ABSTRACT
One does not come to the study of women in prison easily. For me it was an indirect route, from the study of violence against women, to the study of perpetrators, to the study of the prisons where perpetrators were incarcerated, and finally to the study of women inside prisons. Years ago a group of my students asked to visit a maximum-security penitentiary in upstate New York. I was wary of accommodating them, since I maintained the usual stereotypes of prisoners. But I also knew of the racist nature of the criminal justice system and wanted the students to see firsthand how virulent the prison-industrial-complex had grown in the last decade. After that simple trip I transformed my academic focus.
