How Formerly Incarcerated Women Confront the Limits of Caring and the Burdens of Control Amid California’s Carceral Realignment

• Author: Megan Welsh
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/1557085117698751
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085117698751

Feminist Criminology

2019, Vol. 14(1) 89 –114

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/1557085117698751

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Article

How Formerly Incarcerated

Women Confront the Limits

of Caring and the Burdens

of Control Amid California’s

Carceral Realignment

Megan Welsh1

Abstract

The largest scale effort to reduce our reliance on incarceration is currently taking

place in California. Drawing on in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated

women on two different forms of community supervision in one California county,

this article makes two main contributions. First, I offer a conceptual framework

for understanding how women experience the goals of community supervision.

Because actual rehabilitation is often off-limits, I suggest that these institutional goals

are organized around caring, control, and self-governance: Caring is exhibited by

supervision officers in lieu of substantive assistance toward rehabilitation; control

for the sake of public safety remains a key aim of community supervision; and self-

governance is an unstated institutional goal through which women are forced to take

on the invisible work of managing their own rehabilitation. Second, I assess how—if

at all—California’s decarceration effort has shifted institutional goals, and what this

means for women. I argue that decarceration’s continued emphasis on control for the

sake of public safety impedes the transformative potential of efforts to restructure

the crime-processing system.

Keywords

decarceration, parole and probation, women’s incarceration and reentry, California’s

Public Safety Realignment

1San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Megan Welsh, School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA

92182-4505, USA.

Email: mwelsh@mail.sdsu.edu

698751FCXXXX10.1177/1557085117698751Feminist CriminologyWelsh

research-article2017

90 Feminist Criminology 14(1)

When I was in prison, that’s when I started rehabilitating, but it wasn’t nothing that the

prison did, it was what I did within myself. And it took me to be alone for two years in a

cell with books and a TV to make me really cry and cleanse my soul and accept things.

To just be like, ok, I gotta do this because nobody else is gonna do it for me and nobody

else cares.

—Dawn (24, on California state parole)

Introduction

After decades of punitive policies which have earned the United States the ignomini-

ous distinction of incarcerating the largest number of people, at the second highest

rate, compared with all other countries (Walmsley, 2016), the United States has tenta-

tively entered a moment of “penal optimism” (Green, 2013, 2015). A promising array

of reforms at federal, state, and local levels, aimed at both the “front” and “back” ends

of the crime-processing system, are underway to scale back our reliance on incarcera-

tion. The largest state-level reform effort is unfolding in California, where the passage

of the Public Safety Realignment legislation, coupled with the Supreme Court deci-

sion that spurred it, have been called “the most sweeping correctional experiment in

recent history” (Petersilia, 2013, p. 4) and the harbinger of “the new common sense of

high-crime societies” (Simon, 2014, p. 155). These grand descriptors hint at the trans-

formative potential of this large-scale effort toward decarceration.

However, the shift away from incarceration remains precarious both nationally and

in California (Cohen & Roeder, 2014; Tonry, 2014; Travis, 2014). Notably, the impetus

to reduce incarceration rates has thus far been largely economic, and jurisdictions have

done so reluctantly, if not outright involuntarily (Aviram, 2010; Cole, 2011; Gottschalk,

2015; Hallett, 2012). California in particular has enacted its changes unwillingly, after

fighting them for more than a decade (Travis, 2014). An additional concern is that the

reduction in imprisonment has been met not so much with a decrease in the overall

scale and scope of the crime-processing system, but rather in a shifting of its form,

primarily through the use of “alternatives to incarceration” administered locally.1 For

example, the centerpiece of California’s carceral realignment is a new form of com-

munity supervision administered at the local county level rather than by the state.

Relatedly, as the data presented here suggest, the interventions that our newly found

penal optimism expects will keep people out of prison continue to operate within

resource deficient environments. Thus, now, as throughout recent decades, people

ensnared in the crime-processing system must do the bulk of the work to both get out

and stay out. For women, a wealth of recent scholarship has yielded mixed results on

the efficacy of community supervision for enabling women to desist from crime and

rebuild their lives (Morash, Kashy, Smith, & Cobbina, 2014; Opsal, 2014; Sered &

Norton-Hawk, 2014; Stone, Morash, Goodson, Smith, & Cobbina, 2018; Turnbull &

Hannah-Moffat, 2009).

This article examines women’s experiences of being on two forms of community

supervision under California’s new regime. Drawing on in-depth interviews with for-

merly incarcerated women in one California county, I first offer a conceptual framework