Outlaw Women

Prison, Rural Violence, and Poverty on the New American Frontier

Susan Dewey, Bonnie Zare, Catherine Connolly, Rhett Epler, Rosemary Bratton

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479845736
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Poverty in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A journey into the experiences of incarcerated women in rural areas, revealing how location can reinforce gendered violence

Incarceration is all too often depicted as an urban problem, a male problem, a problem that disproportionately affects people of color. This book, however, takes readers to the heart of the struggles of the outlaw women of the rural West, considering how poverty and gendered violence overlap to keep women literally and figuratively imprisoned.

Outlaw Women examines the forces that shape women’s experiences of incarceration and release from prison in the remote, predominantly white communities that many Americans still think of as “the Western frontier.” Drawing on dozens of interviews with women in the state of Wyoming who were incarcerated or on parole, the authors provide an in-depth examination of women’s perceptions of their lives before, during, and after imprisonment. Considering cultural mores specific to the rural West, the authors identify the forces that consistently trap women in cycles of crime and violence in these regions: felony-related discrimination, the geographic isolation that traps women in abusive relationships, and cultural stigmas surrounding addiction, poverty, and precarious interpersonal relationships.

Following incarceration, women in these areas face additional, region-specific obstacles as they attempt to reintegrate into society, including limited social services, significant gender wage gaps, and even severe weather conditions that restrict travel. The book ultimately concludes with new, evidence-based recommendations for addressing the challenges these women face.

1

Hitting Rock Bottom

The low, steady whistle of the coal train stirs Tammi from the viscous cocoon of low-quality black-tar heroin and prescription opioids in which she has been suspended since her older brother Cody left her on the outskirts of an oil town. Cody refused to give her cash and appeared to be in a hurry to leave, twitchy with nerves as he paid for the motel room up through two extra days after her approaching court date, just in case she caught the judge in a generous mood and managed to get probation again. Shadowy outlines of objects in the room align and shift into focus as Tammi’s body and psyche begin to jaggedly knit together, her growing awareness of where and who she is sharply conjoining with the pervasive ache emanating from her bones. Washed ashore on the cold, wet sands of dope-sick, she can still vaguely feel warm opiate waters lapping at her feet as the fibers of the polyester bedspread, sweat-slick and cold, hook into her skin as she tries, and fails, to avoid vomiting on the mattress.

As she starts to recognize the person-specific ringtone clamoring from beneath the bed, she regrets letting Cody borrow a run-down pickup truck from one of her regulars at the strip club where she hustles when money is tight, which is more often than not. Now the man will not stop calling her, which is understandable since he probably needs his pickup to get to work. Tammi knows that Cody probably used it to make the three-hour drive to Salt Lake City, the closest densely populated area to Rock Springs, Wyoming, where they and their siblings have spent their lives in arrangements that progressed as they aged from foster families to group homes to, once they reached eighteen, various rentals shared with other illicit drug users and intermittent stays in county jail and, for some, prison. They are part of what local people refer to as an “outlaw family,” a term that consciously evokes the nineteenth-century Wild West and its associated disregard for the rule of law to characterize the substance abuse, addiction, and constellation of criminalized income-generation pursuits some poor people use to make it in the world.

While these pursuits are generally small-scale and highly localized, including the purchase and resale of relatively minor amounts of illicit drugs, theft, and disputes regarding both, they are subject to literal and figurative policing as a result of Wyoming’s small size and the rural social-control mechanisms that dominate everyday life. Tammi has never been to Salt Lake City, but she knows that it is the source for at least some of the controlled substances in Rock Springs, which quite a few Wyoming residents call “Rock Bottom” due to their perception that the town’s steady stream of itinerant and mostly male oil and gas workers creates a culture that normalizes substance abuse and other illicit pursuits. When she is hustling for money in the bar, Tammi often hears these itinerant workers, many of whom come from Texas, Louisiana, and other states with prominent—albeit more diversified—oil and gas extraction industries, comment that Rock Springs’ nicest buildings are its strip clubs.

Tammi slowly props herself up against the headboard and searches for her cigarettes among the thin twists of stained bedsheets, fast-food wrappers, foil, rolling papers, and related detritus strewn across the bed. She finds the criminal court summons for a drug possession charge she received a few weeks prior, when Cody bailed her out of jail, and a single bent cigarette and pink plastic lighter stuffed inside a tattered cigarette pack with four worn ten-dollar bills. Exhaling deeply, Tammi tries to focus her gaze on several inches of the brightly lit outside world visible through the parted curtains and considers what she knows about her situation as the phone on the floor beneath her continues to issue what sounds like an increasingly ominous tone.

