Diminished citizenship in the era of mass incarceration

Abstract

This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the experiences of the large population of people who, at least in part by virtue of their relations with criminal justice apparatuses, do not benefit from the full complement of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy. The frame of diminished citizenship places mass incarceration within a larger historical and social context, moving ideas about “criminals” away from the individual focus of mainstream criminology and providing a useful framework for considering how a variety of marginalized groups navigate the American landscape. At the same time, the frame of mass incarceration offers insights into a crucial mechanism for constructing, diminishing and enforcing citizenship in the United States. Our argument draws on our decade-long ethnographic research with a cohort of women who had been released from prison in Massachusetts in 2007–2008.

Keywords

carceral citizenship citizenship diminished citizenship criminalization gender

Introduction

This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the experiences of large numbers of people who, often by virtue of their relations with criminal justice policies and institutions, do not benefit from the full complement of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy. The lens of diminished citizenship centers analyses of criminalization and other forms of marginalization and subordination firmly in the realm of the state rather than individual failure or deviance, and highlights connections between criminal justice apparatuses and other social, civil and political institutions. Intersecting class, race and gender inequalities continually inform the processes by which citizenship is created, operationalized and undermined in the United States, and elsewhere.

Citizenship carries a commonsense if contested meaning in the contemporary world – citizenship is a legal and bureaucratic status, and a citizen is a legitimate and publically acknowledged member of a particular nation state to which the citizen owes some degree of allegiance and from which the citizen receives certain rights and protections. In that citizenship is uniquely constitutive of lived experience in modern nation states, questions of who is excluded and who is included under the citizenship umbrella, who has the power to determine and enforce these inclusions and exclusions, and what are the processes by which this happens are of great importance (cf. Fredrickson, 2003; Glenn, 2000).¹

An embodied social category, citizenship dictates where, how and even if one may live. Evelyn Glenn argues that, “Citizenship … [is] fundamentally a matter of belonging, including recognition by other members of the community. In this conception, citizenship is not simply a fixed legal status, but a fluid status that is produced through every day practices and struggles” (Glenn, 2011: 1; cf. Ong, 2006 on disarticulation of state and citizenship in the era of neo-liberal governance and values). Thus Rose and Novas (2005) describe processes of “making up citizens” in terms of the power and practices of political, medical, legal and other authorities to construct and enforce categories such as the ill, the disabled, the child abuser, the criminal and so on.

The notion of diminished citizenship grew out of our ongoing work with a cohort of 47 women who had been released from prison in Massachusetts in 2007 – 2008. The women are diverse in terms of race, age, education, family background, sexual orientation, personality traits, and extent of contact with the criminal justice system. Yet, a decade after exiting prison, none have attained their oft-stated and explicitly desired goals of “regular, normal” American lives of safety, independence, steady employment, secure housing and stable family life. We have come to understand that while criminalization played and continues to play powerful roles in terms of restricting their freedom, the reality is that state-facilitated (or at the least disregarded) poverty, discrimination and physical and sexual abuse diminished their standing as citizens long before they formally became involved with the criminal justice system.²

Building on conceptualizations of citizenship developed by Glenn, Fredrickson, Ong and others, we identify diminished citizenship in terms of processes by which various populations, at various times, can experience some but not all of the rights of citizenship. We opt for the verb “diminished” rather than the adjectival “second class (citizen)” in order to get at the dynamic and often inconsistent nature of these processes. Linda Bosniak correctly emphasizes that citizenship “may not be formally withdrawn, and yet it may be diminished in its effect, evaded, effaced, diluted, displaced. This is the real risk to constitutional personhood for noncitizens and for some citizens, as well; not outright removal but depreciation — at times specifically imposed by government … ” (2010: 14). Our interest here is less in defining or delineating citizenship than in tracing the intersecting cultural, social, medical and legal means through which it is diminished for particular people.

Recognizing the multiple ways in which citizenship is constructed and devalued, this paper brings together – under the umbrella of diminished citizenship – a variety of models, each of which focuses on a particular population or institution. These include Miller and Stuart’s (2017) notion of carceral citizenship, Turner’s social citizenship, Vaughan’s conditional citizenship, Crawford’s (2006) health citizenship, Richie’s (2012) reproductive citizenship, Rowe et al.’s (2001) program citizenship, Lerman and Weaver’s (2014) custodial citizenship, Seear and Fraser’s (2010) addicted citizenship, and work on racialized and gendered second-class citizenship by Spivak (2017), Alexander (2010), and others. We do not seek to critique or even refine any of these critically important concepts. Rather, our aim is to demonstrate how they build on one another, mingling and merging, in complex, dynamic and insidious ways.

Over the past decades, mass incarceration has been an especially powerful diminisher of citizenship in the United States (cf. Bosworth et al., 2016). Reuben Miller and Amanda Alexander describe “the uniqueness of treatment for the criminalized poor, at the hands of social actors, and the mechanisms through which they are excluded from full social participation as evidence of an alternate citizenship track—what we have called carceral citizenship …. They are uniquely branded by the mark of a criminal record and are subject to forms of legal exclusion that would be unlawful if directed toward other social groups” (2016: 312; also Miller and Stuart, 2017).

