Women's Incarceration Research Articles

Negotiating Toilet Access: A Qualitative Exploration of Women's Incarceration

Norms and behaviors about toileting in prison can expand understanding of women's lived experience of incarceration. Knowledge about this subject is significant because access to clean, safe toilets is a human rights issue, and toilet habits can impact social, mental, and physical outcomes. Three focus groups were conducted with 15 incarcerated women about their quotidian prison toilet experiences. While the toilet was physically available, institutional regulations, social norms, and women's individual psychologies limited their access and utilization. The ways in which toilet use was negotiated with self, peers, and are described, and the implications of these findings are discussed.

Women's Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence While Incarcerated: The Measurement Structure, Reliability, and Validity of a Novel Instrument.

While incarcerated, women may continue to experience intimate partner violence (IPV), perpetrated by partners who reside in the outside community. Power and control dynamics of abusive relationships may intensify as the abuser exploits their partners' incarceration. The current study assessed IPV experiences of 832 incarcerated women (50% white, 76% mothers), testing a novel instrument. Results validated a two-factor structure: (a) general abuse (i.e., verbal, physical) and (b) deny or threaten to deny (i.e., leveraging the women's incarceration to intimidate or control). This study introduces a novel instrument to measure IPV while incarcerated and provides implications for research and practice.

The Correctional Services Canada Institutional Mother Child Program: A Look at the Numbers

Women are the fastest growing population in federal prison in Canada. Women's incarceration has significant implications for families, as approximately two-thirds have children who face intergenerational trauma, risk of criminalization, and health concerns. The Correctional Services Canada Mother Child Program allows children up to age six to live with their incarcerated mothers. Publicly available information about outcomes associated with the program is scarce, including the number of participants. Using data from 2000–2020 acquired through an Access to Information and Privacy request, this article presents descriptive statistics about the program. Findings indicate the program is underused, and associated outcomes are under-researched.

Trends in Women's Incarceration Rates in US Prisons and Jails: A Tale of Inequalities

Women's rates of imprisonment and incarceration in jails grew faster than men's rates during the prison boom in the United States. Even during the recent period of modest decline in incarceration, women's rates have decreased less than men's rates. The number of women in prisons and jails in the United States is now at a historic high. Yet research on mass incarceration most often ignores women's imprisonment and confinement in jails. This review examines trends in women's incarceration, highlighting important disparities for Black, Latina, and American Indian/Indigenous women. It contextualizes these trends in terms of the economic and social disadvantages of women prior to incarceration as well as inequalities that are created by women's incarceration for families, communities, and women themselves. The review concludes by calling for improved data on women's imprisonment and jail trends, particularly regarding race and ethnicity, as well as more research and theoretical development.

History of Menstrual Injustice

Abstract
 This research paper lies at the intersection of criminal justice, human rights, public health, and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Written for the 2021 Barnard major track History of the Present, this paper details the contemporary history of American mass incarceration as well as exposes the blatant human rights injustices and health concerns of the experience of carceral menstruation. As women's incarceration, and Black women's incarceration in particular, has increased more than any other demographic in recent years, menstruation behind bars has become a pertinent and absolutely necessary experience to discuss and improve. Abhorrent policies in jails and prisons have forced upon prisoners with periods highly unsanitary and unjust menstruation experiences, an example of the prison industrial complex's blatant and inhumane disregard for bodily autonomy.

A Global View of Women, Prison, and Aftercare: A Call for Reform

Ending violence against women-part of the priority theme of the CSW65-is an international human rights issue. We must prevent and combat violence against all women, including those who are incarcerated worldwide. Incarcerated women are among the most marginalized populations; they have suffered numerous victimizations without ever seeing their perpetrators brought to justice. Though most incarcerated women have committed non-violent offenses, they are locked away in prisons, far away from their loved ones, and subject to inhumane conditions. According to international human rights law, preventing VAW is the responsibility of the State in all contexts, including prisons. In this article, we acknowledge the global treatment of women in prison as a form of State violence against women and provide policy reform for incarcerated women worldwide. We propose four strategies to reform women's incarceration worldwide: (1) recognizing and dismantling systemic and institutionalized discrimination and biases; (2) abolition of prison sentences for non-violent offenders; (3) restorative approaches to aftercare (or reentry); and (4) making children the priority.

'You have to be almost dead before they ever really work on you in prison': A qualitative study of formerly incarcerated women's health care experiences during incarceration in Louisiana, U.S.

