Cultivating communities of care: A qualitative investigation of the communication of support among incarcerated women

ABSTRACT

In 2014, a female-only detention and re-entry facility was restructured to implement new rehabilitative philosophies rooted in strategies to prepare incarcerated women for successful transition into society. A specialized housing unit called incentive-based housing (IBH) was created within this facility to promote an environment of accountability and responsibility. Here, women are expected to be proactive in seeking and achieving successes through programming, all while offering support to one another. In this study, participant observations and interviews were used to understand how 12 incarcerated women living in IBH communicate support. This qualitative study revealed three forms of support being communicated: (a) accountability, (b) validation, and (c) compassion. This study also revealed forms of communication that complicate support, including (a) drama and (b) rivalry. Communication of support is important to consider as we devise new approaches to rehabilitation within America’s criminal justice system.

KEYWORDS:

• Incarceration
• social support
• incarcerated women
• rehabilitation
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude for guidance and insight to Dr. Luke Winslow, Editor Robert DeChaine, and our anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 14, 2017, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2017.html .

2 PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 404.

3 PCARE, “PCARE @ 10: Reflection on a Decade of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education, While Looking Ahead to New Challenges and Opportunities,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 288.

4 PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex.”

5 Stephen Hartnett, “Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Commitment,” in “Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and Social Justice: Special Issue on Rhetorical Criticism,” ed. Greg Dickinson, special issue, Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 1 (2010): 68–93.

6 James J. Stephan, Census of State and Federal Correctional Facilities, 2005 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2008), https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csfcf05.pdf, 5.

7 James J. Stephan, 1984 Census of State Adult Correctional Facilities (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1987), https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csacf84.pdf, 8.

8 Lois Davis et al., Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education: A Meta-Analysis of Programs that Provide Education to Incarcerated Adults (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2013), 32.

9 Mona Lynch, “Rehabilitation as Rhetoric: The Ideal of Reformation in Contemporary Parole Discourse and Practices,”Punishment & Society 2 (2000): 45.

10 Marina Gamo, “Voices Behind Prison Walls: Rehabilitation from the Perspective of Inmates,” Philippine Sociological Review 61, no. 1 (2013): 205–27.

11 Alison Liebling, “Incentives and Earned Privileges Revisited: Fairness, Discretion, and the Quality of Prison Life,” Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 9, no. S1 (2008): 25–41.

12 Davis et al., Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education.

13 Giovanni Delaere, Sophie De Caluwé, and Geraldine Clarebout, “Prison Education and Breaking through the Walls in Flanders: The Motivational Orientations of Long-Term Prisoners,” The Journal of Correctional Education 64, no. 3 (2013): 2–21.

14 For example, see Mary L. Cohen, “Choral Singing and Prison Inmates: Influences of Performing in a Prison Choir,” The Journal of Correctional Education 60, no. 1 (2009): 52–65; and Andrew Parker, Rosie Meek, and Gwen Lewis, “Sport in a Youth Prison: Male Young Offenders’ Experiences of a Sporting Intervention,” Journal of Youth Studies 17, no. 3 (2014): 381–96.

15 For relevant studies, see Frederick C. Corey, “Personal Narratives and Young Men in Prison: Labeling the Outside Inside,” Western Journal of Communication 60, no. 1 (1996): 57–75; Suzanne Marie Enck and Blake A. McDaniel, “‘I Want Something Better for My Life’: Personal Narratives of Incarcerated Women and Performances of Agency,” Text and Performance Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2015): 43–61.

16 Stephen John Hartnett, Jennifer K. Wood, and Bryan J. McCann, “Turning Silence into Speech and Action: Prison Activism and the Pedagogy of Empowered Citizenship,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2011): 335.

17 Eleanor M. Novek, “‘Heaven, Hell, and Here’: Understanding the Impact of Incarceration through a Prison Newspaper,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 4 (2005): 288.

18 Gamo, “Voices Behind Prison Walls.”

19 A multitude of critical studies engage this issue of rehabilitation. For examples, see Anouk Bosma et al., “Prison-Based Rehabilitation: Predictors of Offender Treatment Participation and Treatment Completion,” Crime & Delinquency 62, no. 8 (2016): 1095–120; D.A. Andrews and James Bonta, The Psychology of Criminal Conduct, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Anderson, 1998); D.A. Andrews and James Bonta, The Psychology of Criminal Conduct, 4th ed. (Newark, NJ: LexisNexis, 2006); James Bonta, “Offender Risk Assessment: Guidelines for Selection and Use,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 29, no. 4 (2002): 355–79; James Bonta and D.A. Andrews, Risk Need-Responsivity Model for Offender Assessment and Rehabilitation (Ottawa, Ontario: Public Safety Canada, 2007).

