Writing Against Time : The Life Histories And Writings Of Women In Santa Cruz County Jail

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Mass imprisonment in the contemporary age has given rise to increased scholarship exploring the criminalization and incarceration of women. Yet few studies have inquired into how women prisoners themselves explain their trajectories to imprisonment, just as relatively few have chosen qualitative over quantitative modes of inquiry to learn about this understudied population. Even fewer scholars have examined the role of writing in incarcerated women's lives. This dissertation attempts to help fill these lacunae through an exploration of the life history interviews and writings of women in county jail in Santa Cruz, California. Gaining access to the jail as a writing instructor, I conducted life history interviews with thirty-six writing workshop participants and collected writings from them and twenty-nine additional participants. I found that interpersonal violence in multiple forms was the most dominant theme across the life history narratives. But interviewees offered four different types of narratives, and violence figured differently into each. For a majority, it was seen as the root cause of their criminal justice entanglements. For others, experiences of violence were seen as critical events in trajectories implicating instead either excessive drug use or criminal justice policies as the root cause of those entanglements. I suggest that these narratives defy neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and correctional discourses constructing interviewees as morally corrupt "criminals," providing important forms of vindication and validation of self for narrators. I also suggest that while the narratives gesture to the social, they offer primarily individual explanations for criminalization and incarceration that obscure underlying relationships of power. Interviewees found certain jail conditions particularly challenging, and developed strategies to endure and resist them, extracting value from the experience of doing time. Writing was key among them--used by interviewees to bear witness to and critique the jail experience, to create healing and inward renewal in a space of repression, and to reject and resist the inhumane treatment to which they were subject as prisoners--affirming their dignity and creating freedom in an institutional context emphatically negating them. I conclude by discussing factors for which social explanations for the criminalization and incarceration of women might account, by commenting on the scholarly and practical significance of this study, and by pointing to directions for future research.

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