In the Shadow of Prison

Cullompton : Willan ( 2008 ) 210pp. £62.00hb ISBN 978-1-84392-246-9 £24.99pb ISBN 978-1-843 92-246-2 Chicago : University of Chicago Press ( 2008 ) 262pp. £28.50hb ISBN 978-0-226-11462-7 £11.50pb ISBN 978-0-226-11463-5 In the current era of mass imprisonment when between 2.5 million and 6.5 million women in the US experience the imprisonment of their partners each year, and, in England and Wales, around 1% of children aged under 18 years have a parent in prison, it is lamentable that most discussions of prisoners' families are restricted to either the benefits of wives in facilitating men's desistance from crime or to parental imprisonment as a risk factor for child delinquency. Helen Codd's In the Shadow of Prison and Megan Comfort's Doing Time Together are a welcome departure from such narrow and depersonalised depictions of prisoners' families. Chapter 1 of Codd's book charts the social and penal context which has led to the exponential growth in imprisonment, and consequently the number of prisoners' kin affected by the incarceration of their menfolk. In the following two chapters Codd focuses attention on the one hand to the neglect of prisoners' families in both policy and research and, on the other, to a tendency to co-opt wives and partners as resettlement and desistance facilitators (particularly important given the diminished resources of the probation service). Evidence regarding the substantial pains of imprisonment suffered by family members, including debt and ‘courtesy stigma’ (Goffman 1963), as well as the (complex and contested) effects of parental imprisonment on children's future criminality are reviewed in Chapter 3. For this reader the fourth chapter, a socio-legal analysis of strip-searching prison visitors, contact between imprisoned parents and their children and the right to procreate, was the most interesting, debating, as it does, the human rights of disallowing ‘unfit’ individuals (both long-term prisoners and the women who choose to be their partners) the right of parenthood. The specific pains of imprisonment for women are the topic of Chapter 5, which repeatedly highlights the absence of a male equivalent of ‘standing by your man’, and, indeed, your children: the emotional and financial burden of caring for the children of imprisoned mothers is shouldered overwhelmingly by other female relatives. The remainder of the book provides a useful overview of British sources of support for prisoners' families, arguing that such services, while important, are no substitute for a critique of imprisonment itself. Whilst the book is let down somewhat by repetition of research studies and by numerous typographical errors, In the Shadow of Prison is, nonetheless, a useful introduction to the policy and legal issues faced by prisoners' wives, partners and children. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison by Megan Comfort, an outstanding ethnographic study of wives' and girlfriends' interactions with their incarcerated menfolk in San Quentin State Prison, California, portrays a complex, and sometimes contradictory, picture of the effects of ‘doing time together’ on women's domestic and romantic lives in the ‘free’ world. Comfort sets out the theoretical framework of the book in Chapter 1, introducing, following Clemmer (1958), the concept of ‘secondary prisonization’– namely that the personal and domestic lives of women with incarcerated partners are subject to extensive regulation within, and beyond, the prison walls, the institution serving to govern female partners' romantic and sexual relationships, their personal and financial investment in sustaining relationships with their mates, as well as regulating their bodies within the carceral sphere. Chapter 2 vividly documents women visitors' time spent, as ‘quasi inmates’, in ‘the Tube’– a long, concrete ‘desolate drab hallway’ at the boundary between the outside world and the prison visitor ‘processing area’, where women spend lengthy and unpredictable periods of time on up to four days each week waiting to visit their partners. Inter-partner communication and the enacting of domesticity and ‘private' life within the prison walls are the subjects of Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. Ironically, in spite of the substantial burden of sending parcels and receiving ’phone calls for women who are frequently already financially impoverished, by providing such incentives, women's aid (and finance) the smooth-running of the prison by encouraging men's compliance and docility on the inside. Furthermore, their labours serve as a means of gaining power and control over their men, which, in turn, creates profound ambivalence about their partner's confinement: the ‘heightened passion’ of enforced separation and the frequent articulations of devotion by incarcerated men reliant on the ‘treats’ their women provide often compare extremely favourably with their troubled conjugal relations on the outside, which are commonly characterised by sullenness, absence, domestic abuse and hardship. This contrast is well illustrated in the fifth and final substantive chapter of the book, which documents the women's personal lives away from the prison. As Comfort elucidates: ‘contending with an ex-felon who is struggling to find work, control a drug habit, avoid the temptations of the street, and subdue his violent temper is “totally different” from interacting with this man when he is housed, fed, and restrained by the penitentiary’ (p.75). The most shocking message of this highly-engaging and certain future classic book is that, rather than an option of last resort, criminal justice intervention (and imprisonment, in particular) is the only remaining, well-funded and reliable source of support in the lives of the American poor. As Keisha, one interviewee, puts it: ‘The po-lice can be a real asshole, but then, when you need 'em, they do be there’ (p.196). The prison can also provide safety and sanctuary to prisoners' female partners, but at the cost – to a massive population of legally ‘free’ women – of submitting to intrusive methods of surveillance, control and degradation

Context (archaeology · Criminal justice · Criminology · Imprisonment · Prison · Psychoanalysis · Recidivism · Shadow (psychology · Sociology · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · History · Homelessness and Social Issues · Psychology

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