How Formerly Incarcerated Women Confront the Limits of Caring and the Burdens of Control Amid California's Carceral Realignment. (January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Welsh, Megan
• Is Part Of: Feminist criminology. Volume 14:Number 1(2019)
• Page Start: 89
• Page End: 114
• Publication Date: 2019-01
• Subjects: decarceration -- parole and probation -- women's incarceration and reentry -- California's Public Safety Realignment; Feminist criminology -- Periodicals; Female offenders -- Periodicals; 364.37405
• DOI: 10.1177/1557085117698751
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1557-0851

Abstract

The largest scale effort to reduce our reliance on incarceration is currently taking place in California. Drawing on in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women on two different forms of community supervision in one California county, this article makes two main contributions. First, I offer a conceptual framework for understanding how women experience the goals of community supervision. Because actual rehabilitation is often off-limits, I suggest that these institutional goals are organized around caring, control, and self-governance: Caring is exhibited by supervision officers in lieu of substantive assistance toward rehabilitation; control for the sake of public safety remains a key aim of community supervision; and self-governance is an unstated institutional goal through which women are forced to take on the invisible work of managing their own rehabilitation. Second, I assess how—if at all—California's decarceration effort has shifted institutional goals, and what this means for women. I argue that decarceration's continued emphasis on control for the sake of public safety impedes the transformative potential of efforts to restructure the crime-processing system.