Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison - Tapa dura

"The claim that prison can be a source of welfare provision, health care, and even romantic intimacy for people typically denied more adequate ways to meet these human needs will strike many readers as counterintuitive and politically problematic, but it is true nevertheless. Megan Comfort's beautifully written book does a brilliant job of tracing this, and other, complex truths in a detached, detailed, and thoroughly insightful manner." - David Garland, author of The Culture of Control"

By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation's two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? "Doing Time Together" vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiances, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison's intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into quasi-inmates, eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America's massive prison system, Comfort's book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.