Abstract
What is it like to serve a life sentence inside the U.S. corrections system? Curiosities abound about prison culture, relationships, violence, food, illness, aging, programing, and hustles. In this ethnographic autobiography, A Woman Doing Life: Notes From a Prison for Women, Erin George shares her knowledge about these topics based on her experiences in jail and later at a Virginia state prison where she is serving a life sentence. Her portrayal of the correctional system, and the people who live and work there, including herself, is well written and engaging. Attention to detail and the inclusion of a wide range of stories, drawn from her own experiences and her peers, offer a comprehensive glimpse of incarcerated lives. George shares generously with the reader—whether recounting her first long drive to the prison along the winding country roads of her youth, describing her children’s visits, or detailing harrowing medical experiences with cancer, her story is consistently personal, heartfelt, and brave.
Given the intimacy of this book, it is not surprising that the author’s partiality surfaces. In the preface of the book, George states that her “main concern was that I exclude any bias,” including anti-prison sentiment or self-promotion (p. vi). However, as social scientists can attest, this type of objectivity is virtually impossible in narrative and ethnographic work. While telling her story, George continually positions herself as a good prisoner, following rules, working hard, attending to her parents, and accepting her fate. At the same time, the story is peppered with judgments about others and misinformation. For example, she vilifies the men confined to the supermax, repeatedly dismisses same-sex relationships as gratuitous, and suggests that “full-blown AIDS” is contagious. Her anger toward women who return to prison after being released is palpable. As stated earlier, the book is consistently personal, heartfelt, and brave, and these expressions reflect this character. George’s willingness to openly share her opinions and perceptions about herself and others creates a complicated portrayal that can inform social work practice and research. The book makes clear that Erin George is a person, like all of us: proud, imperfect, judgmental, scared, and powerful.
The weakest parts of the book come not from George but from her editorial team which has inserted their own narratives in and around her story. These embellishments add little to the book and distract from the book’s central contribution: George’s own description of her prison life. Robert Johnson provides a brief introduction to each chapter that interrupts the narrative flow of George’s writing. These brief snippets, meant to position her narrative within existing research, repeatedly cite Johnson’s own work and are not necessary to understanding her writing. The Afterword, written by Alison Martin and Jocelyn Pollock, offers another stab at the existing literature and research about incarcerated women. While the positioning of this essay at the end of the book is less disruptive, the authors’ focus on the deficits of the prison population stands in stark contrast to George’s more nuanced depictions of incarcerated women and correctional staff. The supplemental materials written by George, including her poems, a prison glossary, and a collection of cooking recipes from the inside, are wonderful.
In short, A Woman Doing Life offers the honest voice of a talented writer and observer of the human experience who is living her life behind bars. The book would be a valuable addition to the bookshelf or syllabus of social work practitioners and scholars seeking to build knowledge about prison life. George’s accounts, including her own biases and constructions of self, provoke the reaction and critical thinking that is so important to facilitating class discussion and learning.