Breaking Women

Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment

Jill A. McCorkel

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814764978
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

Winner of the 2014 Division of Women and Crime Distinguished Scholar Award presented by the American Society of Criminology
Finalist for the 2013 C. Wright Mills Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Since the 1980s,when the War on Drugs kicked into high gear and prison populations soared, theincrease in women’s rate of incarceration has steadily outpaced that of men. Asa result, women’s prisons in the US have suffered perhaps the most drasticallyfrom the overcrowding and recurrent budget crises that have plagued the penalsystem since harsher drugs laws came into effect. In Breaking Women,Jill A. McCorkel draws upon four years of on-the-ground research in a major USwomen’s prison to uncover why tougher drug policies have so greatly affectedthose incarcerated there, and how the very nature of punishment in women’sdetention centers has been deeply altered as a result. Throughcompelling interviews with prisoners and state personnel, McCorkel reveals thatpopular so-called “habilitation” drug treatment programs force women to accepta view of themselves as inherently damaged, aberrant addicts in order to securean earlier release. These programs were created as a way to enact stricterpunishments on female drug offenders while remaining sensitive to theirperceived feminine needs for treatment, yet they instead work to enforcestereotypes of deviancy that ultimately humiliate and degrade the women. Theprisoners are left feeling lost and alienated in the end, and many never trulyaddress their addiction as the programs’ organizers may have hoped. Afascinating and yet sobering study, Breaking Women foregrounds thegendered and racialized assumptionsbehind tough-on-crime policies while offering a vivid account of how thecontemporary penal system impacts individual lives.

PART I

The End of Rehabilitation

1

Getting Tough on Women

How Punishment Changed

Everything’s changing. We’re not supposed to call the warden “Daddy” anymore.
—Prisoner, on the transition to the new prison

Unfounding is like rewriting history.
—Warden Richardson

Warden Richardson looked uncomfortable during the press conference. He was a large man with a commanding presence, but today, as he waited to be introduced, he was decidedly unsettled. He alternately shifted his weight forward onto the balls of his feet and then backward onto his heels until he lost his balance and had to be steadied by a correctional officer. He fumbled with his watchband, wiped his eyeglasses, and elaborately folded and refolded his handkerchief before returning it to his pocket. When it was finally his turn to speak, he appeared startled and asked a well-dressed man to his left if he would prefer to introduce himself. The man smiled faintly and nodded for the warden to begin. The warden cleared his throat, welcomed everyone to East State Women’s Correctional Institution, and declared, “Today is the sixty-fifth anniversary of our founding as the first and only women’s prison in the state. I am also pleased to announce that we are here to celebrate not one but two anniversaries, for today is the first anniversary of our future.” He spoke briefly of the prison’s origins in the 19th-century reformatory movement and its long-standing commitment to rehabilitating women prisoners. He then motioned the well-dressed man to come forward and introduced him as a “partner and pioneer in correctional innovation” and a “strategic resource for winning the War on Drugs.”

The press conference took place in January 1994, a year considered by many state officials to be a turning point in the War on Drugs. Arrests and convictions of drug offenders had reached unprecedented highs. The punishments associated with drug crimes, particularly cocaine-related incidents, had become demonstrably harsher, and most carried mandatory multiyear prison sentences. Men and women convicted of drug offenses were now more likely to be sentenced to prison and, while there, serve considerably longer terms. Prisons across the state had also changed. Funding for rehabilitation, vocational, and education programs was sharply reduced and in many of the men’s prisons dropped altogether. Surplus funding went to new prison construction and the acquisition of surveillance and restraint technologies like ceiling-mounted cameras and fortified cell doors. In annual criminal justice reports and political stump speeches, politicians and bureaucrats presented increases in arrest and incarceration rates and the “hardening” of prisons as good things, signs that local agencies and the state government were winning the War on Drugs.

