Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars

Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation’s jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. Using her ethnographic fieldwork and clinical work as an ob-gyn in a women’s jail, Carolyn Sufrin explores how jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of incarcerated pregnant women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them, Jailcare describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. Sufrin argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish. Rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women’s lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.

• addicted.pregnant.poor (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)
• Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison
• The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton Classic Editions)
• Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Volume 4) (California Series in Public Anthropology)
• Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence
• The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice (Wadsworth Contemporary Issues in Crime and Justice)
• Evaluating Public and Community Health Programs, 2nd Edition
• Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison: Life in the Year After Prison
• In the Mix: Struggle and Survival in a Women's Prison (Suny Series in Women, Crime and Criminology)
• Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership