Abstract
Mean Lives makes an important contribution to our understanding of the pathways to crime for women who face social and economic deprivation and the Mean Laws that lead to incarceration for crimes often committed as secondary participants in crimes committed by the men they associate with. In addition to providing a framework for understanding the multiple pathways to crime, Susan Sharp’s analysis of her interviews of women who have managed to stay out of prison provides an innovative window into what it takes to make it in the free world: community support, education, and job opportunities. In doing so, Sharp provides support for the feminist pathways model, which states that the absence of community support and the lack of educational and job opportunities are the primary causal factors leading to criminal behavior. Access to health care was important to the women who had been released, but there is little support provided for the claim that access to mental health or drug treatment played a direct role in their rehabilitation.
The book is largely based on questionnaires and interviews administered over several years to relatively large samples, ranging from 119 to 301 subjects. In-depth interviews were conducted with smaller samples, including 20 caregivers, 21 prisoners who had been released and returned to prison, and 12 who successfully stayed out of prison. For the most part, response rates are relatively high in the administration of the questionnaires, ranging from 56 to 75 percent, indicating that the researcher achieved a high level of rapport with the inmate population, overcoming their general suspiciousness of, and reluctance to appear to be cooperating with, those who are in control of their lives. Given the many difficulties in obtaining voluntary participation among prisoners, these results are indicative of a high level of reliability in the data. Structural constraints such as confinement in restricted housing units, movement of prisoners, work assignments, counseling, and family visits often make it difficult for prisoners to respond to requests for participation even when they wish to do so. Typically in such an environment, an occasional inmate or two may express her concerns about the research and choose not to participate, but this is surprisingly rare. Participation at a much higher level would indicate coercion and a lower level would indicate a lack of trust.
The first chapter of this book, “Mean Lives: A Theoretical Framework,” presents a feminist approach to the explanation of female criminality. Beginning with a brief review of older, male-centered explanations of criminality, Sharp quickly shifts to a female-centered framework that highlights the role that patriarchal institutions play in the feminization of poverty and the opportunity structure that often leads to relatively minor criminal behavior, such as drug possession and petty theft. According to Sharp, the feminist pathways model focuses on “how the abuse and oppression of women and girls narrows their options and may place them on a trajectory where crime may be the most logical response. Most pathways approaches describe multiple pathways of women to crime” (p. 12). Sharp then proceeds to discuss the evidence in support of these multiple pathways to crime.
Some readers may be disappointed to find that this book is not about what life is like on a day to day basis for women who are incarcerated in one of the “meanest” states in the U.S. when it comes to the treatment of women who have difficult lives due to poverty, drug dependency, and vulnerability to the sort of abuses that often lead to mental health problems. Rather, it is about the connection between those “mean lives” and the “mean laws” that incarcerate a disproportionate number of women in Oklahoma compared to other states for the sort of minor crimes low-income women are most likely to commit. The second chapter, “Mean Laws,” describes the rise in female imprisonment in Oklahoma over the past several decades. It appears that in Oklahoma, like in many other jurisdictions, women face legislation that treats them, even if passive participants, as equally culpable as the primary (usually male) actor. This is especially true in drug cases. Oklahoma also treats drug offenses the way other jurisdictions treat violent crime, mandating that drug offenders do 85 percent of their time before being eligible for parole (p. 38). In addition, Oklahoma’s draconian drug policies incarcerate some women for life who play secondary roles in the drug trade in their communities.
In Chapter Three, Sharp describes the deprivations incarcerated women have experienced, including sexual and physical abuse in childhood and as adults, that lead to strains that become the “mediating link” to subsequent drug use and crime (p. 60). While it is true that many studies describe an association between abuse histories, mental health issues, and later incarceration, there is little direct evidence that the strains associated with these adverse experiences lead to crime. The retrospective interpretation of abuse histories as a cause of female criminality, which is commonplace in the prison system, is often used to justify the use of psychotropic medications to control the behavior of those who are assumed to be suffering mental health problems as a result.
Through in-depth interviews of selected smaller groups of women, those who made successful adjustments to life upon release and those who have been released and returned to prison, we get an excellent sense of what these women’s lives are like prior to their incarceration and what it takes to make it upon release. Like other states with relatively high incarceration rates for women, Oklahoma provides few resources for women both prior to and during their incarceration. In Chapter Four, Sharp briefly describes the “limited programming and limited job opportunities” in the Oklahoma prison system, leading older women to “fill their time, through self-improvement projects, hobbies, and friendships” (p. 72) while younger women tend to get into trouble. Those who make it upon release do not do so because of prison programs, but because of community support, educational opportunities, and employment that help to make them self-sufficient.
Juanita Ortiz, author of Chapter Five, “Going Back Again,” reports the results of the interviews she conducted with women who had been released and returned to prison when she was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Consistent with the overall findings in the book, the absence of community support and of educational and job opportunities apparently played a role in their reincarceration. The author states, “Substance abuse and mental health issues are also problematic for newly released women” (p. 75), citing work that lists the numerous mental health issues incarcerated women face and the absence of treatment for these women. But there is little evidence provided that these issues are directly related to their return to prison.
Although “Oklahoma remains one of the most punitive states in the nation” (p. 140), there have been some recent attempts at reform in the women’s prison system. Women are no longer housed in male facilities, and a few women (32) are permitted to have their children stay with them overnight or live with them in a dormitory-style setting. But an absence of funding means that the Department of Corrections must largely rely on “volunteer organizations to maximize theprogramming with limited resources” (p. 141).