Globally, the rate of incarceration among women is rising, and in the U.S., women's incarceration has grown at twice the rate for men over the last four decades. Louisiana has the second highest rate of incarceration in the U.S. There is evidence that men in Louisiana prisons do not receive adequate healthcare, but little is known about their women counterparts. We aimed to document formerly incarcerated women's experiences with receiving healthcare during incarceration in Louisiana to inform policy and practice change. In partnership with two community-based organisations in New Orleans, Louisiana, between August 2016 and April 2018, we conducted semi-structured 1-hr interviews with 22 formerly incarcerated women who had been incarcerated in the state for at least one consecutive year. A convenience sample of participants was recruited through community-based organisations' re-entry and health programmes. Our interview guide included questions about experiences with accessing care, reproductive health needs, interactions with providers and preventive care during incarceration. We used applied thematic analysis techniques to interpret data. Over 90% of interviewees identified as Black. Their mean age was 50.7. The average length of incarceration was 8.4years. Participants reported multiple barriers to accessing care including punishment for seeking care, long wait times, costs, lack of respect from providers and health concerns being dismissed. Participants reported limited mental health, preventive and dental services; an insufficient number of providers; and poor health outcomes as a result of delayed care. Overall, women did not have access to adequate, timely care during incarceration. Findings suggest a need for policy changes related to the provision of carceral healthcare services and external oversight of prison conditions and healthcare delivery. Further research into women's experiences of ageing during incarceration and tailored transitional health models is needed.

The Mental Health of Mothers Currently and Formerly Incarcerated in Jails and Prisons: An Integrative Review on Mental Health, Mental Health Treatment, and Traumatic Experiences.

This integrative review aimed to synthesize the literature on the mental health, mental health treatment, and traumatic experiences of currently and formerly incarcerated mothers. We searched PsychINFO, CINAHL, and Criminal Justice Abstracts for all research articles that were written in English; included adult mothers who were incarcerated or incarcerated and released; and contained findings related to mental health, mental health treatment, or traumatic experiences. Thirty-four articles met the inclusion criteria. Mothers had high rates of moderate-to-severe mental health problems and high childhood and adult trauma rates, especially intimate partner violence. Mothers faced barriers to treatment yet showed psychological resilience and active coping skills. Nurses can recognize risk factors for women's incarceration and assess mental health symptoms and trauma, especially interpersonal violence. Nurses can use assessment findings to refer mothers to treatment and community resources and support their reuniting with their children. Nurses can also provide trauma-informed care and education about mental health topics and advocate for mental health treatment prerelease and postrelease. Staff education and organizational interventions to reduce burnout may remove additional barriers to care.

The Life Pattern of Incarcerated Women: The Complex and Interwoven Lives of Trauma, Mental Illness, and Substance Abuse.

The fastest growing population in the U.S. prisons consists of women whose rate rose nearly twice that of men (Sipes, 2012). Incarcerated women are oftentimes victims of abuse and have high reported rates of mental illness and substance abuse, yet their life pattern is not well understood. The purpose of the study was to develop the life pattern of incarcerated women to gain a better understanding of the life situations that have led to their incarceration and gain a better understanding of their needs during their imprisonment. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 incarcerated women. Margaret Newman's (1994) Theory of Health as Expanding Consciousness was used as the theoretical framework and research method to develop the community pattern. The life pattern that evolved for the women was a complex and interwoven life filled with childhood trauma, mental illness, substance abuse, unhealthy relationships, and disorganized family situations that led to the women's incarceration. The women gained a better understanding of their pathway to prison. Correctional nurses are in a unique position to address the traumas women in prison have experienced and to assist them with the healing process. Addressing the traumas the women have endured could improve their health and better prepare them for release from prison.

Highly Effective Birth Control Use Before and After Women's Incarceration.

We examined factors associated with women's use of highly effective birth control before and after incarceration, since women with ongoing criminal justice involvement bear a disproportionate burden of sexual and reproductive health problems, including high rates of unintended pregnancy and inconsistent contraceptive use. Using a longitudinal study design, we conducted surveys with 102 women in an urban midwestern jail and then followed up with 66 of them 6 months after incarceration. We used stepwise logistic regression to assess individual, interpersonal, resource-based, organizational, and environmental factors associated with utilizing highly effective birth control. Forty-two percent of women reported utilizing highly effective birth control (e.g., sterilization or other highly effective reversible methods) prior to incarceration, and 54% reported using these methods after release from jail (p<0.001). Ninety percent of women reported not wanting to get pregnant. Consistent use of birth control (p=0.001) and alcohol problems (p=0.027) were associated with utilization of highly effective birth control prior to incarceration. Previous pregnancies (p=0.012) were the only factor associated with utilization of highly effective birth control after release from jail. Clinicians and public health practitioners can use findings from this study to develop clinical and intervention efforts aimed at improving unintended-pregnancy prevention among incarcerated women both during their confinement and during the tumultuous period after their release from jail.

