Abstract
Reflecting on research following formerly incarcerated Massachusetts women for more than a decade, this paper questions whether conventional understandings of recidivism and desistance are meaningful frames for understanding women’s life trajectories. Drawing on our ongoing ethnographic work we argue that conventional measures of recidivism and desistance tend to (1) overstate the significance of distinctions between licit and illicit behavior—especially for women, (2) undervalue macro/structural and institutionalized barriers to stable housing and employment, (3) overly focus on individual choices and narratives in contexts where freedoms are constrained by structural and institutional policies and practices, (4) overlook the risks and erratic nature of daily and family life for women and other vulnerable, marginalized and poorly-resourced populations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 165-190 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Feminist Criminology |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2020.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for the study was provided by the Suffolk University summer stipend program and the Massachuetts Bay Transportation Authority. We wish to thank the Massachusetts women who generously shared their experiences and ideas with us over the past decade. In all of our writing we endeavor to tell the stories that they ask us to put out into the world. We also wish to thank our colleagues and friends who read versions of this manuscript and offered invaluable guidance as we tried to organize an enormous amount of material into a meaningful format. In particular we thank Fergus McNeill, Stephen Farrall, Rebecca Stone, Lucious Couloute, Bianca Bersani, Stephanie Bensadoun, Tilbe Altin, and Feminist Criminology editor-in-chief Kristy Holtfreter. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for the study was provided by the Suffolk University summer stipend program and the Massachuetts Bay Transportation Authority.
| Funders |
|---|
| Feminist Criminology editor-in-chief Kristy Holtfreter |
| Massachuetts Bay Transportation Authority |
| Suffolk University |
Keywords
- ethnographic research
- reentry from prison to community
- social constructions of female deviance
- women’s desistance
- women’s reentry
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