Doing Time on the Outside

Criminalized women are the focus of great interest in contemporary sociological research all over the world, however much of the growing body of work in this area has focused on the prison. Considerably less attention has been paid to women serving their sentences in the community. Doing Time on the Outside fills a gap in the research by focusing on the experiences of women on conditional release, and attempting to understand how some criminalized women avoid going back into custody given the many challenges they face.Using data collected in a series of interviews, MaDonna R. Maidment identifies four major factors characterizing women's attempts at re-integration. First, the fewer 'layers of social control' a woman lived under prior to her prison term, the greater her chances of staying out of prison. Those women accustomed to a lifetime of formal social controls are vulnerable and largely dependent on continued intervention.Maidment's important findings have significant implications: they beg us to re-examine how our society processes criminalized women, and to call into question well-entrenched contemporary policies, which have failed to account for the economic, social, and cultural realities of women's lives.