The flaw in this formulation—one that had recently come to dominant political discourse behind the doors of the state capitol—was a sizeable and politically unwieldy overcrowding problem in the state’s only prison for women. Poor conditions in the prison had attracted national attention, prompting investigations by human rights groups and a series of class action lawsuits charging the state with violating the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. State officials responded by building a new, larger facility for women in 1992. When, just eighteen months later, it too became overcrowded, both prison administrators and state officials faced a formidable problem—how to reduce the size of the prison population without appearing soft on crime? Mandatory sentencing policies meant that early release and community-based rehabilitation programs were out of the question. The political climate in the state, particularly widespread support for a punitive response to drug offenders, positioned reform as not only the antithesis of punishment, but as a failed and pointless endeavor. What was needed was a response to the overcrowding problem that would embody the ideals of the “tough on crime” movement while serving to shrink the size of the prisoner population.

The strategy prison administrators would come to pursue was embodied in the form of the well-dressed man whom Warden Richardson was in the process of introducing to guests at the press conference. His name was Dr. Michael Nesbitt, and he was vice president in charge of the clinical division of Prison Services Company. His company was the lone supplier of health care services to inmates throughout the state and one of the largest providers of correctional medical care in the country.¹ The Company was a joint sponsor of the press conference and, it would seem, of the future of punishment more generally. Invitations to the event billed it as a coming-out party in honor of the “promising future of women’s corrections,” and a celebration of the “strategic” partnering of government and private industry to resolve the interrelated problems of drug addiction, crime, and prison overcrowding.

The press conference was staged inside one of the prison’s largest housing units and attended by a mix of criminal justice insiders and professional outsiders, among them journalists, politicians, judges, prosecutors, administrators of social service agencies, university researchers, and community organizers. The focus of the day’s festivities was not on either of the most visible and costly developments that had recently taken root at East State Women’s Correctional Institution. The press release made no mention of the fact that the facility where we all assembled was barely two years old and was the architectural antithesis of its reformatory-era predecessor. Nor did any of the day’s speakers address the installation of new surveillance equipment, even though this had been the subject of an intense and ultimately successful campaign by officials from the state Department of Correction to convince prison administrators of its utility. As the day’s proceedings wore on, it became clear that the key harbinger of the penological future was not to be found in electronics or architecture. Rather, the future was in social technologies that advanced the possibility of both organizational and individual transformation. Speaker after speaker revealed that these technologies held the promise of remaking women drug offenders into law-abiding citizens, and antiquated, seemingly ineffectual total institutions like the prison into “bottom line” organizations. Both sets of transformations would be realized in and through Project Habilitate Women, an experimental drug treatment program that was designed and managed by the Company and housed and operated within the institutional environs of the prison. When asked by a reporter how the program would bring about such sweeping changes, Dr. Nesbitt leaned forward to reply but was interrupted by the warden, who said with a wink, “We’re unfounding rehabilitation.”

It was an intriguing turn of phrase. “Unfounding” is part of the lexicon of the criminal justice system, although the warden’s use of the term was a creative appropriation from its customary usage. The term traditionally refers to a formal statement issued by police departments declaring that a crime previously thought to have occurred never actually took place. As a record-keeping practice, unfounding is intended to correct for crime reports that turn out to be false or erroneous (e.g., “police unfounded the crime after learning the report was false”). But it is a political practice as well. Unfounding offers police a strategic means of manipulating the official crime rate in order to accomplish any number of political objectives.² When I spoke with the warden after the press conference, I asked why he used this term to characterize the transition from older, rehabilitative styles of control to a new penology. He explained that he meant the phrase as an “inside joke” about the zero-sum politics of the drug war. He elaborated:

WARDEN: It’s wrecking havoc on how we run things in here. Look, there isn’t any room anymore for civil debate. You’re either tough on crime or you’re not. If you say rehabilitation, you’re soft. And if you’re soft, you’re out. They don’t give a damn about what actually goes on in prison or what works in terms of managing inmates. . . . That’s why this new program is called [Project] Habilitate [his emphasis]. The executives at [the Company] are not stupid, they’re not going to try to sell something that nobody wants.

