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About this book
By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation's two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? Doing Time Together vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiancés, and boyfriends on the inside.
Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison's intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into "quasi-inmates," eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives.
An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America's massive prison system, Comfort's book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.
Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison's intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into "quasi-inmates," eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives.
An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America's massive prison system, Comfort's book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.
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Yes, you can access Doing Time Together by Megan Comfort in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Scienze sociali & Criminologia. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
O
U
T
S
I
D
E
T
H
E
P
R
I
S
O
N
WA
L
L
S
3
thousand
men
incarcerated
there.
My
primary
duty
was
to
coordinate
an
HIV-prevention
intervention
designed
for
women
with
incarcerated
male
partners,
a
program
that
took
place
directly
outside
the
prison
gates
in
a
house
owned
by
the
nonprofit
organization,
which
served
as
the
San
Quentin
visiting
center.
My
efforts
to
conduct
health
edu-
cation
and
program
evaluation
were
routinely
interspersed
with
the
provision
of
the
more
mundane
services
offered
by
the
visiting
center:
lending
clothes
to
people
who
were
“inappropriately”
dressed
for
their
visits,
caring
for
children
whose
mothers
could
not
or
did
not
want
to
bring
them
onto
the
prison
grounds,
and
explaining
the
intricate
visit-
ing
policies
and
procedures
to
newcomers.
When
I
accepted
the
job
with
the
nonprofit
I
had
long
been
inter-
ested
in
working
in
a
prison
without
working
for
a
prison.
Being
at
the
visiting
center
seemed
an
ideal
stepping-stone
toward
what
I
really
as-
pired
to
do—find
a
position
where
the
action
was,
as
it
were,
“on
the
Figure
1.1
Sign
at
front
gate
of
San
Quentin
Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Outside the Prison Walls
- 2 “On-Line” at San Quentin
- 3 “We Share Everything We Can the Best Way We Can”
- 4 “Papa’s House”: The Prison as Domestic Satellite
- 5 “It’s a Lot of Good Men behind Walls!”
- 6 The Long Way Home
- Appendix 1: Setting and Methods
- Appendix 2: An Orientation to the Research Literature
- Appendix 3: United States Carceral Population, 1980–2000
- Appendix 4: Field Documents
- References
- Index