Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons

CONCLUSION: This Really Isn't a Rehabilitation Place: Policy Considerations

conclusion This Really Isn’t a Rehabilitation Place policy considerations We’re failing as a society as a whole. It ain’t the prison! It’s society!—patty, North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women starr, a forty-one-year-old African American woman, offered the following reflections in describing “what it’s like to grow up in prison”: Prison has been a learning experience for me. I grew up here. I have matured to the woman I am today. I learned how to process things differently, and now I understand my self-worth. Is it too cynical to say they saved my life? I wouldn’t have learned these things otherwise. I saw no way out. I couldn’t read or write. All I had was my physical being and that was shallow . Some women say they were saved here. I wouldn’t say that, but I understand and respect what they say. But it’s a pendulum. I also learned the tricks of the trade here. I’ve talked to a lot of boosters and learned how they do it. Now I think, why couldn’t I have been in that field instead of selling my body? And I’ve stole a lot of food here. So prison goes both ways. Starr’s personal history is as familiar as it is tragic. She was raised in South Philadelphia by her mother, a drug dealer who offered her little guidance or protection. Starr’s uncles and cousins began molesting her when she was in kindergarten, and the abuse continued for several years. At age ten or eleven, Starr began her involvement with drugs and alcohol during parties hosted by her mother. She went to school only through ninth grade and then turned to the conclusion | 253 streets, where she survived by working as a prostitute. By the time Starr entered prison, she had already attempted suicide twice. In claiming that she “saw no way out” of the life that she was living and that imprisonment enabled her to “grow up,” Starr highlights the gaping holes in our social safety net and the depth of our social problems, including poverty, addiction, and sexual violence. Indeed , Starr’s reflections highlight the extent to which imprisonment has become our primary means of managing social problems in the contemporary United States. The fact that Starr has matured and learned to “process” things, learned to read and write, and gained a sense of self-worth during her incarceration is a testament to her determination, resilience, and creativity; it is not a testament to the health of the prison system. Yet as Starr’s reflections highlight, by acknowledging that women manage to transform themselves in prisons, one can inadvertently attribute a salvific agency to prisons. In fact, insofar as I focus on the roles that reading plays in women’s efforts to change their lives and ways of thinking, a danger exists that this book will perpetuate an overemphasis on the rehabilitative power of the prison. In order to thwart such danger, I conclude by situating my study within a broader policy argument about rehabilitation, reading , and education in U.S. penal contexts. Starr’s claim that prison is “a pendulum” that “goes both ways” articulates a central premise embraced by scholars involved in the International Conference on Penal Abolition (icopa) and in Critical Resistance (cr). Scholars from both of these movements argue that prisons themselves can be “criminogenic”: imprisoning people makes them more likely to commit additional crimes. Further alienation from society, abuse and humiliation by other prisoners and staff, dehumanizing and infantilizing conditions, and significant barriers to work, housing, and citizenship upon release are some of the factors that make prison a damaging place. Ruth Morris, a founding member of icopa, describes the effects of incarceration in these terms: [We take a person] with a lower than average self-image, and we put that person into prison: take away almost all opportunities to contribute creatively , make their own decisions, learn positive skills and even to maintain whatever positive social skills and ties they had. We further limit contact with the few faithful family who try to keep the ties alive, humiliate those family members when they try to visit, subject the prisoner to blind and random harassment, humiliation, and punishment, enrage them while 254 | conclusion keeping them helpless. We subject them to sensory deprivation and prevent them from keeping up with rapid...