Candace Kruttschnitt 3/23/00
Women's Responses to Prison
Overview
Q: Let's begin by having you give a one- or two-minute summary of your research first.
A: Ok, several years ago, Rosemary Gartner and I were talking about working on a project together, and we were discussing David Ward's original study of the California Institute for Women, which I'll call CIW, in Frontera, California. That study was done in 1965, and it was the first study anyone had ever done of a women's prison, to try to determine, there was a lot of research at that time on men's prisons, how men do time, how they get along with each other, but nobody had looked at women's. He happened to be at UCLA at that point and studying the men's facility in southern California, and he and his colleague, Gene Kassebaum thought it would be interesting to go up the road, since the women's facility was right there, and see if the same kinds of factors affected the way that women do time and whether they did time differently than men. Subsequently, he published a book, and it became extremely famous because it was the only work that had been done on the women's facility. But also because it documented a large prevalence of homosexuality within the prison, which people weren't aware of previously, very different than the homosexuality that occurs in men's prisons. At any rate, Rosemary and I started thinking what a shame it was that nobody had ever gone back and replicated that study. You could imagine that over the course of 35, almost 40 years, given the types of changes that have occurred for women in terms of their social roles, their opportunities, that the way they do time today is very different than the way that they have in the past. On the other hand, if you believe Goffman's right, that total institutions exert an effect on individuals, you might expect that it doesn't matter what's happened in society at large, that once you put someone at a total institution, the way they do time is going to be exactly the same. So we went out and did a preliminary visit at the prison, and talked to them about their interest in having us replicate the study, and at that time, people kept talking about the new facilities that had been built in California, that the time Ward and Kassebaum did their research, there was this one and only one prison. It held 800 women. Subsequently, there are now five prisons in California, the newest having been built in the Central Valley in Chowchilla. CCFW (California Correctional Facility for Women) and across the street, Valley State prison. Valley state prison opened in April of 1995, designed to house 2800 women, but current capacity is about 3900. Well, once we visited this new facility, we realized that it would be important not only to do this over time dimension, but also to control for time and look at the effects of very different facilities of how women do time. So, in essence, the study kind of blossomed from an original concern with historical change, to controlling for time and looking at specifically institutional effects and how what some people have called the new penology, has affected women. By the new penology I mean that there is no longer concern with rehabilitation, but instead what you have is a focus on primarily management and classification of inmates. You send them to do their time, you count them, you get them in the right place at the right time, and you don't worry about whether they're rehabilitated. They're there to do their time and that's it.
Research Questions
Q: What role did theory play in this study?
A: It played a big role because we basically started with probably the central theories in penology, one of which is "functionalist theory," from which Goffman was working, that says basically how inmates do time is a function of being in a total institution. An offshoot of that, which is "situational-functionalist perspective," which basically argues that it's not just being in the total institution, but it's the characteristics of the institution. So for example, some institutions are more coercive, and have a worse environment than other institutions, so you'd expect that inmates' behavior would vary according to that. And a third perspective is the "importation model," which says that neither the characteristics of the institution itself, or just being in an institution is important, but it's really what the inmates bring in with them, what their prior experiences have been, whether they've been incarcerated before, what their family life was like, whether they get contact from the outside, those kinds of characteristics they bring in with them will influence how they do time. So we were concerned with all three of those perspectives and testing them, and we had the ideal model in order to do that.
Q: Which perspective did you think was going to be most helpful?
A: After going through a lot of the literature, I think we both felt that it depended on whether you were looking at overtime or controlling for time, institutional differences. In other words, we could see hypothesis being more important, the situational one in particular, situational-functionalist, being very important for when we control for time and compare the effects of two different institutions. Because the two institutions are so radically different. On the other hand, in terms of the historical model, we obviously felt that importation was important, that what women bring today to prison, the set of background experiences, would probably be entirely different than what women brought with them in the 1950s to prison.
Design Sampling
Q: You mentioned the selection of prisons, what other design decisions did you make, and how did you make them?
