How Formerly Incarcerated Women Confront the Limits of Caring and the Burdens of Control Amid California’s Carceral Realignment

Abstract

The largest scale effort to reduce our reliance on incarceration is currently taking place in California. Drawing on in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women on two different forms of community supervision in one California county, this article makes two main contributions. First, I offer a conceptual framework for understanding how women experience the goals of community supervision. Because actual rehabilitation is often off-limits, I suggest that these institutional goals are organized around caring, control, and self-governance: Caring is exhibited by supervision officers in lieu of substantive assistance toward rehabilitation; control for the sake of public safety remains a key aim of community supervision; and self-governance is an unstated institutional goal through which women are forced to take on the invisible work of managing their own rehabilitation. Second, I assess how—if at all—California’s decarceration effort has shifted institutional goals, and what this means for women. I argue that decarceration’s continued emphasis on control for the sake of public safety impedes the transformative potential of efforts to restructure the crime-processing system.