Branch et al. (2019) cogently clarify that carceral citizenship isn’t simply about a “new” group of disadvantaged people (although the rise and continuance of mass criminalization is historically unprecedented and unique), but “part and parcel of longstanding continuums of citizenship that are structured by intersectional identities.” We are reminded of Angela Davis and Gina Dent’s observation that “it is important to think of the prison: not only because of the very genuine concerns for those who are incarcerated but also because of its place in revealing the organization of the structures that we hold to be democratic and their connections to gender and globalization” (2001: 1240). As De Giorgi found once he began a study of prisoner reentry, “I ended up learning more about chronic poverty and the daily struggle for survival in a neoliberal city than I was able to document any significant expansion of the penal state” (2017: 88–89).

For the women whose experiences inform our analysis in this paper, carceral citizenship plays out in conjunction with a variety of other diminishing structures and institutions. In particular, their citizenship rights, like those of women and non-gender normative people across the country, are undermined by failures of the state to address gendered violence. Victimization leads women into emergency rooms, hospitals, homeless shelters, battered women’s shelters and, in some cases mental health treatment facilities and prisons where they are subjected to high levels of intimate surveillance that keep them captives of a multi-dimensional institutional circuit (Norton-Hawk and Sered 2018).

Following a brief introduction to our own fieldwork and the women we have come to know in the course of that work, the bulk of this paper explores aspects of citizenship and some of the mechanisms by which they are diminished. Throughout the paper we offer brief anecdotes and quotes from our fieldwork in order to illustrate how diminishing processes play out in real life. We wish to make it clear, however, that we do not see poverty, illness, homelessness, substance mis/use, incarceration, etc. as individual failings but rather as manifestations of the failure of the state to adequately and pro-actively protect citizenship rights across social domains and political institutions.

The women of the study: A brief overview

Over the past twelve years we have engaged in hundreds of formal interviews and informal conversations with 47 formerly incarcerated women whom we initially met in 2008 during the course of visits to the women’s center of a Boston multi-service facility serving poor and homeless adults and a nearby halfway house for women on parole.

Like the majority of the women drawn into the US criminal justice system, all of the women live with serious chronic mental and/or physical health problems, and all but a few have been hospitalized during the time we have known them. Almost all experienced physical or sexual violence at a young age and about half have been assaulted over the past dozen years (McDaniels-Wilson and Belknap, 2008.) Nearly all use or have used drugs or alcohol to “self-medicate”, a term that they know and use to describe their substance use. Most have tapered off their substance mis/use in recent years. Many deal with some level of cognitive impairment – in some cases from birth, in others as a result of childhood trauma, and/or as a consequence of drug use or assaults.

When we first met the women their ages ranged from 19 to 52. The average age was 35; the median age 38. Most have been incarcerated on fairly minor charges including possession of controlled substances, prostitution, shoplifting and trespassing (cf. Kajstura, 2018). Their sentences typically are short, often for probation or parole violation or failure to pay court fees. About half have been reincarcerated over the years we have known them. All but three of the women are mothers and most have lost custody of at least one child, often as a consequence of incarceration. The loss of their children, according to many of the women, led to homelessness, increased substance mis/use and deteriorations in mental health.

Thirty-three are white, 10 are black, and 4 are Latina or Asian. For the most part, the women of the study expressed to us that their problems have more to do with being women than with being Black, Latina, etc. As we’ve argued elsewhere (Sered and Norton-Hawk 2014), the overdetermination of gender in their lives tends to obscure the power of race. Struggling with emotional, sexual and physical abuse, the women have are drawn into medical and correctional total institutions, each of which prioritizes gendered classification. Weaving in and out yet rarely eluding the penal-welfare-healthcare system, they describe palpable gender-specific sexualization, exploitation, economic vulnerability, social alienation, scrutiny, diagnosis and punishment. Within the correctional system women typically are incarcerated for gender specific crimes, placed in gender segregated facilities, and given gender-specific punishments (for example, loss of custody of their children) Almost all the women have been in psychotherapy both inside and outside of prison multiple times and have been rehearsed in reciting gendered diagnoses such as co-dependence. Within the social welfare system they typically are eligible for benefits or support as women and mothers. In all of these institutions, they are encouraged to downplay the relevance of race to their experiences and focus solely on gender, typically in terms of pathology. We will return to this theme later on.

Research approaches

Initially designed as a five year study, we tried to meet with each woman at three month intervals during that period. At these meetings we went through a set of structured questions regarding housing, money and jobs, education and programs, romantic relationships, family, children, health, drug use, contact with the correctional system, fun activities, frightening and unpleasant events, and plans for the next few months. We took notes during their conversations and frequently asked the women to pause while we wrote down a comment verbatim. Though the topics covered were the same at each quarterly meeting, we always asked follow-up questions and encouraged the women to take conversational initiatives and speak about issues of important or interest to them. In between these meetings we tried to speak informally at least once a month. The conversations were open-ended, generally guided by our asking: How are things with you?

We also regularly spent time at the women’s center and a local drop-in facility frequented by some of the women and accompanied some of them – at their request – to court hearings, medical appointments, and parties, shopping trips, christenings, funerals and program graduations. With women’s permission, we took notes at these occasions.

Notes were later entered into a secure data base at which time names and other identifying information were removed. Qualitative data derived from the open-ended questions were analyzed using an inductive/grounded theory approach that allows researchers to identify themes articulated by respondents in response to questions as well as spontaneously during the interviews (Strauss and Corbin, 2000). Because of our on-going relationships, we have been able to go back and ask women about themes that we identified and elicit their sense as to the importance and accuracy of our analyses.

