Institutional Captives: US Women Trapped in the Medical/Correctional/Welfare Circuit

Based on a five-year ethnographic study of formerly incarcerated Massachusetts women, this paper explores interconnections among the penal, welfare and healthcare bureaucratic institutions in the United States. The authors use the term ‘institutional captivity’ to describe the experiences of women trapped in a circuit made up of battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, prisons, jails, probation, parole, rehabilitation facilities, detoxification facilities, clinics, respite care, hospitals, welfare offices, food stamp and Women Infant & Children offices, psychiatric units, child welfare offices, family court, drug courts, public housing, sober houses, recovery meetings and parenting classes. These interlocking institutions frame public policies and personal lives. Despite ostensibly different mandates, all preach and reinforce a cultural ethos that individualises suffering rather than recognising the institutionalised and gendered patterns of these women’s life experience. Their shared ideology casts women as victims while simultaneously holding women responsible for their own victimisation. Representative of the larger sample, the stories of two women who navigate the institutional circuit serve to illustrate the larger bureaucratic and gendered social issues addressed in the paper.