Tammi knows that there is a man on the other end of the line who is furious that he does not know the location of his pickup truck. She also knows that Cody, a frequent flyer in both Utah and Wyoming county jails, may not be coming back. The parking lot she can see through the window is still full of the heavy utility trucks loaded with equipment used by the oil workers who live at the motel while they labor at exhausting split shifts for weeks or months at a time before returning to their families in faraway states. Their presence indicates that it must still be very early in the morning, which means she may or may not need to leave the room soon since Cody only paid for a week’s stay. Checking the date on her summons, Tammi stifles an involuntary sob as she realizes that she has no idea what day it is. She knows that another failure- to-appear charge, in conjunction with her pending drug-possession case, extensive history of short-term jail sentences, the possibly stolen pickup truck, her low social status as a strip club dancer who occasionally turns tricks, and her family’s bad reputation may all combine in a vicious vortex to prompt the district court judge to send her to prison.

Lighting the cigarette and inhaling deeply, Tammi pulls herself onto the floor and reaches under the bed, silencing the phone with shaking hands as she clutches her summons and searches the printed page and the phone’s small screen for the numbers that will determine her future. Tammi, who has been arrested on drug-related charges at least four separate times in the almost two years since she turned eighteen, knows how to do jail time and, at some points, has regarded jail as a respite from the intergenerational poverty and struggles with addiction that structure the everyday lives of almost everyone she knows. Yet the unfamiliar and intimidating prospect of prison has her unsteady with fear as she recognizes that the portentously mismatched dates on the summons and the screen mean that her court date was two days ago, well enough time for the judge to issue a warrant for her arrest.

Pulling a hood over her head as she fumbles for her shoes, she quickly gathers the foil and rolling papers with other trash into a tightly wadded paper bag and flings open the door, the rush of frigid March air and swirling snow hurling forth into the fetid motel room. Tammi strides as fast as she can across the parking lot without drawing attention to herself and shoves the bag deep into the trash can, hopefully avoiding another drug paraphernalia charge. Unsteadily making her way back to the room, she scans the highway for police cars, remembers that she only has forty dollars in her bag, and sinks with deep fatigue onto the floor, resigning herself to spending her last few hours of freedom in that position. She knows it is just a matter of time before the police come to arrest her again since this motel is one of only a dozen where they would be likely to search for her. As the phone starts to ring again, she uses all her strength to calmly but purposefully obliterate its screen on the corner of the bedside table, removing the SIM card and folding it into tiny pieces so as to make it impossible for police officers to review her call or message history. She wonders what Cody is doing, wishes she had another cigarette, and wonders if, this time around, she might get some help.

Addiction and Mental Health in Rural Areas

Like Tammi, Cody, and their peers, people use illicit drugs and alcohol for many different reasons and, for some, the pursuit and use of these substances is an all-encompassing preoccupation that supersedes other responsibilities and desires. Yet addiction is a fraught concept that derives as much from the cultural context in which it takes place as it does from the behaviors associated with it in various settings. The limited body of research on the rural dynamics of addiction and mental health issues tends to focus on four primary areas: rural-urban comparisons, illicit drug use’s social organization, addiction and mental health trajectories, and available treatment. The first juxtaposes rural and urban data to ascertain potentially significant differences and similarities with respect to prevalence as well as the availability and utilization of addiction and mental health services. The second area focuses on the social organization of illicit drug use, with some attention paid to how rural gender roles impact participation in the criminalized drug economy. Rural addictions and mental health trajectories, including motivations for initiation and cessation of illicit drug use, constitute the third primary area, and the fourth addresses access and barriers to rural substance abuse and treatment.

The preponderance of substance abuse and addiction research concentrates on urban areas, which may stem both from the location of most research universities in large cities as well as from prevailing stereotypes that regard rural areas as devoid of urban problems. The vast majority of social science literature on substance abuse and addictions addresses urban “street cultures” that bear little resemblance to the way illicit drug use occurs in or impacts rural contexts, where mistrust of outsiders combines with pervasive stigmatization to make it difficult for researchers to gain an understanding of these practices (see Carlson et al. 2009; Draus et al. 2005; Weisheit 1993). Hence it is perhaps unsurprising that existing literature offers a mixed set of results with respect to the unique addictions and mental health dynamics facing rural populations, especially given the diverse cultural and geographic contexts that researchers may classify under the broad umbrella of “rural,” which may be variously used to descriptively contain both remote Alaska and suburban Ohio.

