A Woman's Place

...In prison, Denise enjoys frequent visits from her mother and college correspondence courses paid for by her father, yet the aimlessness that characterized her life on the outside continues...

...Almost all have serious drug problems themselves, and about half are victims of domestic abuse...

...It's "locking up society's most marginal citizens," punishing prostitutes and drug mules for "having sex and getting high...

...When women got caught and convicted, their boyfriends typically disappeared...

...This strikes me as true enough...

...Rathbone does identify genuine problems with the women's penal system...

...Driving the getaway car for your boyfriend's robberies...

...Their purpose was to be used—for sex, of course, but also for laundry, paycheck and welfare-check cash, stashing weapons, hauling drugs, prostitution proceeds, and whatever other advantage could be taken of their looks and their seemingly bottomless capacity for fantasizing that the men in their lives loved and would take care of them...

...While I don't agree with Rathbone that this excuses their crimes, I do agree that they deserve a kind of attention that the current system does not give them...

...The men in their lives know it and take advantage of it...

...At the very bottom rung of criminal society were the women...

...In her view, those who commit "nonviolent" crimes like the women she interviews should be somewhere else (where, exactly, she does not specify...

...Denise finally leaves Alan—to go to work as a stripper, even though she has college credits and middle-class parents...

...Rathbone's central character is Denise, 32 at the book's beginning and sentenced to a mandatory five years for selling cocaine to an undercover agent...

...The widespread and flagrant incidence of guard-inmate sex in women's prisons, much of it less than voluntary, is unconscionable...

...Some mandatory-sentencing schemes for drug violations are undoubtedly too harsh on first-time offenders (although, unlike Rathbone, I can't summon much sympathy for the dealers themselves...

...Other people existed to be exploited...

...Yet she never questions whether Denise herself might be responsible for this, and responsible, at least in part, for her series of choices that tore apart the life of her son...

...prisons for both men and women...

...Indeed, Rathbone does not seem to understand why prisons have rules— such as bans on possessing silverware in your cell or corresponding with inmates at other institutions—and she deems all of them equally arbitrary...

...For all Rathbone's empathy with her subjects, which undoubtedly encouraged them to open up to her, she has nonetheless produced a meagerly reported book...

...That sort of job seems standard among Rathbone's interviewees: Julie's profession on the outside was dominatrix...

...Charlotte Allen is the author, most recently, of The Human Christ...

...Rathbone represents a certain kind of highly educated romantic who imagines, a la Michel Foucault, that prisons exist not so much to punish wrongdoing or deter crime as to define social boundaries...

...These are all incidents from the lives of the women whom Rathbone interviews...

...the weak to be consumed by the strong...

...For obvious security reasons, most prisons are wary of admitting strangers...

...Rathbone complains that Denise leaves prison "with no more demonstrable skills than she had when she entered...

...Prisons ought to provide more opportunities for inmates to learn trades and rehabilitate themselves (although the Massachusetts system that Rathbone describes seems no worse than most others...

...There were no feminist fictions about the equality or supposed similarity of the sexes...

...So the book, as she admits, lacks concrete, observed details of the specifics of prison life: what was on the menu in the dining hall, for example, or what her interviewees' cells looked like...

...Rath-bone writes: "Predominantly incarcerated for nonviolent, drug-related offenses, they are frequently mere accessories to their crimes: girlfriends, wives, or lovers of drug dealers...

...That was something I "would have considered doing myself when I was in my teens," Rathbone writes...

...She informs the reader that she disbelieves in "respecting authority" and admires the "glee of self-assertion and inner swagger" that one of the inmates, 22-year-old "Julie" (the names are invented), in for armed robbery after a series of heroin-soaked heists with her boyfriend, feels about breaking prison rules, especially prohibitions against having sex with male guards...

...One of the women she interviews, Charlene, agreed to smuggle cocaine in her clothes in return for $10,000 and a weekend at a fancy beach hotel in Jamaica...

