Search results for ""Author Dana M. Britton""
New York University Press At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as Gendered Organization
When most people think of prisons, they imagine chaos, violence, and fundamentally, an atmosphere of overwhelming brute masculinity. But real prisons rarely fit the “Big House” stereotype of popular film and literature. One fifth of all correctional officers are women, and the rate at which women are imprisoned is growing faster than that of men. Yet, despite increasing numbers of women prisoners and officers, ideas about prison life and prison work are sill dominated by an exaggerated image of men’s prisons where inmates supposedly struggle for physical dominance. In a rare comparative analysis of men’s and women’s prisons, Dana Britton identifies the factors that influence the gendering of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility. In interviews with dozens of male and female officers in five prisons, Britton explains how gender shapes their day-to-day work experiences. Combining criminology, penology, and feminist theory, she offers a radical new argument for the persistence of gender inequality in prisons and other organizations. At Work in the Iron Cage demonstrates the importance of the prison as a site of gender relations as well as social control.
£23.99
Taylor & Francis Ltd Gender and Prisons
Prison is unquestionably one of the most sex-segregated of all social institutions. From the first incarnations of the carceral project more than two centuries ago, reformers and penologists earnestly turned their attention to the construction of 'Christian gentlemen' and 'respectable ladies'. Vestiges of these projects remain to the present day, though often in radically different forms. Academic work exploring the construction of prison related gender has been a relatively recent development within the last quarter century. Included in this volume are twenty-two key articles exploring prison history, the state and gendered social control, gender and work in prisons and the gendered experience of incarceration. The introductory essay places these areas in the context both of more conventional sociologies of gender (highlighting both masculinities and femininities) and traditional scholarship on the prison, arguing for a return of this increasingly important social institution from the instrumentalist domains of criminal justice to the heart of sociological theorizing on topics of gender and social control.
£165.00