ABSTRACT
In 1970, when the number of women incarcerated in U.S. state and federal prisons (5,635) was at its lowest point since 1938, scholarly interest in women in prison was limited and largely concerned with how women's ways of coping with imprisonment compared to men's. In 2000 the United States imprisoned over 85,000 women 1and, perhaps not surprisingly, the literature on women in prison had expanded accordingly to include overviews of the demographic characteristics and life histories of female inmates, detailed needs assessments and reviews of gender-specific programs, and qualitative research on the culture of women's prisons and women's adaptations to prison life.2 This literature suggests that even as the female prison population in the United States increased fifteenfold, there was a dreary monotony both in the types of women going to prisonthe poor, racial minorities, and single mothers continued to be overrepresented; and in the problems they faced inside-access to adequate medical care, to education and vocational training, to drug treatment, and to programs addressed to their histories of physical and sexual abuse.
