Book Review: Barbara Owen, James Wells, and Joycelyn Pollock, In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women’s Imprisonment

Abstract

Book Review: Barbara Owen, James Wells, and Joycelyn Pollock, In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women's Imprisonment. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. ISBN: 9780520288720 (Paperback). 260 Pages. $29.95.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2017 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]When the United States embarked on a policy of mass incarceration during the waning decades of the twentieth century, few considered the impact that this correctional course change would have on women. Women offenders had been largely invisible or forgotten by a criminology that emerged to complement, explain, and occasionally critique state efforts to control and discipline unruly and dangerous men. In the classic texts on crime, literally disappeared from data sets, from discussions of crime patterns, and most importantly for this discussion from life behind bars. For centuries, very often, little or no thought was given to the possibility of a female prisoner until she appeared at the door of the institution (Rafter 1990). It was as though crime and punishment existed in a world in which gender equaled male, and were correctional afterthoughts, at best.Some of this intellectual and institutional neglect was understandable. For most of the last century, we imprisoned only about five to ten thousand (Calahan 1986). In 1980, there were just 12,000 in U.S. state and federal prisons and they constituted only 3.9 percent of those in prisons. After decades of mass imprisonment, though, there are now one hundred thousand in U.S. prisons (111,495 in 2015), and these accounted for 7.2 percent of those in prison (Carson and Anderson, 2016: 5). In four decades, the number of being held in the nation's prisons increased nearly ten-fold and the women's imprisonment boom was born. What had started as a war on drugs quickly morphed into an unannounced and unplanned reshaping of the women's correctional landscape, and what some have dubbed a war on women (Bloom, Chesney-Lind, and Owen, 1994).After this draconian policy shift, it is probably appropriate to take stock of the state of women's imprisonment in the United States. In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women's Imprisonment by Barbara Owen, James Wells, and Joycelyn Pollock is a timely and sobering assessment of what mass imprisonment has meant for behind bars in our country. One could hardly have asked for a better team to compile the assessment. Both Owen and Pollock are authors of highly respected books on the topic of women's imprisonment; Owen's In the Mix which is a classic ethnography of a woman's prison, and Pollock's classic Women, Prison and Society is a highly respected compendium of the history and current state of women's imprisonment. Wells brings to this group a wealth of first hand experience as a former correctional officer who has extensive experience assessing safety in correctional facilities, and an impressive track record for obtaining external grants.Importantly, the book relies on three federally funded studies on the nation's conditions of confinement, with a focus on abuse and assault: an National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study that collected qualitative data from staff at twelve housing men and women, a second NIJ study that examined sexual violence in women's prisons using 40 focus groups (with approximately 150 respondents) in four states, and finally an National Institute of Corrections (NIC) study that conducted a survey of over 4000 prisoners held in fifteen dispersed federal, state, county, and private correctional facilities (15). They also, importantly, conducted a content analysis of fifty letters sent to the Just Detention International detailing women's experiences with assault while imprisoned. …