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A Brief History of Doing Time: The California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Rosemary Gartner  and
Candace Kruttschnitt
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Abstract

Recent scholarship on penality describes profound changes in the ideology, discourses, and policies shaping criminal punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States. To assess the implications of these changes for those subject to criminal punishment, we examine the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of penality. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the “get tough” era. We find that the ways in which women related and responded to other prisoners, to staff, and to the prison regime, while in some ways specific to one or the other penal era, did not fundamentally change. Thus, penal regimes ostensibly informed by profoundly different rationalities nevertheless structured the daily lives of prisoners through a very similar set of deprivations, restrictions, and assumptions.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 267 - 304
Copyright
© 2004 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research was supported by grant #SBR-9617285 from the National Science Foundation. By sharing the data from their study, David Ward and Gene Kassebaum made this research possible. For their assistance with the collection of the survey and historical data, we thank Robert Nash Parker and the Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies, University of California, Riverside; Julie Beck; and Doreen Anderson-Facile. Mariana Valverde, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, and the current and former editors of the Law & Society Review provided useful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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