Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment

3. From Good Girls to Real Criminals: Race Made Visible

70 > 71 to discipline and communicate with PHW prisoners without the explicit permission of the program’s counseling staff. More recently, their hostility toward PHW had broadened to include substantive criticisms of the program itself, particularly that it was more punitive than rehabilitative. At base, their critique reflected a fundamental divide over how best to comprehend the identities and needs of the incoming tide of women prisoners. Were they the good girls that prison staff had long been accustomed to dealing with? Or did they represent a different sort of criminal offender, one whose behavior and subjectivity was more in line with the predatory bugbear of drug war mythology? The divide over how to view women prisoners, and by extension how to deal with them, is evident in a story the warden told me during our interview about Alicia, a thirty-one-year-old African American prisoner. Alicia had been in and out of prison and community-based correctional facilities throughout her adult life. Most of her convictions were for relatively minor offenses like petty theft, prostitution, and forgery, but over the last few years, she had begun to rack up a series of drug charges beginning with simple possession and extending to drug trafficking. Her most recent conviction, for possession of crack cocaine with intent to sell, resulted in a sentence of three to five years in prison. The sentencing judge left open the possibility of an early release from prison, provided that Alicia complete the PHW program. Alicia was among the first cohort of prisoners admitted into PHW, and by all accounts she appeared to be doing well there. It was a surprise to everyone when, just a few months shy of her program graduation date, Alicia wrote a letter to administrators requesting to be transferred from the program to the general prison population. Doing so meant that she would be ineligible for an early release from prison and that she ran the risk of having to serve a maximum sentence of five years. While her request was unanticipated, it was not the request itself that brought about the controversy. Rather, it was that she had listed “abuse” as the reason for her request. I was not present as Alicia was escorted out of PHW by two correctional officers, but Alicia, a counselor from PHW, and several general population prisoners claimed that as she was lead to “max,”1 a crowd of approximately thirty people (including COs, staff members, and inmates) lined either side of the main hallway, clapped, and shouted congratulatory remarks. Joellen, a prisoner who witnessed the event, recounted to me that although inmates were normally prohibited from lining the hallways in a cluster formation, the officers on duty that day relaxed the rules. In our interview, the warden downplayed the number of staff involved in the event, but he did acknowledge that officers on duty were under investigation for violating procedure.2 72 > 73 constructions of Alicia’s identity in play, no one could agree on whether the decision to process her request for a transfer out of PHW had been the most appropriate course of action to take. The only thing they did agree on was that something about the population of women prisoners had changed, and that this change had profound repercussions for the integrity of the prison’s control apparatus. In this chapter, I turn to the second major crisis that confronted the prison—the crisis over the meaning. Overcrowding, recidivism, and an outbreak of disciplinary problems strained not only the prison’s material resources but its ideological ones as well. Prison staff began to question, for the first time in their professional careers, who women prisoners were and what was needed to control them. I argue that race is essential to understanding why staff ultimately lost faith in rehabilitative paternalism and became increasingly willing to entertain a new ideology of punishment. In the first half of this chapter, I examine how a shift in the racial demographic of the prison population coincided with the staff’s perception that incoming prisoners were “real” criminals rather than good girls. This, in turn, undermined the staff’s ideological commitment to rehabilitation. In the second half of the chapter, I explore how Company executives capitalized on racist constructions of “real” criminals to promote a new ideology of control—one that attributed drug addiction and criminal behavior to a diseased self. Taking Notice: Women...