...Dealing the crack whose use will inevitably lead to more battered children—and battered women as well...

...Charlene got caught at the airport and sent up for 15 years under Massachusetts's tough mandatory-sentencing laws for drug crimes...

...Helping your boyfriend commit a cold-blooded murder of an old man...

...Furthermore, she succeeds in talking to only a handful of inmates—some of them, it is clear, only once—so she resorts to padding her narrative with snippets of Massachusetts prison history, a visit to a "corrections fair" (the latest in chains and stun guns), and an engrossing account of wzuw.Jailbabes.com, a now-defunct Internet "dating service" in which men with a taste for that sort of thing mailed money to female inmates in return for whatever favors they could snatch during visiting hours...

...The problem is that Rathbone seems not to understand why any of these women might be in prison, much less why they might belong there...

...Denise is mother to Patrick, an innocent boy of nine at the beginning of her term, and a hardened, angry juvenile-court prisoner himself at age 13 when she gets out...

...My clients lived in a world that exactly mirrored the law-abiding world in its clearly marked social hierarchies and firm punishments for transgressions...

...Rathbone hesitates to take a standard prison tour at one of the institutions she writes about, the maximum security facility at Framingham, because that might amount to conceding the "legitimacy" of the state penal system...

...Standing by while your husband beats your son black and blue, starting at age three, because you are too high on crack cocaine to notice or care...

...During the three years I spent loitering in rundown courtrooms and filthy jail visiting rooms, where I often had to clear my chair of gum, discarded half-candy bars, and hairs from the comb of the previous occupant before I could sit down, I learned a great deal about criminal society...

...It was not unusual for a female prison inmate to have absolutely no visitors, ever...

...Women lawbreakers are, indeed, a "world apart...

...As a writer myself, I sympathize with a fellow writer denied access to sources, but I see no reason journalists should have greater privileges than the rest of the public...

...One of the virtues of Cristina Rath-bone's book, the fruit of a series of interviews over four years with several women at two Massachusetts prisons, is that she understands very well, if for the wrong reasons, that women lawbreakers are "startlingly unlike" their aggressive male counterparts (hence her title, A World Apart...

...That is about as far as Rathbone got, too, despite court orders in her favor...

...Except that the criminals' world was stripped of all the civility, generosity, kindness, honesty, fairness, affection, and pity that characterize the lives of the rest of us, even if only intermittently...

...Julie is openly bisexual, but whether her relationship with Denise is lesbian Rathbone does not say...

...Chuck's profession on the outside: armed robber...

...She alternates between despondency over Patrick and, when transferred to a now-closed co-ed minimum-security facility in Lancaster, nurturing a crush on (and arranging trysts with) a male prisoner named Chuck...

...It is part of a distressing trend over the past two decades of turning women's prisons into facsimiles of men's prisons, stripping them of the curtains, amenities, scope for modesty, and tokens of gentility that recognized that women inmates, while as morally culpable as men, were less overtly aggressive and possibly more amenable to reform...

...and even as a lawyer, I rarely got past visiting rooms...

...Denise also indulges an intense, intimate, and jealousy-marked friendship with the much younger Julie...

...Good thing she didn't...

...But what counts as nonviolent...

...Unlike Ted Conover, author of the widely acclaimed Newjack, who took a job as a prison guard so that he could observe penal institutions and their occupants from the inside, Rathbone decided to sue the state, claiming a right to interview inmates as a member of the media...

...Patrick's plight is heartbreaking, but one would feel more sympathy for Denise had she not spent her son's childhood years smoking crack and going into denial while her husband, an alcoholic and chronically unemployed carpet-installer named Alan, regularly beat Patrick to a pulp, even as a toddler...

...Julie, as might be expected, is a Jail Babe...

...Thanks to sex-discrimination lawsuits, correctional officers of the opposite gender, monitoring even one's most intimate activities, are nowadays commonplace in U.S...