Breaking Women

Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment

Winner of the 2014 Division of Women and Crime Distinguished Scholar Award presented by the American Society of Criminology

Finalist for the 2013 C. Wright Mills Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Since the 1980s,
when the War on Drugs kicked into high gear and prison populations soared, the
increase in women’s rate of incarceration has steadily outpaced that of men. As
a result, women’s prisons in the US have suffered perhaps the most drastically
from the overcrowding and recurrent budget crises that have plagued the penal
system since harsher drugs laws came into effect. In Breaking Women,
Jill A. McCorkel draws upon four years of on-the-ground research in a major US
women’s prison to uncover why tougher drug policies have so greatly affected
those incarcerated there, and how the very nature of punishment in women’s
detention centers has been deeply altered as a result.

Through
compelling interviews with prisoners and state personnel, McCorkel reveals that
popular so-called “habilitation” drug treatment programs force women to accept
a view of themselves as inherently damaged, aberrant addicts in order to secure
an earlier release. These programs were created as a way to enact stricter
punishments on female drug offenders while remaining sensitive to their
perceived feminine needs for treatment, yet they instead work to enforce
stereotypes of deviancy that ultimately humiliate and degrade the women. The
prisoners are left feeling lost and alienated in the end, and many never truly
address their addiction as the programs’ organizers may have hoped. A
fascinating and yet sobering study, Breaking Women foregrounds the
gendered and racialized assumptions
behind tough-on-crime policies while offering a vivid account of how the
contemporary penal system impacts individual lives.