A: Probably the biggest design decision, beside looking at those two facilities—the research we were really fortunate; California incarcerates more women than anywhere else in the U.S. or in the world for that matter, there are close to 10,000 women behind bars in California—so we knew we had a sufficient population to work with. We had about 1800 women at CIW, and about 3900 at Valley State prison, so we knew we had a sufficient size. We also knew we probably had a good distribution of inmates, given that the facilities were so different, they were drawn from different segments of the California population. But in addition, we also made the decision that we would follow the methodology used by Ward and Kassebaum, that that would be very important to the study. And they used a very—and I joked with David about this—feminist methodology in terms of their approach. Ward and Kassebaum never went in with a survey predesigned, saying, "we know all the issues about penology." Instead they went in and did interviews first, to say, "Ok, you tell us what the central issues are, for you doing time," and then designed their survey, based on the results of the interviews. So we did the exact same thing. And I think that was an important design component that had a real influence on the survey, on the findings. Obviously we had to keep some of the questions they asked in order to make the data comparable over time, but it really influenced the quality of the survey.
Q: How did you define and execute your sample?
A: We took the entire prison. One of the things that… I guess there were plusses and minuses to doing research on doing research on a prison population. The plus is it's a captive population, they have nowhere to go and nothing to do, so it's not as if there's a problem in terms of people having work schedules and busy lives and giving them to fill it out. They're there. And so you can count on them being there when you come back. But, there are also other problems, in the sense of motivating them to participate, they want to know what's in it for them, why should they do it. And also you got a population that may have serious problems with reading and understanding questions. So we took the entire group knowing that we wouldn't get 100% response rate. And there would be some women who were sent to secure housing unit, who are in the medical facility, who for one reason or another wouldn't be able to complete the survey.
Q: So from the survey you took the entire…
A: Right…
Q: …for the interviews…
A: The interviews we knew we needed to get a very diverse population of women in order to try to get a broad spectrum on the issues that were central to women while they were doing time. We had a good connection in the California Department of Corrections in their research branch division who sent us a list of all inmates who had been recently admitted within the past six months, and inmates who'd been there longer than five years. And from those lists, we drew random samples. And then we sent them out to California and we asked that when we got there that these women—they have a term that's called "docketed," which means they're released from their cells or their work schedules for a certain time to talk to us—and it worked extremely well. I would say 98% of the women agreed to be interviewed; maybe there was only a handful that said "no, we don't want to talk to you." We did approximately 40 interviews at each prison. And they were women of very diverse ages, racial backgrounds, economic backgrounds, different lengths of sentences; it worked extremely well.
Measurement & Data Collection
Q: How long were the interviews, approximately, and where did you conduct them, and who conducted them?
A: I conducted them, and Rosemary Gartner conducted them. They lasted anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half. They were conducted in different locations in different prisons. In CIW, the older facility, they were conducted primarily in a wing of the prison that handles a lot of the administrative paperwork. They put an office aside for us to do it. At the newer facility, they moved us into all different locations. One day we did interviews in the church, in the chapel within the institution. We did them also within a kind of administrative wing, we did them in a rec. area. We did them wherever we could set up our tape recorders and not disturb anyone and get some semblance of privacy.
Q: Did you interview some of the staff also?
A: Yeah we did. We interviewed as many staff as we could at both facilities, and they were very, very different. The staff at CIW, as you'd expect—many of them have been there for 20 years or more—were very attached to the prison. At the new facility, these were really young pups, these were people who had just come out of correctional officer training schools, and so they were a very different group.
Q: What did you learn; what lessons did you learn from collecting the data in this process that would be helpful for other researchers?
A: That's a tough question. I think that probably the hardest thing, at least when we were doing the interviews, you're talking just about the interviews or when we went to the survey?
Q: The interviews.
A: The interviews. Probably the hardest thing, maybe especially for me, but showing a lack of affect during the interview. So that if someone chooses to talk about their crime or why they're there, and it's a particularly gruesome event that you cannot sit there and "oh you did that? That was really…" you know, you cannot show affect, you have to, no matter what they're telling you, kind of keep an even tone and an even keel, that this is normal, this is ok, this is stuff that we hear all the time. And that sometimes is very, very difficult. I think particularly interviewing—I've interviewed male inmates as well—and interviewing women, they tend to get much more emotional, they get weepy when they're talking about their family and their kids. And after a while, you get hardened to it, especially because a lot of times when women are talking about their children, these aren't women who when they were outside, were home baking cookies. They weren't exactly brownie moms, yet they would have tremendous remorse once they were in, and then they can't see their children. But it's really that learning how to have no affect, and when women go off on tangents, bringing them back to what you need to talk about and what you need to get discussed, and the important questions you need answered.
Q: Did you structure the interviews with a lot of questions?