At the end of the planned five-year period we held closure meetings with each of the women. During the next few months about half of the women indicated that they wished to continue meeting with us. We terminated the structured quarterly interviews but continue speaking with the women over meals and coffee and at their homes as well as in jail, rehab and hospitals. Some of the women sometimes choose to continue following the categories (housing, education, etc.) used in the initial structured interviews. Most however, opt for free flowing conversations, often asking how we are doing and reminiscing about experiences we shared with them in the past. The number of women wishing to maintain on-going relationships with us has ebbed and flowed over the years, averaging about a dozen at any given time. Each relationship is different. Some women call us regularly just to say hi. Others call us when they have a problem or when they have particularly good news to share. Several enjoy regular coffee or lunches with us. Another dozen or so stay in touch through social media.³

We continue to grieve for the seven who passed away.

(De)constructing citizenship: Social citizenship

In his classic sociological formulation, T. H. Marshall (1950) described citizenship as comprising three core components – political, civil and social/economic. Though his writings did not adequately consider race or gender, the tri-partite schema is flexible and familiar. Following the lead of the Massachusetts’ women in terms of what most concerns them in their day-to-day lives and conversations, we begin with an expanded and gendered analysis of social citizenship and then move to civil and political citizenship. This organization is not meant to make a statement about the ordering of aspects of citizenship. To the contrary, various aspects of (diminished) citizenship are intertwined both institutionally and in daily life.

Economic citizenship

The right to autonomous participation in the economic sphere is central to American constructions of citizenship. By working in the formal sector one receives entitlements such as health care and retirement benefits (Turner, 2001). Paid work historically has been morally valorized in American culture (Shklar, 1995). And paid work is the means for most individuals to freely purchase goods and services, actions that are central to the construction of citizenship in the context of American capitalism (Scott, 2011).

Very few of the study women freely participate in economically valued activities, although most wish to do so. None have been steadily employed throughout the ten year period. A few women have worked for one or more years. About half worked on and off over the years, occasionally holding a job for several months at a time and the other half have never been employed for more than a few weeks. Their jobs are often under the table and/or short-term, low status positions where they are yelled at by customers as well as managers. Few have succeeded to obtain jobs that fit the “reliable, recognizable and redemptive” standard described by Gurusami (2019) as the means to demonstrate their rehabilitation to state agents such as parole officers (cf. See Farrall et al., 2010 on the idea that re-entry necessarily includes engagement in economically or socially valuable activities.)

Jobs that the women are able to obtain typically pay minimum wage or less (these jobs are sometimes framed as ‘job training’ and thus exempt from minimum wage laws), are considered ‘at will’ in the sense that they are not guaranteed a certain number of hours or any particular schedule, and do not include opportunities for advancement. Sexual harassment and assault at work are fairly common. These issues are not unique to formerly incarcerated women but are exacerbated by vulnerability that is a consequence of their criminal records, sexual stigmas associated with criminalized women, and their reluctance to get involved with the police. Joy, for instance, was hired to do some under-the-table office work for a truck company but that ended when the boss demanded oral sex. The marginal nature of the job made it inconceivable for her to lodge any sort of formal complaint.

The ability to choose and purchase goods and services is a core aspect of economic citizenship in capitalist societies. None of the women enjoy that ability. They do not have credit cards, thus lack important and often necessary access to economic autonomy in contemporary society. All but two of the women receive food stamps, through which means their purchases are regulated by the government. For example, food stamps cannot be used for hot prepared food, for soap, or for diapers. Food stamps may be stigmatized or not accepted at all grocery stores. Isabella, for instance, has told us how “people” look at her differently when the cashier asks if she is paying with food stamps and how humiliated she feels when she is told that an item that she placed on the checkout counter is not allowed.

With few exceptions, the women have paltry economic options other than dependence upon unpredictable and unreliable men and equally unpredictable and unreliable government services. They frequently express frustration at not being able to purchase culturally appropriate Christmas or birthday presents for their children, at always having to settle for second best or used items. More broadly, the women tend to see themselves as failures because they struggle financially and cannot buy the things that they believe “normal” Americans can purchase – a view of normality propagated by for-profit consumer institutions.

Housing and homes as marks of citizenship

Having one’s own home is a marker of adult citizenship in American culture, and homeownership is understood to create virtuous and independent citizens (Gregory, 2016). Home ownership literally affords citizens ownership of a piece of one’s country. We note the long history of racial bias regarding home ownership with segregationist practices and redlining making it far less likely for African Americans to be able to purchase homes (Lipsitz, 2012). We also note the legal limitations on women’s property ownership until the twentieth century. None of the Massachusetts women own their homes.

As particularly vulnerable tenants due to poverty and criminal records, even those few women who rent apartments do not benefit from the autonomy associated with having one’s own home. Even in the best of circumstances, home rental (as compared to ownership) means dependence upon landlords who can evict tenants, refuse to renew leases, raise rents, and forbid the hanging of pictures or installing other signs of ‘home.’

