Offending Womenis an eye-opening journey into the lived reality of prison for women in the United States today. Lynne Haney looks at incarcerated mothers, housed together with their children, who are ...serving terms in alternative, community-based prisons-a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread. Incorporating vivid, sometimes shocking observations of daily life, she probes the dynamics of power over women's minds and bodies that play out in two such institutions in California. She finds that these "alternative" prisons, contrary to their aims, often end up disempowering women, transforming their social vulnerabilities into personal pathologies, and pushing them into a state of disentitlement. Uncovering the complex gendered underpinning of methods of control and intervention used in the criminal justice system today,Offending Womenlinks that system to broader discussions on contemporary government and state power, asks why these strategies have arisen at this particular moment in time, and considers what forms of citizenship they have given rise to.
Inventing the Needyoffers a powerful, innovative analysis of welfare policies and practices in Hungary from 1948 to the last decade of the twentieth century. Using a compelling mix of archival, ...interview, and ethnographic data, Lynne Haney shows that three distinct welfare regimes succeeded one another during that period and that they were based on divergent conceptions of need. The welfare society of 1948-1968 targeted social institutions, the maternalist welfare state of 1968-1985 targeted social groups, and the liberal welfare state of 1985-1996 targeted impoverished individuals. Because they reflected contrasting conceptions of gender and of state-recognized identities, these three regimes resulted in dramatically different lived experiences of welfare. Haney's approach bridges the gaps in scholarship that frequently separate past and present, ideology and reality, and state policies and local practices. A wealth of case histories gleaned from the archives of welfare institutions brings to life the interactions between caseworkers and clients and the ways they changed over time. In one of her most provocative findings, Haney argues that female clients' ability to use the state to protect themselves in everyday life diminished over the fifty-year period. As the welfare system moved away from linking entitlement to clients' social contributions and toward their material deprivation, the welfare system, and those associated with it, became increasingly stigmatized and pathologized. With its focus on shifting inventions of the needy, this broad historical ethnography brings new insights to the study of welfare state theory and politics.
Incarcerated Fatherhood Haney, Lynne
The American journal of sociology,
07/2018, Letnik:
124, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
With evidence comprising three years of ethnographic research in child support courts and 125 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers, the author shows how criminal justice and child ...support provisions work in tandem to create complicated entanglements for fathers. She develops the concept of incarcerated fatherhood—a matrix of laws, policies, and institutional practices that shape formerly incarcerated men’s relationship to parenting. On the one hand, she analyzes the debt of imprisonment, or the material costs of paternal incarceration; on the other, she examines the imprisonment of debt, or the punitive costs of child support debt. She then brings these two entanglements together to analyze their effects on men’s lives as fathers. Instead of “piling up” in men’s lives, these entanglements work in circular ways to form feedback loops of disadvantage that create serious obstacles for men as parents and complicate precisely those relationships proven essential for reintegration after prison: familial relations of care, reciprocity, and interdependence.
This article explores the politics and practices of labor in two penal institutions for women: a maximum security facility for women in Hungary and a community‐based facility for women in California. ...Diverging from other accounts of imprisonment that tend to operate at either the individual or macroeconomic level, this article analyzes the concrete institutional relations of prison and complicates the assumption that they simply reflect the logic of the prison‐industrial complex. Based on years of ethnographic work in two very different penal systems, I describe variation in how prisons institute labor within and across institutions and cultures: the Hungarian facility positioned wage labor as a right and an obligation that formed the basis of women’s social relationships and ties to others, while the U.S. prison excluded wage labor from women’s lives so they could get on with the work of self‐improvement and personal healing. From the comparison, I reveal how prisons can both draw on and subvert broader social meanings assigned to women’s work, making it difficult to view prison labor as wholly exploitative or abusive. I also argue that refusing to allow female inmates to engage in wage labor can be a more profound form of punishment than requiring it of them. By juxtaposing the discourses and practices of work in two very different penal contexts, this article offers a critical reflection on the political economy of prison labor from the ground up.
Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers and court observations of child-support hearings, this article explores the state’s role in the massive accumulation of child-support debt. ...Arguing that this role is too often hidden from view, the article demystifies how much “child” support debt is actually owed to the state itself—and is thus as much about state obligations as familial ones. These state obligations emerge from two main sources: public assistance payback policies, which “bill” noncustodial parents for the cost of the public aid received by their families; and interest charges on all support debt, which most states charge at rates of up to 10 percent. Both state practices hit incarcerated parents especially hard, since they are usually unable to keep up with their support orders while in prison—and often unaware of how and why their debt is accruing. By becoming a means to prop up the state, support debt acts very much like other forms of carceral debt. Yet it also inserts the state into familial relations in ways that can exacerbate conflict between parents and complicate fathers’ ability to care for their children.
With evidence comprising three years of ethnographic research in child support courts and 125 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers, the author shows how criminal justice and child ...support provisions work in tandem to create complicated entanglements for fathers. She develops the concept of incarcerated fatherhood—a matrix of laws, policies, and institutional practices that shape formerly incarcerated men’s relationship to parenting. On the one hand, she analyzes the debt of imprisonment, or the material costs of paternal incarceration; on the other, she examines the imprisonment of debt, or the punitive costs of child support debt. She then brings these two entanglements together to analyze their effects on men’s lives as fathers. Instead of “piling up” in men’s lives, these entanglements work in circular ways to form feedback loops of disadvantage that create serious obstacles for men as parents and complicate precisely those relationships proven essential for reintegration after prison: familial relations of care, reciprocity, and interdependence.
This article explores the politics of punishment in contemporary Central Europe. Based on an analysis of penal policies and discourses in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, it ...examines how penal politics have taken shape in a region with direct experience with the abuses of penal confinement. On the one hand, it reveals how Central European politicians and state actors used tough, law and order rhetoric to reimagine the postsocialist community and to redraw the lines of social inclusion and exclusion, thus developing a uniquely East European penal nationalism that equates punitiveness with national sovereignty and protection. At the same time, the article argues that this penal nationalism emerged largely as a response to the dilemmas of democratization in the region—to the political challenges of forging new solidarities amid changing social boundaries and of state and political actors’ ongoing legitimacy crises. In this way, the article uncovers the layers of complexity that characterize the postsocialist world of punishment as well as the intersecting influences of past and present, of global and local, and of ideology and practice on those politics.
What does caretaking look like when it occurs in prison? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a mother/child prison in California, this article explores the practices and uses of motherhood ...in a prison designed for female offenders and their children. Burdened by soaring criminal justice expenditures at a time of budget crisis, many US states have begun to look to “alternative” forms of incarceration. Heralded for their cost-cutting promises and ostensibly progressive approach to the needs of children with incarcerated parents, mother/child penal facilities have become increasingly popular. Yet instead of offering an alternative to the punitive practices of the criminal justice system, I argue, such facilities can become symptomatic of them—and thus mirror dominant ideas about gender, race, and class. In this penal setting, the logic of punishment collided with and ultimately subsumed the logic of caretaking—as motherhood was undermined, subsumed, and punished by the prison staff. With this in mind, I use the case of parenting in prison to reflect on the contemporary politics of punishment and of motherhood—and the ways they can end up meshing in even the most seemingly alternative of penal institutions.
Inventing the Needy offers a powerful, innovative analysis of welfare policies and practices in Hungary from 1948 to the last decade of the twentieth century. Using a compelling mix of archival, ...interview, and ethnographic data, Lynne Haney shows that three distinct welfare regimes succeeded one another during that period and that they were based on divergent conceptions of need. The welfare society of 1948-1968 targeted social institutions, the maternalist welfare state of 1968-1985 targeted social groups, and the liberal welfare state of 1985-1996 targeted impoverished individuals. Because they reflected contrasting conceptions of gender and of state-recognized identities, these three regimes resulted in dramatically different lived experiences of welfare. Haney's approach bridges the gaps in scholarship that frequently separate past and present, ideology and reality, and state policies and local practices. A wealth of case histories gleaned from the archives of welfare institutions brings to life the interactions between caseworkers and clients and the ways they changed over time. In one of her most provocative findings, Haney argues that female clients' ability to use the state to protect themselves in everyday life diminished over the fifty-year period. As the welfare system moved away from linking entitlement to clients' social contributions and toward their material deprivation, the welfare system, and those associated with it, became increasingly stigmatized and pathologized. With its focus on shifting inventions of the needy, this broad historical ethnography brings new insights to the study of welfare state theory and politics.
