A Woman’s Place

Other people existed to be exploited; the weak to be consumed by the strong.

At the very bottom rung of criminal society were the women. Their purpose was to be used–for sex, of course, but also for laundry, paycheck and welfare-check cash, stashing weapons, hauling drugs, prostitution proceeds, and whatever other advantage could be taken of their looks and their seemingly bottomless capacity for fantasizing that the men in their lives loved and would take care of them. There were no feminist fictions about the equality or supposed similarity of the sexes. When women got caught and convicted, their boyfriends typically disappeared. It was not unusual for a female prison inmate to have absolutely no visitors, ever.

One of the virtues of Cristina Rathbone’s book, the fruit of a series of interviews over four years with several women at two Massachusetts prisons, is that she understands very well, if for the wrong reasons, that women lawbreakers are “startlingly unlike” their aggressive male counterparts (hence her title, A World Apart). Rathbone writes: “Predominantly incarcerated for nonviolent, drug-related offenses, they are frequently mere accessories to their crimes: girlfriends, wives, or lovers of drug dealers. . . . Almost all have serious drug problems themselves, and about half are victims of domestic abuse.”

This strikes me as true enough. The problem is that Rathbone seems not to understand why any of these women might be in prison, much less why they might belong there. In her view, those who commit “nonviolent” crimes like the women she interviews should be somewhere else (where, exactly, she does not specify). But what counts as nonviolent? Driving the getaway car for your boyfriend’s robber ies? Helping your boyfriend commit a cold-blooded murder of an old man? Standing by while your husband beats your son black and blue, starting at age three, because you are too high on crack cocaine to notice or care? Dealing the crack whose use will inevitably lead to more battered children–and battered women as well? These are all incidents from the lives of the women whom Rathbone interviews.

Rathbone represents a certain kind of highly educated romantic who imagines, à la Michel Foucault, that prisons exist not so much to punish wrongdoing or deter crime as to define social boundaries. It’s “locking up society’s most marginal citizens,” punishing prostitutes and drug mules for “having sex and getting high.”

Rathbone hesitates to take a standard prison tour at one of the institutions she writes about, the maximum security facility at Framingham, because that might amount to conceding the “legitimacy” of the state penal system. She informs the reader that she disbelieves in “respecting authority” and admires the “glee of self-assertion and inner swagger” that one of the inmates, 22-year-old “Julie” (the names are invented), in for armed robbery after a series of heroin-soaked heists with her boyfriend, feels about breaking prison rules, especially prohibitions against having sex with male guards.

(Thanks to sex-discrimination lawsuits, correctional officers of the opposite gender, monitoring even one’s most intimate activities, are nowadays commonplace in U.S. prisons for both men and women.)

Indeed, Rathbone does not seem to understand why prisons have rules–such as bans on possessing silverware in your cell or corresponding with inmates at other institutions–and she deems all of them equally arbitrary. One of the women she interviews, Charlene, agreed to smuggle cocaine in her clothes in return for $10,000 and a weekend at a fancy beach hotel in Jamaica. That was something I “would have considered doing myself when I was in my teens,” Rathbone writes. Good thing she didn’t. Charlene got caught at the airport and sent up for 15 years under Massachusetts’s tough mandatory-sentencing laws for drug crimes.

For all Rathbone’s empathy with her subjects, which undoubtedly encouraged them to open up to her, she has nonetheless produced a meagerly reported book. Unlike Ted Conover, author of the widely acclaimed Newjack, who took a job as a prison guard so that he could observe penal institutions and their occupants from the inside, Rathbone decided to sue the state, claiming a right to interview inmates as a member of the media.

As a writer myself, I sympathize with a fellow writer denied access to sources, but I see no reason journalists should have greater privileges than the rest of the public. For obvious security reasons, most prisons are wary of admitting strangers; and even as a lawyer, I rarely got past visiting rooms. That is about as far as Rathbone got, too, despite court orders in her favor. So the book, as she admits, lacks concrete, observed details of the specifics of prison life: what was on the menu in the dining hall, for example, or what her interviewees’ cells looked like.

Furthermore, she succeeds in talking to only a handful of inmates–some of them, it is clear, only once–so she resorts to padding her narrative with snippets of Massachusetts prison history, a visit to a “corrections fair” (the latest in chains and stun guns), and an engrossing account of www.Jailbabes.com, a now-defunct Internet “dating service” in which men with a taste for that sort of thing mailed money to female inmates in return for whatever favors they could snatch during visiting hours. (Julie, as might be expected, is a Jail Babe.)

Rathbone’s central character is Denise, 32 at the book’s beginning and sentenced to a mandatory five years for selling cocaine to an undercover agent. Denise is mother to Patrick, an innocent boy of nine at the beginning of her term, and a hardened, angry juvenile-court prisoner himself at age 13 when she gets out. Patrick’s plight is heartbreaking, but one would feel more sympathy for Denise had she not spent her son’s childhood years smoking crack and going into denial while her husband, an alcoholic and chronically unemployed carpet-installer named Alan, regularly beat Patrick to a pulp, even as a toddler. Denise finally leaves Alan–to go to work as a stripper, even though she has college credits and middle-class parents. (That sort of job seems standard among Rathbone’s interviewees: Julie’s profession on the outside was dominatrix.)

In prison, Denise enjoys frequent visits from her mother and college correspondence courses paid for by her father, yet the aimlessness that characterized her life on the outside continues. She alternates between despondency over Patrick and, when transferred to a now-closed co-ed minimum-security facility in Lancaster, nurturing a crush on (and arranging trysts with) a male prisoner named Chuck. Chuck’s profession on the outside: armed robber.

Denise also indulges an intense, intimate, and jealousy-marked friendship with the much younger Julie. Julie is openly bisexual, but whether her relationship with Denise is lesbian Rathbone does not say. Rathbone complains that Denise leaves prison “with no more demonstrable skills than she had when she entered.” Yet she never questions whether Denise herself might be responsible for this, and responsible, at least in part, for her series of choices that tore apart the life of her son.

Rathbone does identify genuine problems with the women’s penal system. Some mandatory-sentencing schemes for drug violations are undoubtedly too harsh on first-time offenders (although, unlike Rathbone, I can’t summon much sympathy for the dealers themselves). Prisons ought to provide more opportunities for inmates to learn trades and rehabilitate themselves (although the Massachusetts system that Rathbone describes seems no worse than most others).

The widespread and flagrant incidence of guard-inmate sex in women’s prisons, much of it less than voluntary, is unconscionable. It is part of a distressing trend over the past two decades of turning women’s prisons into facsimiles of men’s prisons, stripping them of the curtains, amenities, scope for modesty, and tokens of gentility that recognized that women inmates, while as morally culpable as men, were less overtly aggressive and possibly more amenable to reform.

Women lawbreakers are, indeed, a “world apart.” The men in their lives know it and take advantage of it. While I don’t agree with Rathbone that this excuses their crimes, I do agree that they deserve a kind of attention that the current system does not give them.

Charlotte Allen is the author, most recently, of The Human Christ.