More of the women rent apartments through Section VIII subsidies, public housing or other programs for low-income families. Subsidized and public housing comes with its own diminishments of citizenship. Overnight guests often are prohibited, in effect limiting sexual citizenship. Visits from people with prison records may be disallowed, limiting social citizenship. Women who receive government subsidies for housing are subject to inspections to make sure that they are not allowing someone else to stay with them and that they are keeping the place clean (according to the inspector’s standards.) And those women who received housing because they have young children are subjected to housing inspections by child welfare agencies.

Throughout the United States, the major drivers of housing insecurity are high housing costs and lack of affordable housing, though there is a popular myth that homelessness is a personal flaw exacerbated by deinstitutionalization of state psychiatric hospitals. In fact, rates of homelessness in U.S. cities skyrocketed during the 1980s when conservative economic and social welfare policies led more and more Americans into poverty while the cost of housing rose and the availability of rental housing declined. Though it certainly is the case that many mentally ill people become homeless – likely because of poverty, for many, it is the living on the street that causes psychological distress.

A dozen or so of the project women have been chronically homeless in the sense of sleeping in a park or staying at shelters for extended periods of time. Almost all at one time or another couch-surf with friends, relatives or acquaintances, stay in shelters or residential programs, or move into apartments or rooming houses from which they end up evicted for a variety of financial and social failures. Most of the women have exchanged sex with a man in return for a place to stay.

Homeless individuals may not be eligible for certain government benefits (for example, food stamps) and may lose their benefits by not having a safe place to receive mail. Secure housing also is a pre-requisite to other aspects of citizenship including safety, privacy and having an address from which to register to vote or receive notice of jury duty. During periods of homelessness the women of our study are more vulnerable to assault and more visible to the police. Ginger, for example, was raped while on the streets but also was arrested for throwing a shoe at her boyfriend when both of their nerves were frayed during a time in which they were sleeping in a public park.

Disabled citizenship

The Massachusetts women talk about their health and healthcare tribulations more often than any other category of challenges. All deal with serious physical chronic and acute health issues (arthritis, asthma, cancer, and injuries related to assaults are among the most common), nearly all have been hospitalized and/or undergone surgeries in the time we have known them, and most describe themselves as highly dependent upon their doctors both for medication and for certification for Disability (SSI or SSDI). Most take multiple prescriptions and over the counter medication and have frequent appointments with doctors for tests and consulting. Many of the women have commented that they see themselves as failures in terms of their health, and encounters with medical professionals reinforce the sense that one’s problems are individual rather than expressions of failed social policies.

In American culture disability is neither noble nor virtuous. Rather, it is associated with weakness, victimization, dependency, fraudulence, and societal barriers to exercising the responsibilities of citizenship (Waldschmidt and Sépulchre, 2019). Particularly in this era of neo-liberal values and policies, personal responsibility for health has become “the sine qua non of individual autonomy and good citizenship” (Crawford, 2006: 402–3; cf. Hays, 2003; Waquant, 2009; Woolford and Nelund, 2013), although the United States is the sole developed country without a national health system.

Nearly all of the study women have been diagnosed with mental illness of some sort (most with PTSD, many with bi-polar disorder, and a few of the older women – in keeping with diagnostic trends – with schizophrenia). While some may have organic mental pathologies, others are diagnosed as mentally ill because their behavior does not match racialized and gendered norms or because social welfare professionals don’t know what else to do with women who don’t fit in and keep getting into trouble (cf. Eisenberg 1988).

Nationally, mentally ill men and women are so grossly overrepresented in jails and prisons that mental illness has come to be a primary risk factor for incarceration. People who are perceived as mentally ill may be declared unfit to stand trial by reason of mental disorder and thus lose the right to a fair trial by a jury of one’s peers. In prison, people deemed mentally ill are more likely to be sent to solitary confinement and to be medicated against their will (Roth, 2018.) Insanity can be invoked as legal grounds for open-ended sentencing to psychiatric facilities, and many states, including Massachusetts, make provision for involuntary (civil) commitment and confinement of people deemed to be mentally ill although they have not been tried or convicted of a crime. For the project women, it is impossible to untangle the extent to which criminal justice involvement damages their mental health (quite a few of the women attribute their poor mental health to having been separated from their children while in jails or other institutions or having lost custody of their children), and the extent to which struggling with mental health challenges increases their risk of arrest and incarceration (Sugie and Turney, 2018).

All except four of the women are categorized as disabled and qualify for Disability (almost all are on SSI with just a few eligible for SSDI; mental health diagnoses are by far the most common grounds for Disability eligibility among the women). In the post-welfare world of the Personal Responsibility and Welfare Reform Act of 1996, SSI has become the catch-all for people who are unable to live up to American standards of hard work and self-sufficiency – whose lived reality is a misfit for normative structures of employment in twenty-first century America (Hansen et al., 2014.; Hay, 2010; Hays, 2003) Approximately 7.9 million Americans receive federally administered SSI payments; the majority of recipients (about 55%) are women and six out of ten SSI recipients under age 65 have been diagnosed with a mental disorder (Social Security Administration).

Disability checks provide less than one quarter of the $2257 monthly income that the Massachusetts Economic Independence Index deems necessary to afford basic needs of housing, utilities, food, basic transportation, health care, basic clothing, essential personal and household items and taxes in the Boston area (Crittenton Women’s Union, 2013). Thus Disability checks keep the women in a limbo category in which they are certified as “disabled” in return for a monthly allowance that is insufficient for meeting the routine expenses of daily life. While many could work, especially at flexible or part-time jobs, most have personal experience of the erratic nature of low-wage, ‘at will’ employment, and can’t risk losing their Disability eligibility.