A: Only four. We only had four questions in terms of: (1) what's it like doing time; (2) what's the hardest thing about doing time; (3) what are the relationships inmates have with each other within the prison, and by that we didn't mean necessarily homosexual relations, but more in terms of if you had to, like if someone said if you were going into a high school and you wanted someone to describe to you what is the structural relations between students: what clicks exist, why do they exist. We wanted to know, for example, if there was a sub-rosa economic system, were there women dealing drugs, were they dealing cigarettes, whatever, to get at that without saying "are you dealing drugs in here?"; and (4) also staff-inmate relations. So we really only had four questions.
Q: So you didn't ask them what they did to get into prison, but they told…
A: No. Often times they did, because one of the things that was key that we did need to know was was this their first time being incarcerated, and had they been in any other prisons. Because if they had been up to Valley State prison, we wanted to know because we were interested in how that time compared to the time they were doing in CIW.
Data Analysis
Q: Could you tell us a little bit about how you analyzed the data?
A: Well, there are two different components to it, because the interviews lead to the construction of a survey, which took a long time. We set up Atlas/ti and Amy Miller in-loaded all of the interviews, which we had transcribed into Atlas/ti which is a method for qualitative analysis. And it is extremely difficult. So we had a component for analyzing the data qualitatively, which is what that paper that I gave you is going to report on. And then we, from the interviews, constructed a survey. The survey, as I mentioned before, in part had some of the questions Ward and Kassebaum had used earlier. But we also wanted to really reflect what women were saying now about their attitudes, experiences, and perceptions of doing time, and those could vary on different dimensions; they could relate to other inmates, they could have to do with their attitudes about the staff or the prison as a whole. We used some existing scales from penology research in the survey. We pretested the survey at both prisons on a diverse group of women, primarily with this issue are they going to understand the questions; is it clear, have we captured the right issues for these women, health care was a huge issue for them. So we pretested it, the pretest went extremely well. And then we came back to administer the surveys, to the inmates. That was a very enlightening experience. We anticipated having far more trouble at CIW than at VSP, because CIW is this old, cottage-style prison for women, it kind of has a "down at the heels" appearance, you know, it smells like all old institutions smell, nothing quite works right, including the staff. I mean, it's just they're all kind of "loosey-goosey" about their jobs and nobody ever knows who's supposed to be where and when and we thought "this would be a miracle if we pull this off." So the day we were going to do it, the administration agreed to lock the women down an hour before their call for dinner. And we took a dolly out and went from unit to unit to deliver the surveys. They handed them out, we waited for two hours, came back and picked them all up. We got a fabulous response rate. Then we go up to Valley State prison, the new, high-tech, where we expected everything to go off without a hitch because these people are really oriented toward everyone being on schedule, things being neat and tidy, no mess-ups, no screw-ups. But the administration there, because they were so concerned about security, did not want us taking these surveys around to the various units. They said "you drop them off, we will distribute them to the women's cells once they're locked in for the night, and they can drop them off in the morning as they leave for their work assignments." We said ok, we came back the next morning, and we had about a 50% response rate. Made a huge difference. I think our physical presence, because then we weren't associated with the Department of Corrections as opposed to correctional officers handing out the surveys. In addition though, another factor that made a huge difference is, at CIW, the old institution, there are only two women to a cell. At the new institution, there are eight women to a cell. And one of the things we found is those bundles of surveys were done or not done in packets. So you can very much imagine peer pressure within cells to fill them out or not fill them out. So I think that had a big impact as well.
Interpretation & Dissemination
Q: Getting back to the interviews, would you give us a summary of the findings of your study?
A: I think, from the qualitative data we've analyzed, there are huge institutional effects. By that I mean, um, situational functionalists were correct. Where you do time has a big impact on how you do time. And the women who are doing time at Valley State Prison, and I should have one caveat here. We have looked at the data to make sure that length of sentence doesn't vary significantly between the two institutions, age of the women, priors, types of crimes they're incarcerated for, racial breakdowns, are all very consistent between the two prisons although CIW has a larger life population—women who are doing life sentences. But other than that, and that rules out the effect where you could say its factors other than the institution, maybe its that these women are doing longer sentence or they have more prior. The institutional effects are enormous. The women who are serving time who are in this high-tech, very sterile, very modern, no trees, multiple perimeter fences, stadium lights, eight women to a cell, are not doing well. They have tremendous anger, the inmates don't get along well with the other inmates, they don't get along well with the correctional officers, on almost every dimension that we analyzed, doing time was tougher for those women.
Q: Now you sampled those that had come in just within the last six months, separately from those that have been there five years or longer. What did you find were the differences between those two groups?
