Gender and Prisons

Prison is unquestionably one of the most sex-segregated of all social institutions. From the first incarnations of the carceral project more than two centuries ago, reformers and penologists earnestly turned their attention to the construction of 'Christian gentlemen' and 'respectable ladies'. Vestiges of these projects remain to the present day, though often in radically different forms. Academic work exploring the construction of prison related gender has been a relatively recent development within the last quarter century. Included in this volume are twenty-two key articles exploring prison history, the state and gendered social control, gender and work in prisons and the gendered experience of incarceration. The introductory essay places these areas in the context both of more conventional sociologies of gender (highlighting both masculinities and femininities) and traditional scholarship on the prison, arguing for a return of this increasingly important social institution from the instrumentalist domains of criminal justice to the heart of sociological theorizing on topics of gender and social control.

Contents: Series preface; Introduction. Gender and Prison History: Penitence for the privileged: manhood, race and penitentiaries in early America, Mark E. Kann; Race, gender and prison history: from the convict lease system to the supermax prison, Angela Y. Davis; 'One female prisoner is of more trouble than 20 males': women convicts in Illinois prisons, 1835-1896, L. Mara Dodge; Wretched, hatless and miserably clad: women and the inebriate reformatories from 1900-1913, G. Hunt, J. Mellor and J. Turner; Following the rules? Women's responses to incarceration, New Zealand, 1880-1920, Bronwyn Dalley; Situating sex: prison sexual culture in the mid-20th century United States, Regina G. Kunzel; A brief history of doing time: the California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s, Rosemary Gartner and Candace Kruttschnitt. Gender, the State and Regimes of Control: Prisons that empower: neo-liberal governance in Canadian women's prisons, Kelly Hannah-Moffat; Homeboys, babies, men in suits: the State and the reproduction of male dominance, Lynne Haney; Embodied surveillance and the gendering of punishment, Jill A. McCorkel ; Gender theory and prison sociology: using theories of masculinities to interpret the sociology of prisons for men, Carolyn Newton. Gender and Work in Prison: Gendered organizational logic: policy and practice in men's and women's prisons, Dana M. Britton; Women doing a man's job: female prison officers working in a male prison, Louise Farnsworth ; A man's world: gender issues in working with male sex offenders in prison, Malcolm Cowburn; Cat fights and gang fights: preference for work in a male-dominated organization, Dana M. Britton. Gender and the Experience of Incarceration: Doing her own time? Women's responses to prison in the context of the old and the new penology, Candace Kruttschnitt, Rosemary Gartner and Amy Miller; Tougher than the rest? Men in prison, Joe Sim; Re/constructing black masculinity in prison, M. Nandi; Resistance

Dana M. Britton is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, at Kansas State University, USA.