NCJ Number
184088
Journal
Women and Criminal Justice Volume: 11 Issue: 2 Dated: 2000 Pages: 45-65
Editor(s)
Donna C. Hale
Date Published
2000
Length
21 pages
Annotation
In a multi-site ethnographic study of female offenders in drug treatment, the authors identified a sub-sample of women whose codefendants were also their romantic partners.
Abstract
The study was a component of Project WORTH (Women's Options for Recovery, Treatment, and Health), a large study profiling characteristics, treatment needs, and client outcomes of female offenders participating in eight drug treatment programs in New York City and Portland, Oregon. Open-ended life history interviews lasting an average of 90 minutes were conducted over a 2-year period with 60 women recently admitted into drug treatment in prisons, jails, and community-based programs. Although an investigation of women with romantic codefendants was not initially built into the study, nearly 25 percent of the 160 women currently or previously had partners who were their romantic codefendants. It was found that romantic codefendant relationships were conditioned by law enforcement efforts and by the social control and surveillance exerted by romantic partners in the home, on the street, and in jail and prison. For the women in the study, romantic codefendants not only exerted policing tactics but also asserted the power to confine, and sequester women in their residences and threatened to retaliate if women moved from the general population of jails and prisons into drug treatment program as an alternative to incarceration. 40 references