A: There are some differences. What's difficult about doing time changes over time. And when you first come in, you're complaining about the food, and the healthcare. And by the time you've been doing five or more years, you're complaining about the lack of privacy, about the boredom, about there are no programs, the treatment you receive from correctional officers, so it is clear that you're questions about what's bothering or your answers to what's bothering you does shift over time.
Q: In reading your paper, I got the impression that maybe the correctional officers, the staff of the newer, more structured prison were meaner. Is that correct, and if so, how did it come about and to what extent was that the cause of the inmates being different?
A: It could well be. We don't have extensive information from staff. There were huge differences in the backgrounds of staff though. Many of the people who were working in this new facility had just come out of correctional officer training schools. If they'd worked anywhere they might have done a short stint at a male facility. I just think they were much less experienced, and they were put in a prison that had a mission that was headed by a male warden, unlike CIW, which has a female warden, that inmate safety was primo. And the male warden had only worked in male facilities and his orientation was much the way it was when he worked at a male facility. There's no nonsense, there's no listening to inmates complaining, you just do your job and that's it. I think the staff at CIW, many of them have been there for a long, long time, as long as the Manson women, who have been there longer than anyone. And so I think they had a very different attitude about that facility, they'd seen many wardens come and go, in the 80s CIW had probably 5 or 6 wardens, many of whom were charged with corruption while they were running the institution. So they had a lot of experience to draw on, and I think their view also, and this is an important component—ironically the ability of CIW to be a laid-back, easier institution is in part due to the opening of Valley State Prison and CCWF. Because CIW staff could now use as a stick on those women: "if you screw up here, we're sending you up to Valley State Prison." So in some ways, it really made it easier for them to be the laid-back easy-going staff because they could get rid of anybody they saw as a bad apple, with the full consent of California Department of Corrections. They are definitely moving toward a system of classifying women so that you will have, what you now have in men's prisons, which are there are some prisons which are designed to be lower-security than other prisons. We've never had the number of women or the number of facilities where they could do that, now they do, and so they're saying we'll designate this as the maximum-security facility for women.
Q: Your paper on this is going to be published in criminology this August. What other publication plans do you have, and what do you see as your main audiences?
A: We've only started analyzing the survey data fairly recently. Eventually this is going to be a book, and I think hopefully there will be multiple audiences. We have very rich historical data. We've had a research assistant at the University of California at Santa Cruz who's been collecting data, census data on women in California; data on California department of corrections, all of their what are called "doms," departmental manuals in terms of how rules and regulations have changed over time. All that's by way of saying that there should be, hopefully, historical sociologists as well as penologists who are interested in this piece.
Q: Do you see corrections itself as an audience for this research, and have you observed any impact from the research?
A: Not yet, but the grant just ended so we're doing our report now, our technical report for National Science Foundation. That report will be sent, it's mandated to be sent to the Department of Corrections in California. We went back last summer to deliver a preliminary summary of the results, based primarily on quick frequencies and cross-tabs we'd run as a result of the surveys to staff, higher level, not correctional officers but higher level staff at both prisons. I have to say that was a very discouraging experience because in both institutions, the response was "There's nothing you can tell us. We already know everything we need to know about running this prison."
Q: But they don't necessarily control correction policy?
A: No, they don't, and that's why this will go to, it has to go to the head of California Department of Corrections as well as the research branch, and the warden's individually will see the full report.
Q: So there could be some _________________ corrections policy?
A: Yeah, yeah.
Q: What are you planning for your next research project?
A: It may not follow directly from this, but indirectly it does, there's a project that I'm involved in with four other women from around the country and also Rosemary in Canada. One's at the University of Nebraska, one at Arizona, one in Maryland, and myself, where we'd like to get, we're working on a life-events calendar that is administered on a laptop in jail facilities. The notion being that we'd like to get data from women on the prior three years before they were locked up—and this is jail, not prison, because you want to get them when they've recently been on the streets—to get really critical information, situational data, on violent experiences women encounter, both as offenders and victims. The current data that exists on situational level analysis of violence is really poor. It tends to be correlations only of violent incidences, which doesn't really tell you about avoided violence. This is crucial for women, because women primarily are in violence in intimate situations. To be able to know in what instances how they've avoided the violence, as well as situations where they did encounter the violence I think would make a huge impact. But you need these life event calendars to say "tell me about the last incident where you were involved in violence; who was present, what was there, what was the outcome," that kind of thing.
Q: Would you like to do more interviews in prison?
A: Oh yeah, I love it.
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