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

1. Engendering the Prison

Engendering the Prison Imagine a prison guard. Whom do you see? If you are like most people, the vision in your mind’s eye is probably that of a hulking man in uniform carrying a nightstick or even a gun. Perhaps you imagine him as brutal and sadistic; at the very least, you see someone who would be able to deal easily with unruly inmates, to meet violence with violence, to “bang heads” if necessary. Now imagine the place in which he does his work. Again, if like most of the population you have little experience of prison and prison life, you in all likelihood envision a Hobbesian nightmare of perpetual conflict, a war of all against all in which only the strong survive. If these are the images you saw, then you are not unusual. These notions have considerable currency. They are re- flected in both commonsense mythology and popular culture. Films like Penitentiary (1938), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Brubaker (1980), and ConAir (1997) have framed prison work and prison life in these terms for generations of moviegoers. As this book demonstrates, however, these images have two things in common: they are largely inaccurate, and they are deeply gendered. The figures obviously missing from this conceptual landscape are women, yet they are a growing proportion of those working and being held in prisons. As of 1995, 19 percent of all correctional officers (the term now preferred over the more colloquial “prison guard”) in federal and state prisons were women: 16 percent of officers in men’s prisons and 56 percent of those working in women’s facilities.1 Women account for 6.6 percent of all inmates in state and federal prisons, and their population has recently been increasing much faster than men’s. Regardless of the population they hold, most American prisons bear little resemblance to their anarchic fictional representations. Most inmates are nonviolent offenders, and all have at least some stake in the maintenance of prison order, if for no other reason than the preservation of their own lives. It is because of this that mass outbreaks of prison violence are 1 1 actually relatively rare. And contrary to popular mythology, correctional officers who work in inmate living areas are always unarmed. Given that they are commonly outnumbered by one hundred to one or more, a weapon of any kind is a potential liability. These images also reflect ideas about gender. In this culture, the use of violence has always been connected with masculinity, whether the violence is illegitimate, as in the case of the “bad guy,” who becomes a prisoner, or legitimate, such as the sanctioned use of force by the police or corrections officer. Violence is so closely tied to hegemonic forms of masculinity that to be a “real man” is, by definition, to know how to use violence and to be willing to do so under appropriate circumstances. Given this, it only makes sense that men are the “natural” guardians of other men. The invisibility of women in our images of the prison and prison life also reveals the function of the masculine as an unmarked category. Prisons, in a generic sense, are men’s prisons; so, too, are prisoners and prison guards men. Women’s violence stands in stark contradiction to prevailing norms around (white) femininity, so much so that nineteenth-century criminologists believed the brains and bodies of women criminals to have been somehow masculinized. The requisites of femininity have the paradoxical effect of making women inmates appear even more aberrant than men, and seemingly disqualify women for the job of controlling prisoners, be they men or women. While the evidence presented in this book contradicts some of these images, I also explore in more detail how notions like this shape our ideas about prisons and prison life. I propose that the ways that we think about the prison are deeply gendered and reflect an exaggerated version of life in men’s institutions, one in which “real men” constantly contend for the prize of masculine physical dominance. Women’s institutions are seen, when at all, as exceptions, or anomalies, though our ideas about them are also gendered and sexualized. In addition, in a comparative analysis of work in men’s and women’s prisons, I examine the ways that the prison, through its structure, practices, and policies, presumes and reproduces gender. Specifically, I show that work in the prison reflects the gendering...