Abstract
Jill McCorkel, Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment, New York University Press: New York, 2012; 272 pp. (including index): 9780814761489, $18.44 (pbk)
The number of women in prison has increased seven fold since 1980, and virtually all of this increase can be explained by the ‘war on drugs’. During that period, the proportion of women serving time for drug offenses climbed from approximately one in 10 to one in three. And since the ‘war on drugs’ was terribly racialized, African American women and Latinas, in particular, have been and still are incarcerated at rates far higher than those of white women.
Despite this huge political and social shift, we actually know very little about the daily lives of the women caught up in the new US carceral state. For this reason, McCorkel's work, Breaking Women, is a must-read. In the book, she documents the transition of a relatively small women's prison in an unnamed south-eastern state from a paternalistic ‘rehabilitation’ facility, to a punishment-oriented prison.
As McCorkel began her ethnography (in the early 1990s), the state correctional administrators attributed the increasing number of female inmates (and prison overcrowding that followed) not to the war on drugs, but rather to offender recidivism. Ironically, they came to this conclusion after commissioning a ‘university study’ into the causes of overcrowding. High recidivism, they argued, meant that the ‘soft’, ‘ineffective’, and costly rehabilitation efforts then in place at East State Prison (McCorkel's pseudonym) needed to be replaced by a tough new approach – one that not only would treat women as if they were men – it would arguably treat them even more harshly. Most significantly, state correctional administrators tied the provision of new resources (now vitally needed to handle the overcrowding) to a demand that East State embrace a punitive institutional culture.
McCorkel, who was an ethnographer assigned to a follow-up university study, documents the genuine regret with which the regular staff at the women's prison watched the demise of the rehabilitative ethos, and their resistance to many aspects of the program. Ultimately, though they resigned themselves to a new correctional reality that came with a new, harsher physical plant and a more judgmental correctional environment. No longer was a woman in prison seen as a ‘good girl’ gone astray, she was rather seen as a ‘real criminal’ (p. 16) in need of correction and surveillance.
At this point, McCorkel shifts her ethnographic lens to focus exclusively on a program provided to East State by a private, for-profit corporation. ‘The Company’ established ‘Project Habilitate Women’ (PHW) which presented the correctional establishment, particularly the state correctional administrators, with a made to order (and cash and carry) move away from ‘rehabilitation’. Originally involved in the provision of medical services in prisons, the Company promises a drug treatment program they claim will reduce recidivism with an emphasis on accountability. PHW, according to McCorkel ‘effectively collapsed the distinction between “treatment” and “punishment” with a format that was closer to a “military style boot camp” than earlier rehabilitation programs that higher ups and politicians had derided as “soft” and “touchy feely”’ (p. 59).
The book details how PHW ran a tough, confrontational, and surveillance-oriented regime whose apparent goal was to ‘break’ women. How PHW did this in the name of ‘drug treatment’ was conceptually quite clever. Company training materials asserted as a fact that ‘addiction is a disorder of the whole person. The problem is the person, not the drug’ (p. 85). Through this redefinition of ‘addiction’, suddenly any issue or problem the woman experienced was related back to her status as an addict. Staff in the program would routinely use racist imagery, insults, name-calling, planned confrontations, and extensive inmate on inmate surveillance to get women to give up their ‘disordered’ addict lifestyle.
As a consequence, early drop-out rates within the program were astronomically high (85 percent), as women fled from the abusive conditions within the program. Ironically, though, after some staff push back, the program is allowed to continue functioning, rules for admission and withdrawal are changed, and ultimately many women are sentenced directly to PHW, rather than to normal prison. Feeding on essentially racist constructions of African American women as ‘crack hos’, ‘immoral’, hypersexual’, who are ‘clinging to their victimization’, the program staff – including African Americans who formerly used drugs – required program participants to quit ‘faking it’, ultimately ‘rent out their minds’ and embrace such constructions of themselves and their problems.
Most powerful in this narrative are the stories of resistance expressed by those trapped in this program, like Alicia, a woman who was led out of the program (to serve a longer prison sentence) rather than continue in what she regarded as a racist and abusive program. But, sadly, there were also many other stories of women that essentially caved into and incorporated this definition of themselves and their lives, so as to survive and escape prison.
Two shortcomings haunt this book. First, we never hear if the program did in fact reduce recidivism. Clearly, university researchers (including McCorkel) did assess this. What were the results? A second concern is McCorkel's use of pseudonyms. While she defends this, arguing it will preserve prison access for future researchers, this device ultimately protects the corporate entity whose troubling behavior she documents so powerfully. Since so many corporations have become complicit in the prison industrial complex, including companies started by academics that promise ‘effective’ programming and ‘risk assessment’, it seems important that one name names. Is this one of the ‘evidence based’ programs that is being forced onto so many correctional administrators? Some elements of PHW certainly resemble cognitively based interventions that focus on the ‘criminal thinking’ patterns of those they work with and seek to change. Often, too, these programs ignore the trauma histories of so many women in prison, focusing instead on male issues like criminal peers and drug taking as a form of risky behavior.
None of this, though, takes away from the deeply disturbing and important work done in McCorkel's Breaking Women. In this book we see just how much new penal regimes both depend on and embrace racist and misogynistic narratives about the women they house, with the goal of getting the women themselves to embrace this colonized self.