Book Review: Women incarceration and human rights violations: Feminist criminology and corrections

Book Review: Women incarceration and human rights violations: Feminist criminology and corrections

“Unsound” minds and broken bodies: the detention of “hardcore” Mau Mau women at Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps in Kenya, 1954–1960

From 1954 to 1960, the British detained approximately 8000 women under the Emergency Powers imposed to combat the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. Kamiti Detention Camp was the main site of women's incarceration, and its importance has been widely acknowledged by scholars. However, new documentary evidence released from the Hanslope Park Archive since 2011 has revealed the existence of a second camp established for women at Gitamayu, created in 1958 explicitly to deal with the remaining “hardcore” female detainees. This article examines the British struggle to contend with the hardcore Mau Mau women in the final years of the Emergency Period, one that was marked by uncertainty, violence, and an increasing reliance on ethno-psychiatry. Debates about how to deal with this group of women engaged and perplexed the highest levels of the colonial administration, generating tensions between legal, political, and medical officials. At the center of these debates was the question of the female detainees' sanity, with some officials pressing for these women to be classified as insane. The charge that hardcore women were “of unsound mind” was used for a variety of purposes in the late 1950s, including covering up the abuses in the camps. Examining the British approach to these detainees illuminates how ideas about gender, deviancy, and mental health shaped colonial practices of punishment.

The Individual Agency and Social Structure Dialectic: Exploring Women's Experiences of Remand Custody through Arts and Community-Based Research

Background: Attention to the interaction between individual agency and the structural causes and solutions to repeated incarceration is important to create sustainable change. In order to create this change, we will need to work in new ways to investigate the issues and to collaboratively identify and implement solutions.Purpose: Arts-and community-based research methods were used to explore the experiences and personal knowledge of women in remand custody.Results: The findings substantiate current knowledge of the underlying causes of women's incarceration, including both structural issues (e.g., poverty, inaccessible education and employment, housing instability) and personal issues (e.g., addictions, history of family violence). Although the women acknowledged individual responsibility, attention to the structural causes and solutions to the cycling in and out of incarceration is fundamentally important, underpinning all of the women's recommendations.Conclusion: The challenge of reducing the cycle of repeated incarceration for women will require a concerted collaborative effort using creative endeavors that bring the knowledge and experience of the women together with key players who can influence change at both the individual and the systemic levels

Nobody's Child: The Role of Trauma and Interpersonal Violence in Women's Pathways to Incarceration and Resultant Service Needs

With the rate of women's incarceration significantly outpacing that of men's, combined with the fact that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, there is an urgent need to delineate incarcerated women's pathways to crime and subsequent service needs. This article reports findings of modified participant observation and qualitative research conducted from 2008 to 2010 with women incarcerated in a large, county jail in North Carolina addressing these issues. Thirty life history interviews, nine focus groups, and 60 questionnaires reveal the centrality of trauma, particularly in the form of interpersonal violence (i.e., sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse in adulthood and/or childhood), in incarcerated women's lives. In the absence of positive resources (e.g., counseling, family/friend support), women's attempts to cope with trauma increase their risks for incarceration as well as further trauma. In addition to providing trauma-based treatment, decreasing women's recidivism requires macro-level examinations of policies that marginalize women economically and socially.

The Value of “Silence” in the Lives of Postincarcerated Women

The increase in the female inmate population in the United States has brought attention to issues related to women's incarceration. Due to a host of reasons—some personal, some based on society's view of female inmates—many women find it challenging to speak about their experiences prior, during, and after their incarceration. This article explores the challenges postincarcerated women face as they engage the process of speaking their stories into life. The participants' stories suggest silence as a necessary, valuable, and protective strategy for women who are living through a process of reconnecting with themselves, their families, and their communities.

