This article examines how staff members at a gender-responsive, outpatient reentry center construct women’s criminality and explain treatment outcomes. Staff members acknowledge the structural causes of women’s criminality, yet during the process of rehabilitation this recognition is paradoxically replaced by a discourse of personal responsibility. By employing participant-observation methods and in-depth interviews with staff, this study demonstrates how the center’s use of “alternative” practices and rehabilitative logics serve to disempower and pathologize women’s lives. This research adds to our knowledge of punishment and governance by revealing how neoliberal strategies of self-regulation may take form in gendered, alternative spaces.
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