Abstract
Breaking Women grew out of an ethnographic study by Jill McCorkel of the Project Habilitate Women (PHW). The PHW is a rehabilitation program tested at the fictitious East State Women’s Correctional Institution, a women’s prison located in the southeastern region of the United States. Entering the prison as a member of a university research team charged with evaluating the PHW program, McCorkel remained after the initial program evaluation to conduct formal interviews with prisoners, administrators, staff workers, correctional officers, counselors, state officials, and executives from the Prison Services Company, the developer of the PHW program. McCorkel offers a thought-provoking chronicle of female prisoners who participated in the drug rehabilitation program. Originally designed to study the effects of get-tough policies on women’s prisons that arose during the 1990s, McCorkel’s research morphed into an analysis of the intersection between race, gender, and the new penology.
The PHW was a privately run program that used coercive techniques that degraded, humiliated, and reinforced racial stereotypes against women prisoners of color. PHW methods included intensive confrontational sessions designed to break down the “diseased” self of drug offenders. Women prisoners were told “they” were the problem—not the drugs. McCorkel argues that the program’s concept of the diseased self intersected with the staff’s racist opinions of women prisoners as immoral, unsocialized, hypersexual, and criminogenic. A majority of the women who participated in the study managed to hold on to their identities by either “faking it to make it” or “surrendering to the process” (p. 163). In general, McCorkel found the PHW program left the women more vulnerable, damaged, and worse off than if they had completed their time within the general population, as the PHW participants left prison without an education, trade skills, or the confidence to reenter society. The PHW program has expanded to other prison sites, with its programming replicated across the country. The program remains an essential component of correctional programming in women’s prisons.
A major strength of Breaking Women is the exhaustive methodology that McCorkel developed and implemented in the PHW study. The formal interviews of the primary stakeholders added nuances and information from administrators and staff workers that probably would not have been collected by surveys, which strengthened her analyses. A limitation of the work is the absence of a brief section addressing her method of data analyses. This omission prevents the reader from critically assessing the trustworthiness of the findings.
McCorkel’s book is a welcome addition to the literature because it genderizes the new penology and critiques the usage of the PHW program as a method of penal control. McCorkel successfully argues that a private corporation designed a program that designates women as permanently diseased as a means to expand its reach and benefit financially from the long-term incarceration of women. Academics, educators in social work and criminology, and students interested in the intersection of race, gender, and incarcerated women and the rise of the carceral state will welcome the addition of Breaking Women to their libraries.