These mechanisms for diminishing citizenship echo deeply ingrained American ideologies of “healthism” which absolve government and corporate leadership from responsibilities for public health (cf. Hay, 2010; O’Malley, 2009) and facilitate punishment of individuals and groups for failing to attain the healthy ideal. Metzel explains that, “Health is a desired state, but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position … [C]alling it health … skillfully glosses over the structural violence done to minority and lower-income Americans, while at the same time suggesting that social and economic misfortunes results from poor choices” (2010: 2; cf. Rose and Novas, 2005).

Health, drugs and citizenship

Social citizenship in the United States traditionally is framed in terms of independence, rationality, self-control, sobriety, health, vigor and autonomy, all attributes associated with adult, white, middle-class and wealthy men (Glenn, 2000). Looking at “the intersections between health, citizenship and drug use in late modern, neo-liberal, Western contexts,” Seear and Fraser (2010) contend, “Most models of addiction … are underpinned by the idea that – unlike proper citizens of neo-liberal democracies – ‘addicts’ lack free will or agency … and are less than fully rational subjects …. [These] assumptions … operate to produce people who use drugs as less-than-full citizens [and] justify legal and public health interventions into [their] lives.”

All of the women have been arrested on charges related in one way or another to substance mis/use: Two for dealing drugs; the rest for charges related to use of drugs or alcohol. Nearly all have oscillated between purchasing illicit substances on the street, trading licit prescription drugs (primarily medication for pain or for anxiety) with friends, and receiving prescriptions for psychiatric and pain medication from doctors. While the substances obtained through these three methods are similar or even identical, their legal statuses vary. Thus, an individual with good health insurance and an agreeable doctor is less likely to be arrested than one who has less social capital.

Alcohol and other mood altering and pain dulling substances help many of the women live with violence and suffering they have experienced (“self-medication”). Yet these substances also can suppress the drive and ability to exercise freedom of thought, speech and movement, function as chemical restraints within prisons and endanger users by dulling senses and reflexes. About half of the women of this study implicate drug or alcohol use (rather than or in addition to criminalization in the wake of substance use) in their being assaulted, kicked out of housing, cut off from their families, or losing custody of their children.

Drug use by mothers is particularly demonized (think here of the racist stereotype of the “crack whore” who neglects her babies in order to turn tricks to support her crack habit.) Women who are known to be drug users are likely to be required to submit to intensive monitoring during pregnancy and their babies may be taken away if illicit substances are found in their blood. This can happen independently of the criminal justice system – reproductive citizenship often is diminished directly by health and welfare institutions.

Sexual, reproductive and familial citizenship

For Turner (2001), social citizenship is achieved through the formation of households and families that become the mechanisms for the reproduction of society. Of the women of our study, few live in secure, voluntarily established family households. A few are legally married to men they haven’t seen for years but whom they have not had the emotional or financial resources to divorce. Some women are in long-term relationships with men they are not married to and/or not living with because their housing situation does not permit the man to stay with them or because they wish to avoid unnecessary contact with civil authorities. Some women had to leave marriages in order to retain custody of children because the husband had an outstanding charge. And nearly all of the women have been sexually abused by a family member. At least eight of the women became pregnant due to rape. Most important to the Massachusetts women, nearly all have lost custody of some of their children at some point and all have been deprived of the right to care for their children while they have been incarcerated or in mandated treatment or rehab programs.

Shatema Threadcraft and Lisa L. Miller emphasize that, “Conceptions of the carceral state that do not situate criminal justice with the larger context of raced and gendered subject formation depict the criminal ‘justice’ system as an arena composed almost exclusively of adult males. … The effects are then calculated in cost-benefit terms (lost wages, absentee fathers, and so on) without significant attention to issues of connectivity and care, which are also affected by the carceral state, and which disproportionately affect women” (2017: 479.)

Social constructions of gender – and the assigning of gendered advantages to certain sub-sets of women – are central to formation and enactment of social citizenship. Throughout our many encounters and conversations, women describe intense and obvious gender-specific sexualization, exploitation, economic vulnerability, social alienation, scrutiny, diagnosis, punishment and resistance. Almost all of the women suffered early childhood sexualization or sexual abuse, typically within the family and sometimes within the juvenile protection or correctional systems. Many left home and school at a young age and were drawn into highly gendered economic structures (e.g. sex work; cf. Raphael, 2004). Struggling with emotional and physical abuse and illness, most of the women have used illegal drugs and thus have been drawn into medical and correctional total institutions, each of which genders in potent ways (cf. Lorber and Moore, 2002). Within the correctional system women typically are incarcerated for gender specific crimes, placed in gender segregated facilities, and given gender-specific punishments (for example, loss of custody of their children; cf. Roberts, 1991.) Almost all the women have been in psychotherapy both inside and outside of prison multiple times and have been rehearsed in reciting highly gendered diagnoses such as co-dependence (cf. Pollack, 2007). Even the women’s attempts at resistance follow a gendered script – the women of this study are more likely to inflict harm on themselves than on others (cf. Ferraro, 2006). In short, as we have come to know the women, we have been struck by the exaggerated forms that gendered institutions, ideologies and social processes take in their life experiences (Sered and Norton-Hawk 2011).