JM: So “unfounding rehabilitation” means renaming it? Repackaging it for political purposes?

WARDEN: No, it’s more than that. What I meant is that there’s tremendous pressure to rethink everything—who we are, what we do. It’s like the past is not a part of us—of this the current enterprise. . . . Unfounding is like rewriting history.

The warden’s comments on the politics of institutional change in the prison system offer a unique vantage from which to consider current debates over the evolving character of punishment in the United States. The War on Drugs and the emergence of the “get tough” movement mark a stunning reversal of the dominant ideology of punishment. That ideology, referred to as “correctionalism” or “penal welfarism,” is characterized by a modernist commitment to reforming and normalizing criminal offenders.³ As a philosophy, correctionalism survived, prospered, and ascended to penal orthodoxy over the better part of a century.⁴ Although it is certainly the case that practical concerns with order and control have often outstripped the central tenets of correctionalism in shaping the ways that prisons are actually run, reform and rehabilitation have endured as legitimating ideals, serving to guide and justify the larger project of confinement.⁵

At the center of current debates is the question of whether the punitive policies of the drug war signal the end of the rehabilitative ideal and the correctionalist regime of which it is a part. Those who argue that we are in the midst of a “new” or “postmodern” penology point out that prisons no longer pursue the “technical transformation” of individual offenders.⁶ Instead, the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the rise of supermax facilities suggest that today’s prisons operate as little more than human warehouses, committed to risk management and institutional security.⁷ In her book Total Confinement, anthropologist Lorna Rhodes reports that maximum security prisons for men offer little in the way of rehabilitative programming or possibilities for self-improvement. Indeed, the very logic of control in these prisons would appear to undermine a philosophy of correctionalism, since rehabilitation is here posited as the very antithesis of security and order.

Other scholars caution against such a reading. Treating current punitive policies as if they represent a definitive break with the past or the coalescence of a new, postmodern penology obscures the extent to which various features of correctionalism endure.⁸ This is particularly salient for considering the apparatus of control on the feminine side of the penal system. Women’s prisons have proven historically resistant to political and intellectual fads. As criminologists Kruttschnitt and Gartner argue in Marking Time in the Golden State, these institutions are remarkable in terms of their continuities and, in particular, their long-standing prioritization of gendered logics of reform.

Nonetheless, continuity in women’s prisons is at least partly attributable to stability in the size of the inmate population. For much of the 20th century, the number of women sentenced to state prisons grew very little. The drug war, of course, changed all this—increasing the overall incarceration rate to five times its average from the early 1970s.⁹ Among women, the rate of increase has been roughly double that of men from the 1980s through the turn of the century.¹⁰ It seems likely that explosive population growth over a very short period would destabilize even long-standing patterns of control. This, combined with the zero-sum politics of the drug war, suggest that at the end of the century women’s prisons faced, if not a period of profound transformation, then at least an institutional rupture with the continuities of the past. This is in fact precisely what the warden meant when he remarked that current policies were “unfounding” the rehabilitative ideal in the prison. Indeed, the challenge that the “get tough” movement poses for correctionalism lies not only in its demand that prisons adopt punitive technologies of control, but also in its insistence that they dispense with past logics of reform.

I am interested in what happened to the rehabilitative ideal within the local context of the women’s prison. Most scholarly accounts locate the source of rehabilitation’s collapse within larger structural arrangements, most notably welfare state restructuring and the cultural anxieties of late modernism.¹¹ This chapter offers an alternative account, one that emphasizes the crucial role played by state actors on the ground. Shifts in the political economy and broader cultural sensibilities debut as crises within institutions, and it is precisely in these moments of crisis that routine practices and working ideologies are disrupted, and subject to challenge and debate. In these moments, local actors endeavor to identify and define the kind of problems they face, develop strategic and meaningful responses to those problems, and construct new vocabularies of motive to legitimate changes in organizational practice. Although their responses are constrained by larger structural forces, those forces do not determine these responses.¹² In this sense, state policy is given its form in and through the struggles of its agents to overcome creatively and strategically the crises that confront them. To gauge whether the drug war has indeed ushered in a new penology, it is necessary to first examine how these local agents interpreted and reconciled the “get tough” mandate in light of institutional traditions and ongoing organizational concerns.

