Breaking Women is an ethnography piece by Jill McCorkel that speaks of how prisons changes over time given the War on Drugs movement, but she just doesn’t talk about men prisons. She talks about women prisons. She also mentions how race and gender affect the encounters women have in prison.
The book starts off with McCorkel talking of how prisons use to be. Women prisons aimed to treat their prisoners rather than to punish them (McCorkel 3). Over time they started to see that women are committing the same crimes men are committing (drug related crime), so they started to crack down on punishment by establishing polices like minimum sentences, expanded use of the death penalty, and the three strike law (McCorkel 6). The prison she visits is called Project Habilitate Women which is a habilitation prison. She claims that these habilitation prisons actually don’t help the women in prison, but instead break them down. They drill into their head that a crime “possesses a self” and “the person is the problem” (McCorkel 86). They try to convince the women who sign up for this program that they are damaged. In order to fix this “self” the prison tries to habilitate the woman’s self. They try to treat the woman’s problem while also trying to maintain their “feminine needs”. As you can image, a lot of women didn’t …show more content…
This habilitation program shouldn’t be framed around something so objective as “self”. It leaves the prisoners feeling lost and confused and that doesn’t help the women with their drug problem. If anything, it makes it worst. By blaming the women for everything that has happen to them in their life (there drug problem, their violent nature, them getting arrested etc.) and not looking at everything that underlines why they did what they did (SES, environmental factors, policies, etc.). If prisons want to actually help these women, they need to shy away from habilitation and go towards
The book starts off with McCorkel talking of how prisons use to be. Women prisons aimed to treat their prisoners rather than to punish them (McCorkel 3). Over time they started to see that women are committing the same crimes men are committing (drug related crime), so they started to crack down on punishment by establishing polices like minimum sentences, expanded use of the death penalty, and the three strike law (McCorkel 6). The prison she visits is called Project Habilitate Women which is a habilitation prison. She claims that these habilitation prisons actually don’t help the women in prison, but instead break them down. They drill into their head that a crime “possesses a self” and “the person is the problem” (McCorkel 86). They try to convince the women who sign up for this program that they are damaged. In order to fix this “self” the prison tries to habilitate the woman’s self. They try to treat the woman’s problem while also trying to maintain their “feminine needs”. As you can image, a lot of women didn’t …show more content…
This habilitation program shouldn’t be framed around something so objective as “self”. It leaves the prisoners feeling lost and confused and that doesn’t help the women with their drug problem. If anything, it makes it worst. By blaming the women for everything that has happen to them in their life (there drug problem, their violent nature, them getting arrested etc.) and not looking at everything that underlines why they did what they did (SES, environmental factors, policies, etc.). If prisons want to actually help these women, they need to shy away from habilitation and go towards