“Women involved in street-based sex trading and illicit drug use accordingly face a level of institutional scrutiny in their lives that systematically denies them full citizenship by questioning their abilities to determine their own best interests, care for the children, and remain free from correctional control” (Dewey and St. Germain, 2016: 74). What Lupton (2012) and Richie (2012) call “reproductive citizenship” and Roseneil et al. (2013) identify as the “bodily” and “intimate” dimensions of citizenship, historically proves fraught for poor and criminalized women. We point to the history of forced sterilization of Black women, the power of the state to deny sex education and abortion rights, high rates of sexual abuse of girls and women, welfare policies that punish women for having more than two children and that effectively push some poor women into prostitution, criminalization of women leading to loss of parental rights, and “family criminalization” of Black mothers subjected to intense institutional scrutiny and punitive treatment (Elliot and Reid, 2019).

Women’s rights as citizens continue to be undermined by the failure of states to adequately address gendered violence (cf. Franzway, 2016: 18 on the sexual politics of citizenship; Threadcraft and Miller, 2017 on high rates of violence against Black women and ways in which gender and race are hardwired into state formation ). These issues are of paramount importance to the women of our study, the vast majority of whom have been sexually assaulted, exploited or abused.

Children of parents who have been incarcerated are more likely to go into foster care and eventually into jails and prisons than children whose parents have not been incarcerated (Martin, 2017; cf. Aiello and McCorkel, 2017 on disciplining of children’s bodies and emotions during prison visits). Tonya’s daughter, for instance, while in state custody was medicated so heavily that, according to Tonya, she couldn’t stand up for herself. A good number of these children, including Tonya’s daughter, eventually end up in juvenile and then adult detention, thus inheriting diminished citizenship.

Civil citizenship on the institutional circuit

Marshall described civil citizenship in terms of the rights that are necessary to individual freedom: liberty, the right to justice and due process of the law, freedom of speech, thought and faith, as well as the right to share in the social heritage of one’s community (1950[1964]: 69). Incarceration is the most dramatic means of diminishing civil citizenship, yet for the women of this study carceral institutions are experienced as one piece of a larger and more powerful institutional circuit.

The Massachusetts’ women civil citizenship has been diminished throughout their decades as captives of an institutional circuit comprising rehabilitation facilities, drug treatment programs, psychiatric hospitals, welfare offices, clinics, homeless and battered women’s shelters, DCF facilities (as children) and DCF offices (as parents), as well as juvenile detention facilities and later jails and prisons.

Compared to the men in their lives, the women typically make greater use of social service and therapeutic agencies and have less direct carceral involvement. As mothers they use healthcare institutions for pregnancy, childbirth and pediatric services and they rely on welfare institutions in order to house, clothe and feed their children. Women also become involved with psychotherapeutic and rehabilitation institutions in the wake of gendered violence, and they turn to the criminal justice system to protect themselves and their children from violent men.

As institutional captives, the women are coerced into dependence upon government programs that restrict their choices, and require compliance both in terms of behavior and in stated attitudes. Drug treatment programs, homeless shelters, battered women’s shelters, halfway houses, group homes, psychiatric hospitals and a variety of other residential facilities are “total institutions”; that is, all-encompassing hierarchical organizations in which similarly situated people are cut off from the wider community and culture, obligated to follow detailed rules and regulations, dispossessed of their “outside” identities and statuses, and drilled in institutional values and norms (Goffman, 1961). In these contexts everything from food to housing to health care to access to one’s children is controlled and regulated through systems of rewards and punishments that dictate both behavior and attitudes (cf. Miller and Stuart, 2017: 539), thus interfering with core principles of civil and political citizenship.

Throughout the institutional circuit women are drilled in the language of normative citizenship; that is autonomy and independence. In myriad settings they are coached in and then required to recite very specific narratives in which they take responsibility for their own problems and refrain from blaming others, whether individuals or government policies (cf. Haney, 2010; Perry and Hackett, 2016.) Ironically, as their citizenship is forcibly diminished, they are required to memorize citizenship narratives in which they themselves are cast as failures. In Court, therapists’ offices, churches, television and Twelve Step meetings they are taught a highly gendered version of a neo-liberal trope that casts suffering as a matter of individual choice and responsibility. If it is your problem you should be able to change it. The scripts taught to criminalized women focus on female psychological and emotional weaknesses: As a woman you are especially vulnerable to low self-esteem and co-dependency, which in turn lead you to make bad choices, including the “choice” to be a victim. The way out is to own up to your flaws, keep all of your appointments with counselors and other officials, and “do you.” If men on the circuit are punished for being too aggressive, women are berated for being victims.

The ability and willingness to tell the “right” story has important implications. Tonya, for instance, finally learned that in order to get cash assistance she had to refrain from telling the caseworker about the racism she encountered during her search for a job and instead emphasize how she was working on her own “anger issues” and “impatience.” For some women, these narratives may be more or less internalized, further diminishing the right of citizens to freedom of speech and belief (cf. Sered and Norton-Hawk 2012 on First Amendment concerns regarding the religious nature of Twelve Step practices ubiquitous throughout the institutional circuit).

