Doing Gender as Self-Improvement: An Exploration of How Incarcerated Men and Women Interpret the Advice From Prison Employees

Abstract

In this article, we use interview data (n = 383) to evaluate how male and female inmates perceive the help they receive from prison staff members. Men were more likely to claim that staff members help them gain real-world job and educational skills while women claim that staff members made them see the error of their ways and push them to self-improve while in prison. We find that inmates are aligning their personal transformations in prison along gender lines and this may fail to help these incarcerated women prepare for the economic realities of the reentry process.