Confronting Student Prejudice with "Mario Kart" Nintendo Wii*

This paper explores the use of Mario Kart Nintendo Wii as an active learning tool to teach about intergroup conflict as a cause ofprejudice. Participating students were randomly placed into two Mario Kart Nintendo Wii tournaments. Students then competed as team members and ranked personality traits for their team (in-group) and the opposing team (out-group). Discussion of the results focused on the role of competition in creating in-group/out-group biases and how this relates to prejudice. Results from a pre-test/post-test quiz indicated that students understood these concepts more clearly after the tournaments were held. Furthermore, those who participated improved their scores more than those who did not participate in the tournaments. ♦Authorship is alphabetical. Correspondence to: Anna E. Kosloski, Iowa State University, 418 East Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070; Phone: (515) 294 8108; email: kosl002 l@iastate.edu. Bridget K.Welch, Western Illinois University, Morgan Hall 403, Macomb, IL. 61455; Phone: (309) 298-2418; email: BK-Welch@wiu.edu. Anna E. Kosloski is a Doctoral Candidate at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on issues surrounding women's incarceration in the United States. She has taught Introduction to Sociology, Women and Crime, and Social Psychology at Iowa State University. Contact can be directed to her at kosl0021 @iastate.edu. Bridget K. Welch is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Illinois Uni versity. Her research areas are social psychology and race, class and gender. She regularly teaches Introduction to Sociology, Research Methods, and a variety of classes in both social inequalities and social psychology. Contact can be directed to her at bk-welch@wiu.edu. Social Thought & Research, Vol. 31 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.83 on Sat, 22 Oct 2016 06:00:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Social Thought & Research Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank Dwight D. Dake for his help with the technological component of this exercise. They would also like to thank Terry L. Besser for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in the population of women prisoners in Europe, North America and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison construction. This article argues that this new pattern of women's incarceration has been forged by three overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental shift in the role of the state that has occurred as a result of the neo-liberal globalization. The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of what has been labeled a ‘prison industrial complex’ made up of a intricate web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs. These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex. The article calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. The article seeks to reveal the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever increasing numbers.

Zina and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women

From 1998 to 1999, I interviewed women who had been incarcerated under the Zina Ordinance ( zina means illicit sex) in Pakistan. This led me to an examination of women's moral regulation by their families, a process in which I maintain the state is complicit. I argue against relativist explanations of this process, which view Pakistani culture or notions of timeless Islam as the reason for women's incarceration. Instead, I examine the interconnection of morality with the legal/judicial structures, the relationship between the state and patriarchy within families, and the plight of impoverished women in Pakistan within an era of globalization. In my analysis, I link economic development and human rights to globalization and the continuing costs of militarization. Such connections allow feminists to target the structural conditions that sustain the laws in Pakistan and help create an environment that will bring about the repeal of the laws while contributing to trans-national feminist solidarity.

Assessing the Racial Climate in Women's Institutions in the Context of Penal Reform

At the end of the twentieth century women's imprisonment in the United States changed dramatically. Increases in the female inmate population and a move toward gender equity in corrections created a new generation of women's prisons. Women's incarceration today more closely resembles men's in terms of regime and physical structure. In this study, we explore whether these institutional changes are changing women's perceptions of the racial climate of prisons. Using data from two large-scale surveys administered in women's prisons in California and qualitative information from interviews with 70 female inmates, we examine women's perceptions of racial hostility and attitudes about racial conflict in light of their current carceral setting. Our data uncover no evidence of serious racial conflict among female inmates and relatively little variation in racial attitudes across institutional contexts. We discuss the significance of these findings in terms of the current discourse on penal change and women's imprisonment.

Counting the Drug War's Female Casualties

This article examines national drug policies through the lens of gender. One of the consequences of current drug policies, which focus almost exclusively on punishment, is that women's incarceration rates have risen astronomically and at even higher rates than those of men. A closer look at the underlying factual scenarios of many of these cases reveals that a high percentage of incarcerated women are non-violent first-time offenders who were peripherally involved in drug activity, frequently through a relationship with a principally involved man. Yet most sentencing schemes, including the federal system, enacted during the height of the war on drugs provide limited discretion to adjust for this reality. Women in a relationship with a person engaged in drug activity may suffer penalties not only through accomplice liability but also through the implementation of constructive possession doctrines. Even in the absence of criminal activity, a woman involved with a drug offender may suffer eviction, forfeiture, and the imposition of a greater disproportion of family responsibilities under increasingly harsh conditions. Women incarcerated for drug offenses are disproportionately the primary caretakers, and often the sole caretakers, of children. Many sentencing schemes, including the federal sentencing guidelines, limit consideration of family circumstances. In light of these realities, incarcerated women experience considerable psychological trauma around issues of bonding, separation, and parenting, yet they receive few services directed to these issues. Consequently, incarceration may carry different meanings for inmates who are primary caretakers of children - a disproportionately female category - than for those who are not primary caretakers. By elaborating many contexts in which drug war policies have affected women's lives, this article provides an illustration of the mechanisms by which ostensibly gender neutral policies can become instruments of gender bias. Underlying this project is the hope that by counting the particular hardships that the drug war has visited on women, their suffering will begin to count in the minds of policymakers positioned to ameliorate it.