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Women Behind Bars: Gender and Race in U.S. Prisons. Vernetta D. Young and Rebecca Reviere. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2006. 219 pages. $19.95.
A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars. Cristina Rathbone. New York: Random House. 2005. 279 pages. $24.95.
Women currently comprise seven percent of all inmates in state and federal prisons in the United States. While still a clear minority, women are the fastest growing group of new inmates in our nation's prisons. How much do we know about these nearly 100,000 women? Until fairly recently, we knew very little. Women as perpetrators of crime and as incarcerated individuals still garner scant attention in most criminology textbooks. However, in the past five to eight years, several books devoted solely to the topic of female crime and incarceration have been published and go a long way in rounding out our knowledge of female offenders (see, for example, Renzetti and Goodstein 2001, Pollock 2002, Chesney-Lind and Pasko 2004).
Two of the most recent additions to the literature on women, crime, and incarceration are Women Behind Bars: Gender and Race in U.S. Prisons, by Vernetta D. Young and Rebecca Reviere, and A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars, by Cristina Rathbone. These books offer two different, but complimentary, pictures of incarcerated women. Young and Reviere's book, Women Behind Bars, is the more scholarly of the two. It is written by two associate professors of sociology at Howard University and pays very close attention to race, class, and gender issues. Rathbone's book, A World Apart, is a more journalistic account of how women live their daily lives behind bars at Massachusetts's Correctional Institution (MCI) at Framingham-one of the oldest all-female prisons in the country.
Young and Reviere's introductory chapter presents an overview of the social and cultural context for the relative boom in female incarceration rates at the end of the twentieth century. They address suburbanization and decaying urban infrastuctures, high unemployment rates and the disappearance of blue collar jobs in city centers, the resulting poverty and residential instability, and low levels of educational attainment. They look at the influx of crack cocaine and cheap guns into urban centers and how these factors combined with the harsher sentencing guidelines brought about by the...