At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as Gendered Organization

Notes

Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1. All data are author calculations from the Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities, 1995 (U.S. Department of Justice 1998). Throughout , calculations exclude community-based facilities (those from which 50 percent or more of inmates are allowed to depart) and co-correctional facilities (recoded as those in which more than 25 percent of inmates are of the opposite sex). Calculations are also restricted to those facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons or the various state systems. The base number of institutions is 1,147. 2. Data on labor force participation rates come from U.S. Department of Labor (2002a), table A.1. Data on the wage gap come from U.S. Department of Commerce (2001), table A. 3. Author calculation from U.S. Department of Labor (2002b), table 3. These seven job categories are secretaries (4 percent of women workers); elementary school teachers (4 percent); registered nurses (3 percent); nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants (3 percent); cashiers (2 percent); bookkeepers and accounting and auditing clerks (2 percent); and accountants and auditors (2 percent). 4. Data on the wage gap within occupations from U.S. Department of Labor (2002b), table 3. 5. The smaller wage gap for women correctional officers is partly due to the fact that they are in a labor market sector (government) in which recruitment and promotion practices are somewhat standardized. The wage gap by sex in almost all government occupations is smaller than in the private sector. 6. I draw on the “theory of gendered organizations” as set out by Joan Acker, but the levels of analysis I utilize differ slightly. In her 1990 statement of the theory, Acker argues that organizations are gendered at five levels (structure, policy and practice, ideology, interaction, and identity). In a 1992 restatement, the first two levels are combined. I have further simplified this scheme to three levels, structure, culture (ideology), and agency, including interactions as part of the third category. 7. I arrived at this number by subtracting the 91 unique titles of movies or series classified under the plot keywords “female-prison,” “female-prisoner,” 235 “women’s-correctional-facility,” and “women-in-prison” from the 748 classified under the keyword “prison.” I did not check the resulting list of “prison” films for duplications. Regardless, the point is clear—representations of men’s prisons and male inmates on film drastically outnumber those of women. 8. I borrow the phrase “iron cage” from Max Weber’s (1958 [1905]) classic analysis of the rationalization of modern society in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Though he views ideal-typical bureaucracy as the most efficient of all forms of organization, he also sees its advance as a troubling sign of the loss of meaning in public life. In modern society, he argues, we are trapped in a cycle in which accumulation and efficiency serve not as means but as selfjustifying ends. We thus find ourselves in an iron cage of ever-increasing technical rationality and bureaucratization. The modern prison, in which the goal of rehabilitation has been eclipsed by utilitarian discourses of safety and custody, is both a literal and a figurative iron cage. Notes to Chapter 2 1. Author calculation from U.S. Department of Justice (2001). This is a sample survey; the total number of inmates interviewed in 1997 was 18,326. 2. An extensive academic literature traces the emergence of each of these prison systems, and I have drawn on it heavily here. On the rise of the penitentiary , see, for example, Hirsch (1992), McKelvey (1977 [1936]), Lewis (1965), Rothman (1980, 1990). On reformatories, see Pisciotta (1994). On convict leasing and the farm system, see Mancini (1996); Oshinsky (1996), Walker (1988). Of these, the standard literature on the penitentiary has perhaps paid the least attention to women. Pisciotta (1994), Mancini (1996); Oshinsky (1996), and Walker (1988) mention the presence of women in reformatories, in leasing camps, and on prison farms. In recent years, feminist historians have begun to fill in the gaps, documenting women’s experiences in each system. Nicole Hahn Rafter (1990) has written perhaps the most exhaustive work on the treatment of women in men’s penitentiaries, focusing on New York, Ohio, and Tennessee (see also Rafter 1982, 1983, 1985). Butler (1997) documents the experiences of women in western men’s penitentiaries. On women in Illinois men’s penitentiaries, see Dodge (1999). The classic history of the women’s reformatory...