This qualitative narrative study shares the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated women, their reintegration into the community, and their journey to and through college. The eight participants span between 25 and 64 years of age, have spent varying lengths of time incarcerated, and are now either in college or recent graduates of both public…

Throughout history and in every culture and country, animals and humans have formed special bonds often as pets. Well trained pets have often been used in Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) programs in hospitals and nursing homes to help patients cope with illnesses and recovery while away from home. Pet visits to these facilities have documented…

The study provides information on the availability, types of learning activities, and perception of the female inmates towards these learning activities in prisons in Ondo, Osun, and Oyo States. The study adopted the survey design. Total enumeration sampling technique was used for the selection of the sample size. The study discovered that the…

In March-April, 2020, we communicated with a cohort of criminal justice-involved (CJI) women to see how they were navigating COVID-19, chronic illness, homelessness, and shelter-in-place orders in Oakland, Birmingham, and Kansas City. We report on conversations with N = 35 women (out of the cohort of 474 women) and our own observations from…

The investigative lesson plan traces major exercises from an early residency, Touching Outside the Walls, as a teaching artist to incarcerated women through Art Spring Organization, the process of building original pedagogy with the women that culminated in a public performance.

Self-esteem is vital to a law-abiding lifestyle and serves to promote successful rehabilitative and reintegrative outcomes, particularly for female offenders often plagued by low levels of self-worth. Prison-based program administrators have the opportunity to achieve their intended programmatic goals while offenders are incarcerated, in addition…

Data from the Nurse-Family Partnership intervention program were analyzed to compare the "selection" versus "unique" effects of maternal jail time on adolescent antisocial and health risk outcomes. Data from 320 women and their firstborn children were available from the prenatal, birth, and 15-year assessments. Consistent with…

A comparison of the characteristics of 337 Canadian adult female gang offenders with a matched sample of women offenders showed that they were more likely to have been sentenced for violent offenses, had a greater number of prior youth and criminal convictions, and served prior terms of incarceration. Gang members were also assessed as having…

The number of women under community-based criminal justice supervision in the U.S. has reached an all-time high. Because of this, there is an increased need for programs meant to address the unique needs of reentry women. In this article we examine a sample of 155 such programs to determine whether currently available reentry programs in the 10…

The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to explore the ways women probation and parole officers learn to negotiate power and interests in the criminal justice system. The women are considered officers of the courts and work within the constraints of the court system. The framework that informed this study was a critical feminist lens on the…

In this study, qualitative, in-depth interviews were conducted with 100 formerly incarcerated mothers to explore the relationship between attachment to children and desistance from criminal behavior. Exploratory data analysis revealed that mothers do believe that children play important roles in their desistance, consistent with the tenets of life…

Using data obtained from retrospective, in-depth interviews with 20 successful female parolees, the present study examines the effects of women offenders' relationships with people in their social networks (i.e., their network relationships) before, during, and after incarceration on their postrelease desistence from crime. Because women's social…

Criminologists have explored the reentry experience of formerly incarcerated adults, documented the pressing challenges of reentry, the correlates of recidivism, and the causes of desistance. Given scholars' focus on reentry to explain what factors impact criminal outcome, this raises the interesting question of whether and how such factors shape…

This research explores autobiographies of young women in detention, rehabilitation, and education as counter-stories to the official, institutional stories of their lives. The context of the study is a private detention facility in the United States; the participants are young women aged 15-19 years in a detention classroom; and data for the study…

This case study of the Therapeutic Community Program at Montana Women's Prison investigates the relationship between inmate reading levels and the self-help materials used for rehabilitative purposes within prison settings. The Therapeutic Community Handbook, published by the Montana Department of Corrections, is used as the primary method of…