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  • Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire
  • Rosemary Gartner
Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire By Lynne A. Haney University of California Press. 287 pages. $60 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In 1992, Lynne Haney spent six months conducting ethnographic research at Alliance, a group home for incarcerated teen-aged mothers, where she tutored the girls, attended staff meetings and participated in house gatherings. Ten years later, Haney spent a total of about eight months at Visions, a residential facility for incarcerated adult mothers located in the same city. There she taught a summer writing class, sat in on group therapy sessions, spent unstructured time with staff and the women who lived there, and conducted her second ethnography. Haney describes the 10-year gap between her two studies as a time of fundamental state restructuring, characterized by devolution, decentralization and diversification. The concepts of "government from a distance" and "state hybridity," Haney argues, serve as the backdrop for understanding the distinctive institutional narratives of governance at Alliance and Visions. At Alliance, the girls were regulated through a discourse of need aimed at breaking what the staff saw as their over-dependence on the state; here self-sufficiency was the goal. At Visions, the women were regulated through a discourse of desire aimed at breaking through their psychic distortions; here self-discovery and recovery were the goals. Haney's book compares the narratives and practices in each [End Page 1086] setting to describe how gendered strategies of governance operate, why they can take such different forms, and what they mean for the women subject to them.

The most compelling and effective parts of the book are the two ethnographies. In these, Haney finds some consistent themes across the two sites, themes that have been identified in other studies of imprisonment. One is that efforts to empower women in carceral settings typically fail miserably and often have the opposite effect. Another is that institutional sites of power and the discourses supporting them can also serve as sources of resistance and rebellion for institutionalized populations. A third is that in carceral institutions for women and run by women, power relations often are disguised or denied, but are always present. Finally, Haney's study joins others in showing how the narrative a particular facility organizes itself around is chosen to justify and secure its existence in a network of institutions competing for resources.

But it is the differences between Alliance and Visions that are the most analytically interesting aspects of Haney's comparison. Most obviously, the two facilities differed in their interpretations of their charges' problems, as exemplified in Alliance's discourse of need and Visions's discourse of desire. Although both discourses failed to contextualize women's lives, largely ignoring the social inequalities they faced, Haney asserts that Visions' discourse did so more fundamentally and with particularly grievous consequences. The therapeutic regime at Visions pathologized and individualized the women's problems, turning them against each other and leaving them profoundly ill-equipped to manage their lives on release. Haney relies on several detailed anecdotes to illustrate these themes, highlighting the costs to the women as individuals and as a collective. Here the book is at its best and its most disheartening as it relates how mothers of older children and mothers of younger children became warring factions and critics of each others' mothering skills, how inmates relished "focus seat" sessions in which they hazed their colleagues, often bringing them to tears, and how pressure from staff to "go deep" resulted in women competing to reveal the most painful and humiliating experiences of their lives in a context ill-prepared to deal with them.

Haney's concluding chapter is also impressive. From her integration of findings from the two ethnograpies, she draws important theoretical insights related to gender and punishment, as well as lessons about intended and unintended consequences of penal programs. Here, Haney also refines her thoughts about the politics of need and the politics of desire, which she argues constitute different paths to the disentitlement of the women she studies. However, her ideas about how to avoid damaging incarcerated women (i.e., by recognizing their diverse...

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