catching up” and making the pieces fit, to live a life of normalcy and do the little things that would allow her to assimilate back into society. After all, every one talks about “reentry.” After being rejected from so many jobs and trying to maintain her self-esteem and faith, the author realized she was not alone out here. So many former women prisoners feel the same thing and think the same thoughts. After having so many doors closed, the author decided to take more assertive responsibility for her own course of action, to help cement her destiny. She had a strong desire to help other women who were facing the same obstacles, so she founded the National Women's Prison Project in Baltimore, Maryland. She continues to heal from her incarceration by helping other women like her heal.

This chapter explores pedagogical activities that foster intimacy—that is, attachment, communication, intersubjectivity—in imprisoned spaces by focusing on the collective storytelling made possible through the concrete materiality of the mural painting in Santa Marta Acatitla, the most important women's prison in Mexico City. In particular, it looks at the conceptual connections that women prisoners in Santa Marta Acatitla began to make with prisoners in other parts of the world. It examines how this project introduced color and textuality inside the prison through the design of the mural on the surface of the spiral stairs used only by visitors or by women prisoners in the process of their liberation. The chapter tackles two central questions in relation to this project: What kind of “text” can emerge under intense surveillance? And how do captive spaces enable or resist signification? In discussing this mural, the chapter highlights the interrelation of theories, concepts, and politics underlying the pedagogy of the spiral.

This chapter shows that narratives of self-improvement and religious transformation have largely replaced narratives of political transformation in women's prisons. This reflects a broader cultural shift from the politicized climate of collective activism and social critique during the early 1970s to the self-help climate of the 1980s and beyond. Self-help discourse has a Christian inflection in the women's prisons where the author conducted research; the majority of available self-help books are written by Christian authors and geared toward a Christian audience. In prisons throughout the country, the decrease in state and federal funding for rehabilitative programming has been matched by an increase in the presence of Christian volunteers, reading materials, and educational programs. As a 2007 federal appeals court decision underscored, this influx has meant that some opportunities, privileges, and reading materials are available only to prisoners who are willing to embrace a Christian perspective.

Chapter 8 treats HBO Latin America’s first series to be made in Mexico. The chapter asks how the “HBO effect,” a paradigm of quality TV that is fully documented in the US, is transformed in a new territory and televisual ecology. The choice of a women’s prison drama thus not only connects the show with grittily realistic transnational titles from the network that addressed law and criminal justice; it also, in this new context, facilitates a connection with the melodramatic national genre of telenovela. The chapter further argues that authorship for the series should be assigned less to HBO than to the Mexican producer, Argos, which had been producing socially conscious and politically progressive dramas for some twenty years before.

This chapter examines the relationship between changing attitudes and legislation toward prostitution and policing in Amsterdam from the middle ages through the eighteenth century, and traces the interaction between the policing and the organisation of prostitution. The reasoning behind the 17th and 18th policy, from whoring as a crime, to prostitution as a social problem was always overshadowed by age old notion of prostitution as necessary evil in a port city. The writings of the Dutch/English Bernard Mandeville serve as an example. In the 17th century prosecution was directed at prostitutes, in the 18th century at the organizers, whereas by the end of the 18th century the prostitution business experienced regulated tolerance. The Reformed Church regularly influenced the policing of prostitution, whereas parental requests and complaints from neighbours also instigated persecution. An further element of control was the prostitute's fear of the Spin House, the women's prison.

This chapter focuses on how advances in education are the ultimate source of improvement, and how it will require a many-tiered coordinated program. Empirical study shows that education makes all the difference in reducing recidivism in prisoners. Recidivism rates vary depending on the quality and the level of educational programs, and quality is notoriously hard to gauge in a prison setting. Even so, all such programs have an impact, and some have a decisive one. If recidivism rates remain at an unacceptably high peak—well over 60 percent—the percentages drop with some education and reach single digits if a person in prison completes a college program. The chapter shows that educational potentials are greater in prisons for women and might, with a realization of what works, be carried into prisons for men.