Despite such diversity of context and geography, a significant body of work indicates that the prevalence of substance abuse, addiction, and mental health issues does not significantly differ on the basis of population density. Such problems are by no means confined to cities or large towns. This is the case across a wide swath of geographic contexts that may reasonably be termed “rural” because of their small population sizes, economic dependence on agriculture, and distance from a large city or town. Yet “rural” remains a sloppy federal, state, and local demarcation of areas derived from either census classifications based on population size and density or Office of Management and Budget designations of metropolitan or nonmetropolitan based on the presence of a nearby large city (Johnson-Webb, Baer & Gesler 1997). A survey of county commissioners in eleven western U.S. states, including Wyoming, revealed that population concentration is the most significant variable used in characterizing areas as “urban” or “rural,” followed by a much more unevenly described set of attributes, including infrastructure, services, and recreational opportunities (Berry et al. 2000).

Distinctions between urban and rural areas are even more unclear with respect to illicit drug use across a wide range of areas in the United States characterized by small towns, lower population densities, reliance on agriculture, distances from major metropolitan areas, and other indices of rurality. Nebraska researchers, for instance, found that methamphetamine use rates among individuals arrested in four rural counties closely resembled those of their peers in Omaha, the largest city in the state (Herz & Murray 2003). Yet some studies suggest that substance abuse may be even more prevalent in rural areas. For instance, young people living on farms located in or near communities of fifteen hundred to forty thousand residents across the states of Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, and Maine are more likely to use illicit drugs, including marijuana, inhalants, stimulants, and hallucinogens, than their counterparts who live in towns, although frequency of use does not vary significantly (Rhew, Hawkins & Oesterle 2011).

The synchronicity between rural and urban drug use rates appears to occur for almost all controlled substances, with heroin and prescription opioids perhaps the most striking examples of this reality. A nationwide study on changing characteristics among heroin users entering drug treatment demonstrates significant demographic shifts in recent decades from urban people of color to primarily suburban and rural whites in their late twenties (Cicero et al. 2014). Illicit prescription opioid markets and abuse in rural areas take unique forms arising from their cultural contexts, leading public health researchers to investigate possible reasons for particular types of use in specific areas. For instance, public health researchers hypothesize that widespread prescription opioid abuse in Kentucky, West Virginia, Alaska, and Oklahoma emerges from greater numbers of opioid prescriptions issued, high-density kin and social ties that facilitate drug distribution, youth out-migration that creates a general sense of limited future prospects, and the stress of poverty (Keyes et al. 2014). This finding is particularly significant in light of a rural Appalachian study that suggests a three-year mean from prescription opioid abuse to first injection of the prescription opioid, heroin, or other drug of choice (Young & Havens 2012). Most illicit drug users and public health experts would agree that injection drug use poses an additional health burden due to the difficulties rural people have, relative to their urban counterparts, in procuring sterile syringes and associated greater likelihood of reusing or sharing possibly contaminated injection equipment.

The lack of treatment services and highly qualified mental healthcare professionals increases the rural addiction and mental health burden. Such limited treatment options are worrisome given that nationally representative samples indicate that rural and urban people suffer from similar rates of most psychiatric disorders, trauma exposures, and substance abuse (McCall-Hosenfeld, Mukherjee & Lehman 2014). A comparative study of rural and urban treatment-seeking methamphetamine users observed that—relative to their urban counterparts—rural midwesterners reported much more significant complications related to their drug use, which they typically began at younger ages, and higher rates of intravenous use, alcoholism, cigarette smoking, and psychotic symptoms (Grant et al. 2007). Hence, while people appear to abuse controlled substances at similar rates in both rural and urban areas, the disproportionate lack of services renders rural substance use a much more life-threatening proposition; this reality is strikingly evident in rural opioid use and opiate overdose rates that are 45% higher than in cities and towns in at least forty-two U.S. states (Faul et al. 2015).

Poor-quality or nonexistent drug treatment services, ready availability of controlled substances, constrained economic opportunities, and limited social worlds are a “small-town vortex” that reduces or eliminates rural midwesterners’ motivations to abstain from substance abuse (Draus & Carlson 2009). Such rural anomie is also evident in Appalachian Kentucky, where illicit drug users associate the prescription opioid oxycodone with greater social capital than other controlled substances, such that those who are able to procure it receive elevated social status in a very economically stratified region (Jonas, Young & Havens 2012). Illicit drug use is always a product of the context in which it occurs, and in southern farming communities, polysubstance users adjust their type and frequency of consumption in conjunction with physical demands created by seasonal agricultural cycles as well as the need to participate in arduous farm work that may require relocation (Bletzer 2009). In Wyoming, socialization into methamphetamine use, particularly (but not exclusively) among men whose first use is at a later age, has been found to occur in work settings and among family coworkers, particularly in physically demanding jobs that require long hours, such as those in resource extraction–related fields (Bowen et al. 2012).

