Editor's introduction

Abstract

The United States is a carceral society. This is a well-known fact, which has received renewed currency in light of the 2016 presidential election, and debate over the impact of the Clinton-era crime bill. Most of the scholarly writing on this issue is in areas such as criminology, employing quantitative and aggregative methods. Here, Susan Dewey and Rhett Epler undertake a survey of recent ethnographic literature on incarcerated women, including work by such women themselves. Ethnography, including auto-ethnography, makes the lives of these women legible to those of us on the outside, shedding light on the cultures that arise in these extraordinary circumstances. One thing that we see quite clearly is the intersectionality of different subaltern and minority statuses: race and sexual orientation, as well as femininity itself. One thing that is clear in most of these cases is that prison was a nearly pre-ordained outcome of lives lived in uncertain, impoverished, and violent circumstances. One female inmate stated simply that prison was the safest place she had ever lived. Also under consideration are carceral institutions other than prisons, especially clinics and “halfway houses.” These represent an attempt to provide women a means of re-entering society successfully. Notably, both of the essay’s authors have experience working in such a setting. The literature under consideration offers a range of perspectives on such institutions, including quite critical ones. Of course, we do not expect ethnographies to offer readymade policy recommendations. Nonetheless, with such a large portion of the U.S. population experiencing some form of incarceration or supervision, ethnography is the best tool to understand what is happening from various perspectives, most importantly that of the inmates themselves.