Women’s Exercise of Agency in the Context of Correctional Oppression

• In Event: Oppression, Injustice and Inequality - Schools and Prisons

Abstract

This paper examines women’s exercise of agency in a community reentry program that promises reform but reproduces oppression in women’s lives. Data from ethnographic research include observation and women’s narratives that are retrospective appraisals of choices and analysis of present conditions. Several themes for understanding how female offenders talk about and exercise agency are discussed. On women’s appraisal of agency, the women tend to define themselves as active agents and reject being considered victims even while they have experienced much oppression throughout their lives. Furthermore, agency is exercised as resistance to various forms of domination and control during the reentry experience as it was before when women were incarcerated, active in crime, in relationships, and inside the childhood home. Relatedly, resistance efforts are foremost individual and provide some measure of relief from control thus empowering women, but these efforts may reproduce harm in women’s lives demonstrating constraints of agency in action.

Author

• Gail A. Caputo, Rutgers University