Feminist Ethnographies of Women in Prison

Abstract

I CANNOT IMAGINE A PLACE where one might stand and have a clearer view of concentrated disadvantage based on racial, class, and gender in equality in the country then from inside the walls of a women's prison. There, behind the razor wire fences, concrete barricades, steel doors, metal bars, and thick plexiglass windows, nearly all of the manifestations of gender domination that feminist scholars and activists have traditional ly concerned themselves with-exploited labor, inadequate healthcare, dangerous living conditions, physical violence, and sexual assault-are revealed at once. That gender oppression is significantly furthered by racism and poverty is undeniable from this point of view; women's cor rectional facilities constitute nearly perfect examples of the consequences of the multiple subjugation and the compounding impact of various stig matized identities. The convergence of disadvantage, discrimination, and despair is staggering. In fact, it could be argued that prisons incarcerate a population of women who have experienced such a profound concentra tion of the most vicious forms of economic marginalization, institutional ized racism, and victimization that it can almost seem intentional or mundane. The pattern is clearly evident in almost every crowded visiting room, in every sparsely decorated cell, and in the stories of each woman held in degrading and dangerous conditions that characterize women's prisons and other correctional facilities in this country.