ABSTRACT
Ethnographic studies of microcontrol within the prison gave way to macro-and historical enquiries. In typical academic fashion, this move went too far: how, we might ask, does something like "late-modern penality" look to its (unwilling) recipients? Gartner and Kruttschnitt (Chapter 16) give us a model for answering such questions. Their case study of women in two Californian prisons is explicitly designed to see how macroshifts in the penal landscape are reflected in the women's experience of imprisonment. The rare feature of this research is not so much the inside/ outside comparison, but access to data that allow for comparisons over time: the California Institution of Women from the early sixties to the midnineties.