20 Joanne Belknap, Shannon Lynch, and Dana DeHart, “Jail Staff Members’ Views on Jailed Women’s Mental Health, Trauma, Offending, Rehabilitation, and Reentry,” The Prison Journal 96, no. 1 (2016): 79–101.

21 See John Cassel, “The Contribution of the Social Environment to Host Resistance,” American Journal of Epidemiology 104, no. 2 (1976): 107–23; Sidney Cobb, “Social Support as a Moderator of Life Stress,” Psychosomatic Medicine 38, no. 5 (1976): 300–14.

22 Cobb, “Social Support as a Moderator of Life Stress,” 300.

23 Brant Burleson, “Comforting Messages: Features, Functions, and Outcomes,” in Strategic Interpersonal Communication, eds. John Daly and John Wiemann (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), 135–161.

24 Cobb, “Social Support as a Moderator of Life Stress”; Terrance Albrecht, Brant Burleson, and Deanna Goldsmith, “Supportive Communication,” in Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, eds. Mark Knapp and Gerald Miller (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 421.

25 Anita L. Vangelisti, “Challenges in Conceptualizing Social Support,” Journal of Personal Relationships 26, no. 1 (2009): 39–51.

26 Frances Huber, “Communicating Social Support Behind Bars: Experiences with the Pennsylvania Lifers’ Association,” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2005).

27 PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex;” PCARE, “PCARE @ 10.”

28 Matthew A. Koschmann and Brittany L. Peterson, “Rethinking Recidivism: A Communication Approach to Prisoner Reentry,” Journal of Applied Social Science 7, no. 2 (2013): 188–207.

29 Dennis Mumby, “Critical Theory and Postmodernism,” in The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research, and Methods, eds. Linda Putnam and Dennis Mumby, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014), 101–25.

30 For example, see Jan Ch. Karlsson, Organizational Misbehaviour in the Workplace: Narratives of Dignity and Resistance (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Mumby, “Critical Theory and Postmodernism;” Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson, Organizational Misbehavior (London, UK: Sage, 1999).

31 For example, see Dennis K. Mumby, “Theorizing Resistance in Organizational Studies: A Dialectical Approach,” Management Communication Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2005): 19–44; Peter Fleming, “Sexuality, Power and Resistance in the Workplace,” Organization Studies 28, no. 2 (2007): 239–56.

32 Mumby, “Critical Theory and Postmodernism,” 112.

33 Ibid.

34 Barbara Townley, Reframing Human Resource Management: Power, Ethics, and the Subject at Work (London, UK: Sage, 1994), 6. For Foucault’s original essay, see: Michel Foucault, “On Governmentality,” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–21.

35 Mumby, “Critical Theory and Postmodernism,” 115.

36 Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott, “Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual,” Journal of Management Studies 39, no. 5 (2002): 619–44.

37 See PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex;” PCARE. “PCARE @ 10.”

38 Jacquelyn B. Frank and Elizabeth A. Gill, “The Negotiated Identities of Long-Term Inmates: Breaking the Chains of Problematic Integration,” Western Journal of Communication 79, no. 5 (2015): 513–32.

39 Koschmann and Peterson, “Rethinking Recidivism.”

40 Enck and McDaniel, “‘I Want Something Better for My Life.’”

41 Sarah J. Tracy, Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

42 Ibid.

43 Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Postructuralist Theory 2nd Edition (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1997); Mumby, “Critical Theory and Postmodernism.”

44 Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory.

45 Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001).

46 George De Leon, “Therapeutic Communities: Is There an Essential Model,” in Community as Method: Therapeutic Communities for Special Populations and Special Settings, ed. George De Leon (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 5.

47 Alisa Stevens, “‘I am the Person Now I Was Always Meant to Be’: Identity Reconstruction and Narrative Reframing in Therapeutic Community Prisons,” Criminology & Criminal Justice 12, no. 5 (2012): 540.

48 Stephen Hartnett, Executing Democracy, vol. 1, Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683–1807 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010).

49 For example, see Lesley Frazer et al., “Rehabilitation: What Does ‘Good’ Look Like Anyway?” European Journal of Probation 6, no. 2 (2014): 92–111.

50 Gamo, “Voices Behind Prison Walls.”