The United States is a carceral society. This is a well-known fact, which has received renewed currency in light of the 2016 presidential election, and debate over the impact of the Clinton-era crime bill. Most of the scholarly writing on this issue is in areas such as criminology, employing quantitative and aggregative methods. Here, Susan Dewey and Rhett Epler undertake a survey of recent ethnographic literature on incarcerated women, including work by such women themselves. Ethnography, including auto-ethnography, makes the lives of these women legible to those of us on the outside, shedding light on the cultures that arise in these extraordinary circumstances. One thing that we see quite clearly is the intersectionality of different subaltern and minority statuses: race and sexual orientation, as well as femininity itself. One thing that is clear in most of these cases is that prison was a nearly pre-ordained outcome of lives lived in uncertain, impoverished, and violent circumstances. One female inmate stated simply that prison was the safest place she had ever lived. Also under consideration are carceral institutions other than prisons, especially clinics and “halfway houses.” These represent an attempt to provide women a means of re-entering society successfully. Notably, both of the essay’s authors have experience working in such a setting. The literature under consideration offers a range of perspectives on such institutions, including quite critical ones. Of course, we do not expect ethnographies to offer readymade policy recommendations. Nonetheless, with such a large portion of the U.S. population experiencing some form of incarceration or supervision, ethnography is the best tool to understand what is happening from various perspectives, most importantly that of the inmates themselves.

中文翻译：

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编辑介绍

美国是一个监护社会。这是一个众所周知的事实，鉴于2016年总统大选以及克林顿时代犯罪法案的影响，该货币已重新获得币值。关于这个问题的大多数学术著作都是在犯罪学等领域，采用定量和综合方法。在这里，苏珊·杜威（Susan Dewey）和瑞德·埃普勒（Rhett Epler）对最近有关被监禁妇女的人种学文献进行了调查，包括这些妇女本身的工作。人种学，包括自动人种学，使这些妇女的生活对外界的我们而言是清晰易懂的，从而阐明了在这些特殊情况下产生的文化。我们非常清楚地看到的一件事是，不同的下属和少数群体身份之间的相互关系：种族和性取向以及女性气质本身。在大多数情况下，很明显的一件事是，监狱是生活在不确定，贫困和暴力环境中的几乎预定的结果。一名女囚犯简单地说，监狱是她住过的最安全的地方。除监狱以外的其他监狱机构也在考虑之中，尤其是诊所和“中途宿舍”。这些是为妇女提供一种成功重新进入社会的手段的尝试。值得注意的是，本文的两位作者都有在这样的环境中工作的经验。所考虑的文献对这类机构提出了各种观点，包括相当关键的观点。当然，我们不期望民族志提供现成的政策建议。但是，由于美国大部分人口都受到某种形式的监禁或监督，