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Review of In Search of Safety

Crit Crim DOI 10.1007/s10612-017-9371-x BOOK REVIEW Owen, Barbara, Wells, James and Pollock, Joycelyn: In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women’s Imprisonment University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2017, 260 pp., ISBN: 978520288720 Walter S. DeKeseredy1  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 At the outset of their book, In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women’s Imprisonment, the authors (Barbara Owen, James Wells and Jocelyn Pollock) correctly point out that, ‘‘When most people think about prison, they think about men’’ (p. 1). This is due, in large part, to the fact that men make up the bulk of the world’s prison population. Of course, too, with some exception, the popular media focuses primarily on males behind bars, which is another contributing factor. Yet, criminology must also be held partially responsible because most of the scholarly books and journal articles on incarceration produced by our colleagues conspicuously overlook the plight of women behind bars. Thus, Owen, Wells and Pollock’s scholarly monograph is a much-needed major contribution to the field. Guided by the concepts of pathways, gender-inequality, intersectionality, community, capital, prison culture, human rights, and state-sponsored suffering, the authors attempt to describe women’s prison experiences. Owen and her co-authors devote special attention to documenting how female inmates handle challenges to their safety by developing various forms of prison capital. The authors define capital as: any type of resource, or access to a desired resource, that can keep a woman safe while she does her time. In addition to prison forms of social capital (who you know) and human capital (what you know), other specific expressions of cultural, emotional, and economic capital provide the foundation for the search for safety as women do their time (p. 2). Theoretically and conceptually sophisticated, this book presents important data on searching for safety through prison capital and other issues derived from mixed methods, including prisoner and correctional staff focus groups, staff interviews, content analysis of & Walter S. DeKeseredy [email protected] 1 West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA 123 W. S. DeKeseredy prisoner letters received by Just Detention International (an international health and human rights organization dedicated to ending sexual abuse in detention centers), and survey data gleaned from over four thousand female prisoners in 15 federal, state, county, and private penal institutions spread across the United States. Despite this wealth of data, the reader is not overwhelmed, and the voices of female prisoners are prioritized throughout the book. What is more, Owen and her co-authors do not pathologize the women featured in their work. Rather, their offering merges a structural critique with a human rights approach to incarceration. What becomes quickly evident for those unfamiliar with the lives of female inmates is that intersectional inequalities and historical and structural trauma led them to prison—inequalities that continue to manifest themselves within jails and prisons. As Chapter 4 reveals, women’s prison culture reflects and responds to gendered inequalities. As Owen and her colleagues put it, ‘‘Prison culture mediates these inequities by mapping cultural routes to survival and safety while at the same time creating the potential for risk and danger’’ (p. 17). There are various threats to female prisoners’ safety, such as verbal abuse from staff, but it may surprise many readers, as it did Owen and her co-authors, that many of the women who participated in the research described relatively low levels of perceived physical and sexual violence in their housing units. Instead, issues related to cleanliness, disease, and medical care were primary threats to their safety. Essentially, for many of the incarcerated women, ‘‘safety’’ was not just ‘‘the absence of violence and harm,’’ but something more: ‘‘the state of being protected from harm, danger, and other threats; and the product of having one’s needs met’’ (p. 68). Chapter 3 documents how women use gendered types of human, economic, social, and cultural capital to help them seek safety. We learn that in order to stay safe: women must find ways to reduce their vulnerabilities to every member of the prison community by developing prison capital as protection. Some women leverage free world capital to build safe lives inside; other women actively seek out ways to improve themselves and their conditions while locked up; still others develop prison capital by becoming big ballers on the yard, claiming their place in the prison world through aggression (pp. 91–92). While seeking safety is the central theme of Owen and her co-authors’ work, their book provides key insights into other issues, such as key differences between male and female prisons. For example, they show that female prisons do not spawn and sustain the same types of violence situated in male institutions. Moreover, as they note in Chapter 2, female prisoners are more likely than their male counterparts to have substance abuse and mental health problems, and to experience other serious health problems. It is not individual pathologies, then, that lead women to prison, but rather gendered inequalities that exist in the outside world. In Search of Safety speaks to me on many levels and my copy is filled with margin notes and many pages are dog-eared. This, according to my good friend and colleague, Renzetti (1997), is ‘‘usually the sign of a very good book—good not only because it makes an interesting read but, more important, because it is useful.’’ I strongly encourage colleagues who teach criminology and criminal justice courses to adopt this book because it covers a broad range of topics related to female incarceration; students will find it to be a valuable resource. It certainly is for me and I will recommend it highly to my senior undergraduate and graduate students. A word of warning, however, is necessary. This book is likely to anger many readers and mobilize them to join the struggle to abolish prisons. Indeed, they should be angry, 123 Owen, Barbara, Wells, James and Pollock, Joycelyn: In… given the ‘‘unnecessary suffering’’ described by the women who participated in the authors’ studies. Consider what one respondent revealed: People here have skin rashes, toothaches, and allergy problems. When you in a lot of pain, it makes people want to fight. It makes you have a spoiled temper. I almost got into an argument because I had pus sores on my legs. This girl in my cell kept telling me I was nasty. Eventually I will fight if you keep talking trash to me (p. 81). To make matters worse, as stated by numerous respondents, many staff ‘‘just don’t care.’’ What, then, is to be done? In Chapter 7, Owen and her co-authors assert that harms caused by imprisonment should be framed as violating the human rights of female prisoners set out in the United Nations minimum standards and norms for criminal justice. More specifically, they call for the reducing the number of people in prison and bringing a human rights approach based on ‘‘the inherent dignity and worth of incarcerated persons’’ into American penal institutions (p. 170). It is beyond the scope of this review to document all that is described in Chapter 7, but I would be remiss if I did not state that the authors provide a sound rationale for their proposed solutions, and they are likely to be applauded by many critical criminologists exposed to them. One has to wonder, though, in this current era, is America ready for the authors’ ‘‘way forward’’ via a human rights approach? I doubt it and my pessimism is based on the radical neo-liberal policies and laws proposed by the Trump Administration at the time of writing this review (July 2017). One prime example is the elimination of the Obama Administration’s August 2016 order to phase out private prisons. Despite such setbacks and the challenges we face, we should not sit quietly and simply hope that things will change after the next federal election. If critical criminologists and other groups with similar goals do not stay focused and remain committed to promoting progressive policies like those advanced by Owen and her co-authors, many individuals, families and communities will continue to suffer from the harms powerfully described by these authors. As Currie (1993) reminds us, ‘‘We have tried moral exhortation. We have tried neglect. We have tried punishment. We have even, more grudgingly, tried treatment. We have tried everything but improving lives’’ (p. 332). References Currie, E. (1993). Reckoning: Drugs, the cities, and the American future. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Renzetti, C. M. (1997). Foreword. In M. D. Schwartz & W. S. DeKeseredy (Eds.), Sexual assault on the college campus: The role of male peer support (pp. vii–xiii). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 123