Women’s Sense Of Self And Attitudes In Places Of Detention

Abstract

Considering the social diseases of society, we rarely associate women with them. A woman is synonymous with the birth and upbringing of children, homemaking, but by no means with crimes and prisons. It should be noted that female crime is running rampant, the number of recidivism among women is increasing. And if the morals prevailing in male prisons are known to almost everyone, then the female prison remains out of the focus of sociological research. This article doesn’t claim to be completely scientific, but to a greater extent, it is aimed at lifting the veil on the life of convicted women, their sense of self in places of detention, and can serve as a basis for creation of the picture of the life of a woman in Russian prisons. The paper discusses the peculiarities of serving sentences in places of detention for women who have committed crimes. Based on a semi-structured in-depth interview, we have described the women’s sense of self in prisons. Today it is improper to discuss the issues related to female crime or even to the closed community of convicted women. We made an attempt to reproduce the women's sense of self in the social environment of a closed social system and to analyze the patterns of behavior and social conditions that determine them. Summarizing the characteristic traits of this uncommon social group, the authors described everyday life of women serving sentences, their social motivation and attitudes.