A Life-Course Perspective on Incarcerated Women’s Views on Adulthood

Abstract

Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with incarcerated women, supplemented by mail correspondence with a sub-sample of these women, I explore how the participants interpret their early life-course experiences when reflecting on their transition to adulthood and, subsequently, their views on adult roles and responsibilities. The women’s narratives indicate that early experiences with trauma, along with premature entries into adult roles, result in a disorganized transition to adulthood. The findings also suggest that the women’s accelerated transitions to adulthood shape their views on adult roles, pointing to a need to incorporate discussions of age-normative timetables in efforts to assist at-risk and incarcerated women.

Keywords:

• adulthood
• incarcerated women
• the life course
• transition to adulthood

Notes

I have reported findings related to the women’s narratives regarding the impact of sentence length on their sense of adulthood elsewhere (Umamaheswar, 2014b). For the purposes of the findings discussed here, sentence length did not emerge as a significant theme in the women’s narratives.

While I would have preferred an alternative method for the women to express their interest in participating in the study, I was not permitted to include stamps or stamped return envelopes for the women to mail their forms back to me. I did not want to limit my sample only to women who were financially positioned to afford stamps in prison, and the strategy I followed was the only other option the prison staff offered me.

One inmate responded to the letter but then decided not to participate, and another woman wanted very badly to participate but was prohibited from doing so for disciplinary reasons.

Findings related to the women’s narratives regarding the impact of incarceration and the prison environment on their sense of adulthood can be found in (Umamaheswar, 2014b).

I sent out six waves of letters to the women, with each letter serving as a response to the participants’ previous letter to me. There was some expected attrition in the response rate, given that incarcerated persons’ circumstances can change rapidly as they are released, moved, or otherwise become unwilling/unable to reply. Ten of the 14 women who agreed to participate in this portion of the study responded to the first letter I sent them; 8 responded to the second; 5 responded to the third and fourth; 4 responded to the fifth; and 3 responded to the sixth and final wave.

At the time I completed the study, each woman with whom I had been corresponding was still incarcerated, so I did not continue to study the women after their release.

In reporting the results, I do not specify the women’s crimes. My reasons for this are threefold: (a) For the purpose of the findings reported here, the types of crimes that the women committed had little bearing on the narratives regarding the women’s early life-course experiences; (b) I am better able to preserve the women’s anonymity by withholding information on their crimes; (c) given the violent nature of some of the crimes for which the women were convicted, I believe providing information on the crimes may be both distracting and stigmatizing.

It should be noted that, although 14 of the women in this sample reported histories of abuse, this number may have been even higher if the women were asked direct, explicit questions about their victimization experiences.