Carceral citizenship

Incarceration is central to the construction of civil citizenship in modern city-states, according to Vaughn, but, “The relationship between punishment and citizenship is … conditional in two senses: the first is that one’s claim to citizenship is granted only if one abides by an accepted standard of behavior and punishment that may be imposed if one does not live up to this standard; second, while undergoing this punishment, one is no longer a full citizen yet neither is one completely rejected. Instead, one occupies the purgatory of being a ‘conditional citizen’” (2000: 26).

These two conditions are intertwined in the experiences of the Massachusetts’ women. All have been incarcerated, and all were criminally charged as consequences of economic, reproductive and gendered citizenship enshrined by State policies. For example, shoplifting charges are common among the women. Their shoplifting often involves theft of small items such as baby shampoo (not covered by food stamps) or Advil (over the counter medicines are not covered by Medicaid.) Some of the women were charged with assault and battery in the wake of fights with violent intimate partners. Others were arrested on outstanding warrants when they called the police for protection from a violent man. Domestic violence pushed some into homelessness, which in turn led to charges of trespassing, loitering or creating a public disturbance, and loss of child custody. Because most of the women could not afford bail (typically in the vicinity of $200), they were held in jail awaiting trial, which then increased the chances that they would be convicted. At the times of their arrests and arraignments, many of the women were cognitively impaired as a result of head injuries, drug use, trauma, fear and/or dope sickness. It is not at all clear that they fully understood the deals they were offered, or the consequences of accepting plea bargains. Nearly all accept plea bargains at the advice of their lawyers.

At this time about half of the study women have been “free” for a number of years, yet the long reach of criminalization keeps them as carceral citizens. Miller and Stuart (2017) identify “carceral citizenship” as the broad array of responsibilities and restrictions required of people with criminal records that are not demanded of “conventional citizens”. Bureaucrats, landlords, employers and others working outside the criminal justice system are permitted and sometimes required to reject applications “solely because the applicant has a criminal record. This is despite their qualifications. In almost any other circumstances these actions would be considered a form of illegal discrimination because most other vulnerable groups have the rights and protections of conventional citizenship. … [H]owever, the carceral citizen does not have these same rights and the state does not interpret itself as having an obligation to protect them in the same ways” (2017: 537; cf. O’Hear, 2019; Uggen et al., 2006: 296; on “third class” citizenship for those charged with violent crimes, broadly defined ).

So-called collateral consequences (“so-called” because it’s not clear that these are “collateral” rather than intentional) include restrictions on eligibility for student grants and loans, for public assistance, and on employment in certain occupations (often professions that involve working with children or the elderly – sectors that tend to be especially important for women of color). Formerly incarcerated women are less likely than men to obtain legal employment (Decker et al., 2014) and formerly incarcerated Black women face the highest unemployment penalties out of any racial group (Couloute and Kopf, 2018). At the same time, local, state and federal correctional agencies impose fees for supervision and administration from parole, court fees, fees for urine tests, house fees for sober houses or halfway houses (and these houses sometimes lock-down making it impossible for residents to go to work), and child support payments that accumulated while in prison. For Isabella, these fees added up to a debt she could never pay and resulted in her “choosing” re-incarceration in order to close her cases. (Though incarceration costs the state a great deal of money, it sometimes is offered in lieu of paying debts; ACLU, 2010).

Political citizenship: Participation in the exercise of political power

Political citizenship; that is, the right to political participation, free elections and a secret ballot, is diminished through rules barring people convicted of felonies from the right to vote, serve on juries or hold office. An estimated six million Americans currently are disenfranchised because they are incarcerated or have a felony record (Manza and Uggen, 2008; Uggen et al., 2016). Historically, political citizenship was denied to African Americans, Native Americans, certain categories of immigrants and women in the United States (cf. Friedman, 2005; Glenn, 2000).

To the best of our knowledge, none of the Massachusetts’ women vote – even when they are technically “free” – and few know whether or not they have the right to vote. Several women told us that they are afraid to vote because they might have an outstanding warrant and worry that they could be picked up by the police at the voting station (cf. Brayne, 2014). Given the frequency with which they move from institution to institution and from homelessness to housing and back, most are not registered to vote in any particular district. Even if they wish to vote, many lack the funds for a bus ticket to get to a polling place or find themselves so burdened with appointments for drug testing, parole check ins, housing inspections, court dates and child welfare evaluations that voting feels like one more government-induced burden.

The Massachusetts women typically experience the political system as focused on control and punishment rather than on securing the collective good. “Custodial citizens are not constituted as participatory members of the democratic polity, but as disciplined members of the carceral state” (Lerman and Weaver, 2014: 111; cf. Sugie, 2015). When the women talk about politics (which is rare), they tend to express a general sense that all politicians are crooked, though the Black women are proud of Obama and a few women repost on Facebook cartoons mocking Trump. For the most part, they express distrust of the government and have little faith that they can in anyway impact government policies. That distrust is sensible in light of the many arbitrary rules they encounter in both criminal justice and social service agencies, and their lack of success in challenging even the most minor bureaucratic rules. When Isabella was incarcerated, for instance, she was not permitted to send a birthday card with a drawing of a puppy to her young daughter because of a temporary rule disallowing pictures in letters.