As in other rural settings, Wyoming’s social and geographic dynamics also influence access to substance abuse and addictions treatment across a wide spectrum of costs and approaches. Yet wait lists are often lengthy and unable to accommodate people in crisis; according to one Wyoming state legislator, at one point the entire state had less than ten available spaces for women in residential drug treatment. The capital city, Cheyenne, has a single recovery community center that, following the national model for such centers, offers a gathering site where people in recovery can convene for social events designed to assist individuals in making the transition from addictions treatment to long-term sobriety. Twelve step groups, which prioritize an individual accountability–based model of addiction recovery, are organized by volunteers at least once a week in most towns at no charge. Despite criticism of the model’s limitations, the American Psychiatric Association recommends twelve step self-help groups as a method of addressing addiction, and this model remains the most common form of successful intervention with people who are voluntarily seeking to give up substances or are mandated to address their addiction (Moos & Timko 2008). Twelve step groups are also particularly attractive because they are free, offer confidentiality, enable one to share one’s own story, and are open to anyone who has struggled with addiction.

Church-based groups that view practicing Christianity as the solution to substance abuse exist in several towns. Twelve step or church-based groups may or may not organize group meetings in county jails. Court-supervised treatment, popularly known as drug court, is also free of cost and available in fourteen of Wyoming’s twenty-three counties, in addition to the Shoshone and Arapaho Tribal Substance Abuse Treatment Court on the Wind River Reservation. Counselors and physicians also provide substance abuse treatment at a cost, and just over a dozen residential addictions treatment programs exist across the state, with some charging fees on a sliding scale. Yet the relative lack of anonymity in Wyoming towns, all of which are small, impacts individual perceptions of the ability to access these services, even when they are low-cost or free, often in ways that relate directly to both small-town notions of propriety and the criminal justice system as a whole. A small-town sheriff, social worker, or other respected member of the community is highly unlikely to attend an addictions treatment meeting where he or she has to sit side by side with the people with whose supervision he or she is professionally tasked. Likewise, those from families with long histories of criminal justice involvement may mistrust the kind of disclosure required in such settings or dismiss them altogether as part of a system irrelevant to their lives.

This lack of anonymity in rural areas is further compounded by the fact that families and other social ties have been found to play an especially significant role in the social organization of rural illicit drug use. Some scholars have argued that this is particularly true in areas characterized by histories of intergenerational poverty and neocolonial or other forms of ethnic or racial oppression. In rural northern New Mexico, which has some of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the United States, intergenerational poverty, illicit drug use, and addiction are conceptualized as a form of inheritance associated with community loss (Garcia 2014). A study of rural drug offenders and recent drug use likewise demonstrated that Hawaiian youths, in comparison with non-Hawaiian youths, had significantly more drug offers from peers and family members as well as much higher rates of alcohol and marijuana use (Okamoto et al. 2014). Youth in a study conducted in rural southwestern New Mexico describe illicit drug use as a widespread practice that alleviates considerable boredom in a context offering youth very limited educational and employment options or hope for the future (Willging, Quintero & Lilliott 2014). Adolescents in rural Nebraska likewise attributed their prescription drug misuse to a lack of opportunities and activities (Park, Melander & Sanchez 2016).

Data from national studies indicates a lack of gender differences in rural substance abuse and dependence, in sharp contrast to urban areas, where women generally report lower rates of substance abuse. Researchers have attributed rural women’s increased rates of substance abuse to “downward economic mobility, resulting in the loss of social cohesion especially among whites, who comprise about 85% of rural residents” (Chamberlain, Mutaner & Walrath 2004). The illicit drug economy, like its licit counterpart, is fundamentally gendered, with higher-status and better-paid roles ascribed to men. Yet women serve essential roles by providing housing, buying illicit drugs, financially or otherwise supporting men who are addicted, and participating in small-scale sales (Anderson 2005). Women employ creative strategies as they navigate the illicit drug economy, manage resources and relationships as they enter recovery, and contend with punitive sociolegal approaches to addiction (Anderson 2008). These patterns are also often evident in rural areas, particularly in analyses of gender differences characterizing illicit drug use.

Rural women who use illicit drugs manage a greater arr...