Hard Time

Abstract

As the number of women incarcerated in the United States continues to rise and their complex needs become more apparent, social workers must fortify their historical commitment to criminal justice reform. However, crafting more effective and compassionate responses to the needs of justice-involved women may very well require a more nuanced understanding of the holistic impact of incarceration on women's well-being than the current literature offers. Utilizing the framework of feminist standpoint epistemology, the researcher engaged in qualitative content analysis to examine published personal accounts from 43 women to better understand their experiences in prisons and jails in the United States. Two overarching themes emerged from the analysis. First, the personal accounts illustrated that women experience prisons and jails as environments of denial insofar as these carceral environments deny women's basic needs, their sense of humanity, and their personal power. The second overarching theme pertains to the holistic impact of the carceral environment upon women's lives, meaning it has expansive effects on women's biopsychosocial-spiritual functioning. Social workers should dedicate efforts to dramatically reducing the number of women behind bars and engaging in holistic intervention approaches that might counteract the negative effects of incarceration across domains of well-being.

Negotiating the Maximum-Security Offender Identity: Experiences From Incarcerated Women

“…This article demonstrates that maximum-security offender classification for incarcerated women is a troubled identity associated with serious crimes, aggression and danger, long sentences, and rejection by society. Similar to previous research (Artz et al, 2012;Casey, 2018;Dastile, 2013) that indicates correctional institutions as spaces of denial, deprivation, and victimisation, for women classified as maximum-security offenders these dynamics seem to be also linked to their classification. Consequently, experiences of women classified as maximum offenders give an impression of an "othered" group within the correctional centre with lived experiences of differential treatment, segregation, being silenced through victimisation, dehumanisation, and labelling.…”

“…Although these studies have contributed significantly to providing an understanding of the experiences of incarcerated women, intersectional approach in female offending, gendered and culturally sensitive needs as well as systemic injustice that increased women's vulnerability to crime, few of these studies have focused on the classification of incarcerated women in correctional centres (Agboola & Rabe, 2018;Dastile, 2017;Herbig & Hesselink, 2016;Labane, 2012). Although women's experiences of incarceration have also been explored (Artz et al, 2012;Casey, 2018;Dastile, 2013) with incarceration understood to be an environment of denial, overcrowding, deprivation, victimisation, and dehumanisation, these studies have not explicated how different classification categories of incarcerated women experience these dynamics.…”