Doing Gender as Self-Improvement: An Exploration of How Incarcerated Men and Women Interpret the Advice From Prison Employees

• Author: Nicole Pyfer,Timbre Wulf-Ludden,Kaylee Nowakowski,Jordan Mullins-Orcutt,Emily Jakobitz,Rebecca Trammell
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1557085116687034
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085116687034

Feminist Criminology

2018, Vol. 13(5) 516 –542

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/1557085116687034

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Article

Doing Gender as

Self-Improvement: An

Exploration of How

Incarcerated Men and

Women Interpret the Advice

From Prison Employees

Rebecca Trammell1, Timbre Wulf-Ludden2,

Nicole Pyfer3, Emily Jakobitz1, Jordan Mullins-Orcutt1,

and Kaylee Nowakowski1

Abstract

In this article, we use interview data (n = 383) to evaluate how male and female

inmates perceive the help they receive from prison staff members. Men were more

likely to claim that staff members help them gain real-world job and educational skills

while women claim that staff members made them see the error of their ways and

push them to self-improve while in prison. We find that inmates are aligning their

personal transformations in prison along gender lines and this may fail to help these

incarcerated women prepare for the economic realities of the reentry process.

Keywords

prisoner reentry, prison programs, qualitative research, parole, inmate and staff

relationship

For this article, we focus on how male and female inmates understand and interpret the

help they receive from the prison staff. Prior research shows that some employees

working in the community corrections field follow a gendered pattern regarding the

1Metropolitan State University of Denver, CO, USA

2University of Nebraska, Kearney, NE, USA

3University of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Rebecca Trammell, Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, Metropolitan State University of

Denver, Campus Box 10, P.O. Box 173362, Denver, CO 80217-3362, USA.

Email: rtrammel@msudenver.edu

687034FCXXXX10.1177/1557085116687034Feminist CriminologyTrammell et al.

research-article2017

Trammell et al. 517

advice they give to their clients (Wyse, 2013). These employees believe that the male

criminal had a troublesome childhood that led him into criminal activities. Such men

need to be trained to embrace legitimate economic structures and learn some job skills.

Women offenders, on the other hand, are advised to set boundaries, especially with

criminal male partners. This is done because women are understood to be psychologi-

cally “broken,” and engage in crime due to unhealthy relationships with men. This

means that staff working with offenders sometimes target gender-specific issues to

change behaviors and attitudes (Wyse, 2013).

This research provides a starting point for the current article. If one of the stated

goals of incarceration is rehabilitation, staff members who work with inmates have an

opportunity to shape their behavior or worldview (Biggam & Power, 1997; Blagden,

Winder, & Hames, 2016; Molleman & Leeuw, 2012). Staff members could mentor

inmates or help them through rehabilitative programs to improve their social or job

skills. In other words, staff members could help inmates return to their community

with the tools needed to successfully complete parole. Therefore, our primary research

questions are as follows: How do male and female inmates understand the help or

advice given by prison employees, and are there gender differences in how this advice

is interpreted?

We use interview data with incarcerated men and women (74 women and 309 men)

to examine if and how they perceive the actions of staff members as helping them

become better people. We use the binary description of gender, male and female,

throughout this article because this is how our interviewees describe their own gender.

We specifically focus on gendered narratives regarding self-improvement. This means

paying close attention to how interviewees describe internal factors, such as personal

responsibility for their crime, and external factors, such as learning job skills, when

they discuss self-improvement.

We cannot presume to know the exact type of advice given to our interviewees.

However, it is important to focus on how inmates perceive these interactions. We seek

to understand how daily interactions with staff are understood from the perspective of

the inmate. If there are gender differences in how inmates understand the advice they

receive, this is because they are treated differently or they are interpreting things dif-

ferently. While there is ample evidence that inmates are given different advice or reha-

bilitative services based on their gender (McKim, 2008; Pelissier, Camp, Gaes, Saylor,

& Rhodes, 2003; Wyse, 2013), we pay close attention to how they understand these

interactions. We focus attention on how incarcerated men and women perceive the

help they receive from staff members because perceptions have real-world conse-

quences and could influence their behaviors (Charon, 2001).

There may be legitimate reasons to use different rehabilitative approaches based on

the different needs of men and women. Men and women promote different norms in

prison. For example, women create pseudo-families while incarcerated (Owen, 1998)

and rely on one or two close friends for companionship (Kruttschnitt, Gartner, & Miller,

2000). Men tend to use more violence in prison and are more likely to form racialized

prison gangs that benefit from underground economies such as the drug trade (Fong,

Vogel, & Buentello, 1992; Hunt, Reigel, Morales, & Waldorf, 1993; Irwin, 1980;