Uncover Doing Time Together: Love And Family In The Shadow Of The Prison Presented By Megan Comfort Categorized In Printable Format

thoughtful detail and analysis, Comfort dissects and illuminates how incarceration affects communities and families outside the prison walls, Drawn from her ethnographic research at San Quentin State Prison, Comfort shows the perspective of women whose partners are incarcerated and how those relationships shift when that person is released.
Good book for anyone interested in the sociology and intersection of relationship and incarceration, A bit technical in nature, but mostly a fascinating and insightful look at the effect that prison has on women whose men are in prison, Contains many engaging snippets which were gleaned from extensive interviews and thorough fieldwork, 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 nations 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, fiancés, 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 prisons intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into “quasiinmates,” 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 Americas massive prison system, Comforts book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.
The good, the bad, and the ugly:

The goodThe subject matter of this book was really intriguing, It focused on the women of male inmates and how their incarceration affects them emotionally, physically, economically, and spiritually, It was a very enlightening book on a subject matter I have no experience with, The research was thorough and the book provided a lot of statistics to bolster the author's claims, Which leads to the bad, . .

The badI never really understood what the motive behind writing this book was, I originally thought it was going to portray an unbias view of women in relationships with prisoners, but that was clearly thrown out the window during the first chapter where the waiting room is described in great detail.
The author seems to place a lot of emphasis on how the Correctional System is making the women "secondary prisoners" by making the prison a horrible place to visit.
No duh! This isn't summer camp folks!

The uglywhat's never mentioned in the book is that there is no one making these women endure these relationships.
At any time, they are free to leave their partners and most of the general population would applaud them for doing so, However, for a multitude of reasons they don't leave and therefore, must conform to the "laws" of the prison, Another ugly aspectwhile I'm sure that the author was trying to remain neutral as far as racial and ethnic lines went, the book did come across as a slightly skewed opinion on how the prisons are just racial segregation centers for the disadvantaged.


Overall, it was a fascinatingalbeit, technicalread about maintaining a relationship with someone doing time inside a penitentiary, The only caution I would advise is to begin with an open mind and skim the

racial implications stated, Megan Comfort is a sociologist at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, .