Whose Higher Power? Criminalized Women Confront the “Twelve Steps”

Abstract

Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork with a community of criminalized women in eastern Massachusetts, this article explores their ambivalent, often negative, relationship with and feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous (AA/NA). We suggest that coerced participation in AA/NA undermines any potential value that these programs may have for other types of participants and that the Twelve Step ideology of personal responsibility and turning oneself over to a Higher Power fails to resonate for women who are homeless, poor, incarcerated, abused, and have had their children taken from them.

Keywords

ethnographic research reentry from prison to community religion social constructions of female deviance women

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