How Formerly Incarcerated Women Confront the Limits of Caring and the Burdens of Control Amid California's Carceral Realignment

• NCJ Number: 254101
• Journal: Feminist Criminology Volume: 1 Issue: 14 Dated: 2019 Pages: 89-114
• Author(s): Megan Welsh
• Date Published: 2019
• Length: 26 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2013-IJ-CX-0052
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Award: How Women and Front-Line Workers Manage the Bureaucratic Process of Prisoner Reentry

Annotation

Given the current large-scale effort in California to reduce its reliance on incarceration, this study drew on in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women on two different forms of community supervision in one California county to offer a conceptual framework for understanding how women experience the goals of community supervision and to examine what the decarceration shift means for women in the criminal justice system.

Abstract

The proposed conceptual framework reasons that because actual rehabilitation is often off-limits, institutional goals are organized around caring, control, and self-governance; caring is exhibited by supervision officers in lieu of substantive assistance toward rehabilitation; control for the sake of public safety remains a key aim of community supervision; and self-governance is an unstated institutional goal through which women are forced to take on the invisible work of managing their own rehabilitation. The author further argues that decarceration's continued emphasis on control for the sake of public safety impedes the transformative potential of efforts to restructure the crime-processing system. (publisher abstract modified)