Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment

by Jill A McCorkel

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

Compelling interviews uncover why tough drug policies disproportionately impact women in the American prison system

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Sociology

283 pages, Paperback

First published August 5, 2013

Reviews

[Mya Matteo · Rating 4 out of 5]

well, if you want to be informed and thoroughly depressed about how genuinely cruel women's prisons are in the United States, this is for you.

[Sally Kenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fitting sequel to Pat Carlen, McCorkel's account is simply harrowing, if a bit repetitive.

[Christina Rosso · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really important book about gender, race, and mass incarceration. It will make you rethink everything about our criminal justice system and what rehabilitation really means.

[Sope Kahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really informative about the cycles of violence against women of color after the War on Drugs in the 1970's in collaboration with the welfare cuts, which caused higher incarceration of low-income women of color. This book discusses the history of this "new incarcerated population," who are framed as "mean girls." McCorkel goes into how the prison-industrial complex developed individual "solutions" to the problem of recidivism and overpopulation, which were "habilitation" programs. She describes through her years of studying the program how ineffective their practice was/is, and how it worked to solve the issues of drugs and crime at the individual level, instead of at the systemic level. Instead of realizing the devastating reality of drugs, crime, violence, and survival, the women are taught in these programs to believe that they are the causes of their own problems, and that they are now diseased individuals. It's a difficult read, but really good in order to learn about the history of the prison-industrial complex and it's contemporary effects, especially in relation to low income women of color.

[Eden Ralph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yikes! Super disjointed and hard to read. Really good content but poorly executed. Extremely valid arguments that were argued very poorly. Issue isn’t the content of the book but the way it’s constructed and written. Lots of “i am going to argue…” and then nothing is argued! It feels very odd to write a book that is (generally speaking) not accessible to the women about whom it’s written.

[Mills College Library]

365.6082 M1312 2013

[Maya🐛 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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