ABSTRACT
Female Crimes and Jail: The Visitors’ Perspectives
is an attempt to understand the prison visitors’ perspectives on the crimes attributed to imprisoned women and on the places of female confinement. In this ethnography conducted in two female prisons, we note that many of the interlocutors tend to justify the imprisonment of women by linking them to a “thug” partner. There were no mentions to crimes committed for family sustenance, which is out of step with recent literature on female imprisonment. From the narratives, we note that women arrested for similar crimes are placed in prisons with very different means of control and punishment.
Keywords:
jail; women; inmate visitation; crime; punishment