Jill McCorkel further extends the implications of such an invisibilized incarceration of black women with her seminal monograph,Breaking Women. She delves into the hidden hallways of prisons, intimately detailing a drug treatment program that was initially tested in one of California's largest women's prisons and that has since been replicated across the United States.
Lynne Haney,author of Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire:
This is the book so many sociologists of punishment, law, and gender have been waiting for. Beautifully written and thoughtfully argued, Breaking Women takes readers inside the U.S. penal system to analyze how its overall structure and concrete practices changed in the era of mass incarceration. Through a captivating and absorbing ethnographic account of a prison drug treatment program for women, the book traces how a particularly gendered mode of punishment emerged to discipline and humiliate women. In this way, McCorkel shows how our images of 'get tough' criminal policies and practices must change to encompass not only the inmate warehousing of overcrowded correctional facilities, but also some of the smaller, 'alternative' programs that reach inside inmates' heads to transform their sense of self.
Hennie Weiss:
The book is an interesting, honest, and uncomplicated read, one that challenges current public views of how to care for inmates and reduce recidivism. The intended audience is foremost students and teachers in the field of sociology, criminology and gender studies, but the book is equally accessible to those interested in the prison system, its effects on women, as well as how programs meant to habilitate women are implemented, along with their rates of success or attrition.
P.S. Leighton:
McCorkel's rich data contains the voices of prisoners and staff, which she skillfully links to larger, generally critical, theoretical perspectives on punishment.
Susan Sered:
McCorkel does a superb job of bringing individual women to life for the reader, while simultaneously developing a strong and always readable theoretical analysis.
Shadd Maruna,author of Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives:
It has been observed that the eclipse of the prison ethnography corresponded almost perfectly with the rise of mass incarceration. This hugely important book shows precisely why we need to reverse both trends. The womens stories that are so vividly captured in this work demonstrate in painful detail that efforts to & break human beings, even if in the name of reform, only succeed at creating more victims.
Lorna Rhodes,author of Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison:
Breaking Women is a remarkable achievement. Jill McCorkel's long-awaited account raises critical questions about the social and psychological consequences of the current trend toward punitive, for-profit 'habilitation.' Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this is prison ethnography at its best
McCorkels work is an invaluable contribution to the examination of the politics of gender and race in the context of privatized correctional treatment. It offers a unique insight and adds to the scarce ethnographic research on womens prisons.
Based on four years of ethnography and more than 100 interviews with PHWs stakeholders,Breaking Womenis an exceptionally well-researched piece of scholarship.McCorkel seamlessly weaves together history, politics, policy, and ethnography to form a complex, yet easy-to-follow, line of argumentation.
Jill McCokels book is wonderful testimony to the power of ethnography to untangle and illuminate the complexities of otherwise hard-to-access social processes. And, despite chilling descriptions of PHW & confrontations, Breaking Women is ultimately satisfying to read because of McCorkels stimulating grasp of the social, political, economic, philosophical, and human rights issues raised by prison regimes that combine close surveillance of the body with brainwashing techniques directed at mind control and a breaking of & self, & spirit, & soul. I strongly recommend Breaking Women to anyone with an interest in ethnography. To everyone interested in justice, human rights and the politics of imprisonment Breaking Women is recommended as essential reading.
