NCJ Number
177690
Date Published
1998
Length
322 pages
Annotation
This volume examines the life histories of imprisoned Native American Indian women in Montana to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the defining of certain behaviors as criminal and to the subsequent incarceration rates.
Abstract
The research collected information by means of tape-recorded, detailed interviews with 14 of the 17 Native American Indian inmates and 13 of the 48 white inmates of the Women's Correctional Center in Montana. Prisoners were questioned regarding the prison's social environment, their concerns as imprisoned mothers, and the institutional support offered to them as imprisoned mothers. Interviews with prison staff and a State employee focused on programs offered to imprisoned mothers and how the mothers' relationships with their children were facilitated. The interviews were supplemented with nonparticipant observation, informal conversations with prisoners and staff, reports from the Montana State Department of Institutions, reports from various tribes, and other sources. The text uses the women's own words to reveal the violence in their lives prior to incarceration, their responses to this violence, and the ways in which those responses affected their eventual criminalization and imprisonment. It discusses their experiences in prison, noting that native prisoners perceive the prison as focusing on strict control and as being culture-bound and racist. The text also compares these experiences with those of white women in the same prison to underline the significant role of race in determining women's experiences in the criminal justice system. The volume concludes with a presentation of a native women who was wrongly convicted and incarcerated, with emphasis on her readjustment to life in the community. Photographs, chapter notes, index, and about 350 references (Publisher summary modified)