Offending Women is an eye-opening journey into the lived reality of prison for women in the United States today. Lynne Haney looks at incarcerated mothers, housed together with their children, who are serving terms in alternative, community-based prisons-a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread. Incorporating vivid, sometimes shocking observations of daily life, she probes the dynamics of power over women’s minds and bodies that play out in two such institutions in California. She finds that these ‘alternative’ prisons, contrary to their aims, often end up disempowering women, transforming their social vulnerabilities into personal pathologies, and pushing them into a state of disentitlement. Uncovering the complex gendered underpinning of methods of control and intervention used in the criminal justice system today,
Offending Women links that system to broader discussions on contemporary government and state power, asks why these strategies have arisen at this particular moment in time, and considers what forms of citizenship they have given rise to.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Ethnographic Journey across States
Part I. In a State of Dependence
1. Limited Government: Training Women What to Need
2. Deconstructing Dependency: Needs, Rights, and the Struggle for Entitlement
3. Hybrid States and Government from a Distance
Part II. In a State of Recovery
4. State Therapeutics: Training Women What to Want
5. The Empowerment Myth: Social Vulnerability as Personal Pathology
6. The Enemies Within: Fighting the Sisters and Numbing the Self
Conclusion: States of Disentitlement and the Therapeutics of Neoliberalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Despre autor
Lynne A. Haney is Professor of Sociology at New York University. She is the author of Inventing the Needy: Gender, Politics, and State Development in Hungary and a coauthor of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (both available from UC Press). She is also the editor of Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context.