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>> 1 Introduction Searching for Red’s Self I’m lost. I’ve had to surrender my self. —Red, on the eve of her release from prison What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything? —Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self” “I’m lost, I’ve had to surrender my self.” As Red says this, she curls her fingers into a loose fist and raps her chest as if to indicate the part of her that has gone missing.1 We are sitting in a shaded corner of the prison’s recreation yard awaiting word on whether her release paperwork will be processed in time for her to return home to celebrate her son’s fourth birthday.She learned the day before that she had successfully completed all five of the “transformation phases” of an experimental, intensive drug treatment program that was housed in a separate wing of East State Women’s Correctional Institution.2 The program, known as Project Habilitate Women or PHW for short, was the latest in the prison’s arsenal of measures designed to curb chronic prison overcrowding, high rates of inmate recidivism, prison disciplinary problems, and spiraling economic costs associated with the state’s War on Drugs.PHW was the creation of Prison Services Company (hereafter the Company),3 one of the largest for-profit providers of prison health care services in the country. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Company began an aggressive campaign to corner what continues to be a booming market—drug treatment services for correctional populations. PHW was one of the first in what would become a growing chain of such programs in prisons, jails, work-release facilities, and halfway houses across the United States. 2 > 3 the limitations of a gendered system of control that had its origins in the 19th-century women’s reformatory movement. To overcome this, the Department of Correction closed the old women’s prison, a reformatory-era building that dated back to 1929, and replaced it with a new, state-of-the-art facility that resembled, in both appearance and effect, prisons for men. Barbed wire crowned perimeter fences, metal detectors and various surveillance devices were installed in housing blocks and main thoroughfares, and a control unit was built to deal with inmates deemed dangerous and unruly. This did not mean that gender disappeared as an organizing strategy of control in the prison. It persisted in different forms. Administrators and line staff held fast to the belief that while incoming women prisoners were different from previous cohorts, they were not men. Thus administrators resisted the idea that the women’s prison should entirely morph into its male counterpart —an austere, isolating environment designed to warehouse prisoners for thedurationoftheirsentences.Theyremainedcommittedtotheprinciplethat prisons for women should prioritize treatment over punishment. To respond to the challenges presented by inmates who were thought to be more dangerous , drug addicted, and crime prone, administrators worked with executives from Prison Services Company to launch Project Habilitate Women, an intensive , confrontational form of drug treatment that was based on the therapeutic community model.6 Sociologists have characterized this model as “strongarm rehab” because it is considerably more coercive than popular self-help programs like Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous.7 PHW made a similar distinction, referring to their system of control as “habilitation” in order to contrast it from “softer” and “more lenient” rehabilitative models. Habilitation isasetofsocialtechnologiesthatmobilizesurveillance,confrontation,humiliation , and discipline for the purposes of “breaking down” a self that is thought to be diseased. It is guided by a philosophy of addiction which holds that the self is the ultimate source of social disorder (in the form of crime and poverty), institutional disorder (in the form of prison overcrowding and inmate recidivism ),andpersonaldisorder(intheformofdrugaddiction).Accordingtothis framework, women like Red get addicted to drugs and become dependent on criminallifestylesbecausetheyarebelievedtopossessdiseasedandincomplete selves—selves that are further eroded under the weight of addictions, poverty, and“badchoices.”Theappealofthisprogramtoprisonadministratorswasthat it embodied the spirit of the state’s efforts to make prisons tougher and more secure, while simultaneously preserving the logic of gender difference in the application of carceral control. Ultimately, administrators and state officials hoped to alleviate the problem of drugs, crime, recidivism, and overcrowding byengineeringnothingshortofaninstitutionaltakeoverofunrulyselves. 4 > 5 their sense of self. From the start, prisoners had been asking whether habilitation was a form of “brainwashing,” designed to make them into something they were not sure they wanted to be. State officials, company executives, prison administrators, and line staff were similarly consumed with the...

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