a profile of each of california's thirty-three state prisons is provided on the California Department of Corrections (CDC) website, and each profile includes a brief “Institution Mission Summary.” The mission summary for the California Institution for Women (CIW) reads as follows:

The “Special Historical Note” that follows this summary and concludes CIW's profile highlights the prison's link to an earlier, more explicitly gendered penological era:

The “Institution Mission Summary” for Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW), in contrast, is readily interpretable as representing a very different penological era, an era in which “system management, resource allocation, cost-benefit calculation, and organizational efficiency” (Garland, 1995: 190) are the predominant goals. It reads:

to this point, our analysis of women's imprisonment in California has concentrated on how temporal and institutional factors shape prisoners' responses to their carceral environments. We found that both factors are important. The California Institution for Women (CIW) in the 1990s had only partial success in translating the goals of the new punitive era to its inhabitants largely because of its tenure and legacy in California's imprisonment history; but at Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW), an institution whose tenure began in the 1990s, the effects of the recent transformations in penalty are clearly more discernable. In this final chapter, we consider the extent to which the kinds of institutional distinctions we have drawn remain important for how women do time once we take into account women's personal attributes and life experiences. To do this, we expand our analysis, which to this point has largely relied on interviews, to incorporate information we obtained from our respondents to the surveys we administered. We develop a measure of, or operationalize the concept of, “doing time” by using latent class analysis. While less nuanced than our previous analyses, in what follows we hope to provide both a more representative picture of how women do time in the 1990s and a more complete description of the factors that help to determine their different responses to imprisonment.

this book describes a study of women's imprisonment in California in the early 1960s and the late 1990s, bridging a period that many scholars argue encompasses some of the most significant changes in penal policy during the last century. Although punishment in general and prisons as a central site of state punishment have long been subjects of both popular fascination and debate in democractic societies, this has been particularly true of the last few decades (see e.g., Beckett 1997; Garland 2001; Pratt 2002). In the United States, this period witnessed the fading of the rehabilitative ideal and the attendant view of the deviant as a product of poor socialization; the politicalization of crime – or what Simon (1997) calls “governing through crime” – and the widening of the criminal justice net to include not only a correctional apparatus anchored in community settings but also increasingly severe custodial sanctions (Bottoms 1983; Cohen 1985). While debate continues as to the precise nature and causes of these transformations in state control, and the most effective way of capturing or understanding these developments (Garland 2003), there is a consensus among scholars that the landscape of criminal punishment was very different at the end of the twentieth century than it had been only four decades earlier.

These changes, both in policy and in practice, have had profound consequences for female offenders.

Three

our description of the political, demographic, and crime trends in California from the early 1960s to the late 1990s provides a framework not only for understanding how the experience of imprisonment may have changed over time but also for understanding how, and under what conditions, prison research occurs today. While the expansion of the crime control industry spawned a new generation of prisons and enough offenders to exceed their capacity, populist crime policies left criminologists and other social policy experts largely on the sidelines (Zimring et al. 2001; Simon and Feeley 2003). Simon (2000: 285) provides a particularly lucid discussion of how “the pathways of knowledge that made the experience of incarceration” visible during the 1950s and 1960s – what, as we have noted, he refers to as the golden age of U.S. prison sociology – have largely disappeared. As a result, researchers are now notably absent from penal institutions in the United States perhaps because, as some have argued, their expertise is seen as less relevant and their work “is virtually all political risk for prison administrators” (Simon 2000: 303). With this in mind, this chapter describes the explicit and implicit connections between Ward and Kassebaum's study of the California Institution for Women (CIW) in the early 1960s and our work there, and at Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW), over thirty years later.