Very few of the women express interest in talking or thinking aloud about their experiences in anything but personal terms. We understand this reluctance as reflecting school systems that made them feel intellectually inadequate, physical and sexual assaults that involve head injuries, prescribed psychiatric medication as well as alcohol and street drugs, and above all the constant drilling of neo-liberal scripts on the institutional circuit. Loss of ability and opportunity to tap into broader understandings of one’s situation is a particularly potent expression of diminished political citizenship.

Tonya, whom we introduced earlier, is the only Black woman in the project to spontaneously reference racism as a cause of her problems. We suspect that several factors militate against women talking about racism. First, on the institutional circuit, where gender is intensely overdetermined, women are drilled in a gendered rather than a racialized narrative. Given that the politics of violence again women has historically been raced white (e.g., white women as victims; see Crenshaw, 1991), it may not be surprising that the Black women do not mention race and racism. Second, because Massachusetts is highly residentially and socially segregated, Black women in their day to day lives may feel most immediately put upon by (Black) men who do not keep up child support payments and who disappear into prison. Thus while the policies that keep Black men unemployed, poor and criminalized are generated in White-dominated institutions, it is gender more than race that is visible in the women’s lived experiences. Finally, we realize that Black women may be reluctant to talk about racism to white researchers.

None of the women are active in political parties, ballot initiatives, labor unions, neighborhood organizations, or school committees and none have any involvement in local or national decision-making bodies (cf. Burch, 2013 for a detailed analysis of ways in which high rates of incarceration reduce political involvement at the neighborhood level). Few women have ever expressed a sense of belonging to any sort of community other than the involuntary communities of prison, methadone clinics and drug courts. While most of the women express the desire to engage in socially valuable and respected communal activities, they typically find that their criminal records, poor educational achievements, weak employment histories, lack of transportation and personal health challenges limit their opportunities to be part of the sorts of voluntary associations that historically have served as vehicles for exercising the political rights of citizenship.

Diminished citizenship: The big picture

The Massachusetts’ women are far from unique in terms of experiencing diminishment of economic, reproductive, civil, political or social citizenship. Each of these forms of diminishment impacts millions of Americans. Our emphasis upon the diversity, totality and mutual enmeshments of institutions, structures and policies of diminishment is intended to underscore why particular programs (for example, drug treatment or SSI) fail to restore citizenship even when (if) carceral restrictions are eased.

Over the years we have repeatedly witnessed how the policies and institutional practices that force the Massachusetts’ women into diminished citizenship make it difficult or impossible to use the rights of citizenship such as protection from violence or the right to earn a living in order to exit that status. Reflecting that messy reality, the model we propose in this paper inherently is dialectic: each consequence of diminishment is causal for other features of diminished citizenship. These dialectical processes, we suggest, explain the intransience of the women’s situations.

Throughout this paper we have emphasized gendered and gendering aspects of citizenship diminishment. Beth Richie (2012) makes clear, however, that the structural violence of racism that has shaped Black women's lives as having less value than white women's lives has a greater diminishing effect on Black women’s citizenship. In line with Crenshaw’s (1989) analyses of intersectionality, experiences of being a Black woman always include interactions among racial and gendered oppressions which regularly reinforce one another.

Taken as a whole, our analysis paints a bleak picture. Yet the model of diminished citizenship is inherently dynamic and implies the possibility of change. “To diminish” is a verb, not a static, pre-ordained state of being. What is diminished can also be expanded. Citizenship, a political and social construct, can be nurtured through many of the same mechanisms responsible for its diminishment. Acknowledging and grappling with the multiple ways in which citizenship is diminished gives a structural name to problems that too often are understood as individual problems.

While a detailed plan is beyond the scope of this paper, the lessons we have learned over the past decade indicate key issues that must be addressed in order to restore full citizenship. These include decriminalization of substance use; reinstating financial assistance programs that do not require recipients to be deemed disabled; reducing incarceration; expunging criminal records; devoting resources to reuniting families harmed by mass incarceration; creating an extensive jobs program similar to the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal; supporting affordable housing for all with a goal towards universal home ownership; educating children and adults to change the culture that gives rise to violence against women and children; and instituting policies to facilitate universal voting rights, including making election day a national holiday so that all people can have a say in changing the policies that diminish (their) citizenship.

We are heartened by seeing the designation “returning citizens” in place of the stigmatizing “ex-con” or the seemingly more benign “former prisoners” beginning to appear in a variety of informal and formal writings and conversations since the mid 2010’s. The City of Boston, for example, recently named a “Returning Citizens Department” to provide assistance to previously incarcerated people. Applauding this recognition, we also acknowledge that for many people full citizenship is not a reality before, after or regardless of incarceration.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I wish to thank my dear friend and colleague Maureen Norton-Hawk. Together, we designed this project, carried out the fieldwork, and developed our analyses. She has since retired but her presence is felt on every page of this article. The greatest appreciation goes to the women described in this paper. Over a period of many years they have trusted me with their concerns, worries, triumphs, fears and hopes. I continue to do whatever I can to advocate for the policies and services that they tell me they want. Finally, this paper benefited from insightful readings by a number of colleagues. In particular, I wish to thank Fergus McNeill, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Stephen Farrall, Christopher Uggen, Lucius Couloute, and Rebecca Stone.

ORCID iD

Susan Starr Sered

Notes

Susan Starr Sered is professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Suffolk University, and author of Can't Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs, and the Limits of Personal Responsibility (University of California Press.) You can follow her blog at susan.sered.name.

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