My focus in this chapter is on prison administrators and line staff, most of whom were trained within a correctionalist paradigm and who were vested, both organizationally and ideologically, in the reform of the women prisoners.¹³ What challenges did the overcrowding problem pose for their sense of the prison’s mission? How did they reconcile the punitive demands of “get tough” with the prison’s reformist traditions? The future with the past? The sections that follow demonstrate that although prison staff were early critics of “get tough” policies, the politics and circumstances of the drug war sparked a series of resource and ideological crises that undermined their support for correctionalism and weakened their commitment to preserving the prison’s reformist legacy. I argue that it is within this crucible of crisis and rupture that the staff abandoned long-standing ideologies and practices, and “unfounded” rehabilitation.

The New Prison

Prior to the construction of the new prison, incarcerated women were held in an unwalled, 19th-century facility that had originally been designed to accommodate forty-five prisoners. Over the years, the facility had been expanded to hold almost double this number, but staggering increases in the women’s incarceration rate meant that by the late 1980s the inmate population well exceeded the facility’s expanded capacity.¹⁴ In lawsuits filed against the warden and the Department of Correction, prisoners complained of being “packed like cattle” in the old facility and of having to sleep on the floor of a converted activity room. Attorneys representing the inmates contended that these conditions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and were therefore unconstitutional. In the interest of settling the lawsuits and avoiding future overcrowding problems, state legislators quickly approved the Department of Correction’s request to build a larger, “state of the art” prison for women. Although the warden requested that the original facility be retained to serve as a secondary space to deal with “population overflow,” state officials denied the request. In his memorandum to the warden, the commissioner of correction explained that the old facility was “insufficiently secure.”¹⁵

From the beginning, the new prison was a catalyst for an increasingly antagonistic relationship between East State’s senior administrative staff and officials from the Department of Correction. Senior staff complained that they were left out of design decisions and that state officials ignored their suggestions for the new facility. Prison staff were particularly aggrieved by what they regarded as the security-conscious and “masculine” design of the new prison. Staff Lieutenant Miriam Johnson recounted some of these concerns in an interview:

It was just too much, too much on the security end of things. It looks like a concrete bunker, like a place you’d put the worst of the worst in. You don’t need all that for women. The old prison didn’t even have a fence until a few years ago. Even back then, it was rarely a problem. . . . Women just don’t present the same kind of problems that men do.

Echoing these sentiments, Deputy Warden Harriet Pearson recalled that she filed a report with the Department of Correction to complain that the new design was “masculine” and “inappropriate for women.” Despite these and other complaints, construction on the facility went forward as planned.

Upon completion, the new prison bore little resemblance to its predecessor. There were no curtains on the windows, outdoor picnic tables, or flowerbeds. Instead, featureless, low-rise, green and gray buildings rose up from a grassy clearing and were set apart from the landscape by perimeter fencing and razor wire. The only notable aspect of the new facility was that it was so prison-like, a newcomer might mistakenly assume that the inmates held there were men. That was, of course, precisely the point. Among other things, the overcrowding lawsuits urged the state to adopt an “equal treatment” framework for making resources and opportunities available to women prisoners. The Department of Correction endeavored to do so, although it expanded the definition of “equal treatment” to include not only access to resources and opportunities, but also parity in the conditions of confinement. In a memo to Warden Richardson, a high-ranking state official described the “equal treatment” policy this way: “Prisons for either men or women are not vacations from life. They should exhibit toughness, consistency, and consequences.” Women prisoners received a much-needed law library as a result of this polic...