When we embarked on this study, we thought our methodology was relatively well laid out.

the august/september 1964 issue of the clarion, the prisoners' newsletter published through the California Institution for Women's (CIW) educational department “as a medium of self-expression and communication,” reprinted a local newspaper story entitled “Mrs. Dianne Feinstein: Housewife with a Cause” (Bushman, 1964). It is worth quoting from the story at some length for the sense it provides of penal practice and philosophy at CIW as well as notions about women's roles in the early 1960s.

the post–world war II period was a time of reform and innovation in the California criminal justice system. Optimism about the system's ability to remold offenders through novel rehabilitative programs and therapeutic regimens was widespread, encouraged by the state's booming economy and its self-image as “America's laboratory for social change” (Cross 1968: 110). Through the 1960s and into the 1970s that optimism was sustained even in the face of rising crime rates, social unrest, and an economic slowdown. But by the late 1970s, California had embarked on a series of legislative initiatives that marked the beginning of an “era of hyper-incarceration” (Simon 2000) in the state. These initiatives gained momentum over the next fifteen years as public faith in the government's ability to deal with social problems declined, the disparity between rich and poor expanded, and the state's population grew increasingly more diverse ethnically and racially.

In this chapter we consider how these political, economic, and social changes shaped women's crimes and criminal punishment in California. We describe how female criminals, traditionally seen as less culpable and more redeemable than their male counterparts, were caught up in the state's expanding crime control complex. To do this, we first provide an overview of trends both in criminal justice policies and in public attitudes toward crime and criminals in California during the last four decades of the twentieth century; and we consider the larger demographic, economic, and social context within which these trends occurred.

in the fall of 1998, shortly after we completed our field research, Amnesty International singled Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW) out for a visit during its investigation of human rights violations in women's prisons. A year later, thousands of television viewers were introduced to VSPW through American Broadcasting Company's (ABC) six-part Nightline series on women in prison. As part of that series, Ted Koppel interviewed the prison's chief medical officer, Dr. Anthony DiDomenico, who commented that prisoners at VSPW liked having pelvic exams because “it's the only male contact they have.” When DiDomenico was relieved of his duties shortly after the interview, VSPW's fame spread even further as newspapers across the United States and Canada picked up the story. The image conveyed by this publicity was of a massive, overcrowded and underresourced institution where sexual abuse and medical maltreatment of prisoners were commonplace. But while that image might grab public attention and describe some aspects of prison life at VSPW, it simplifies a much more complex picture. The experience of imprisonment at VSPW, the epitome of the neoliberal era prison, also incorporates elements of other penal regimes and political eras. The “intertwining of established and emergent structures” (Garland 2001: 168) of imprisonment can be seen in the continuing abuse and neglect of women prisoners and in the recent and dramatic increase in the numbers of women subject to long periods of carceral control.

To protect the anonymity of the interviewees, we have assigned a pseudonym to each woman and provided only limited information about each of them. For some of the women interviewed by Ward and Kassebaum, very little personal information was available.

Women Interviewed by Ward and Kassebaum at CIW in the early 1960s

April had been at CIW for three weeks after spending two months in jail. She was serving a twenty-year sentence for manslaughter; she stabbed a man, probably her boyfriend or husband, to death. Before this commitment, she had served jail time on drunk and disorderly charges. The interviewer notes she had lived “under authority” in a state mental hospital.

Barbara was an eighteen-year-old who had been transferred to CIW from a youth facility because she was “unmanageable” and had escaped once. Although she admits to having committed a number of felonies, she did not have a felony conviction. The interviewer notes that Barbara had been in and out of jail and girls' schools for seven years. She was interviewed after only one week at CIW.

Corinne had served one year at CIW on a conviction for grand theft and forgery. A representative on the inmate council, she had been a truck driver before coming to prison. Corinne, white, was twenty-seven years old, and had children. She had dropped out of high school before finishing tenth grade.

Doris was a regular user of marijuana and pills on the outside, which got her into trouble with the law. She had been in prison before, and her criminal record included three prior felony convictions. She told the interviewer that she had attempted suicide twice before when she was not in prison, the most recent attempt five years ago. Raped at age sixteen by her mother's boyfriend, she had been married once, but only for a week. She referred to herself as bisexual. She was interviewed a second time after she returned to prison on parole violation.