Charlotte Allen, a lawyer by training, was an inspired choice to review   A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars, by Cristina Rathbone.


Here is a smidgen of Charlotte’s review to whet your appetite (she starts off talking about her own clients):


“At the very bottom rung of criminal society were the women. Their purpose was to be used–for sex, of course, but also for laundry, paycheck and welfare-check cash, stashing weapons, hauling drugs, prostitution proceeds, and whatever other advantage could be taken of their looks and their seemingly bottomless capacity for fantasizing that the men in their lives loved and would take care of them. There were no feminist fictions about the equality or supposed similarity of the sexes. When women got caught and convicted, their boyfriends typically disappeared. It was not unusual for a female prison inmate to have absolutely no visitors, ever. …


“The problem is that Rathbone seems not to understand why any of these women might be in prison, much less why they might belong there. In her view, those who commit ‘nonviolent’ crimes like the women she interviews should be somewhere else (where, exactly, she does not specify). But what counts as nonviolent? Driving the getaway car for your boyfriend’s robber ies? Helping your boyfriend commit a cold-blooded murder of an old man? Standing by while your husband beats your son black and blue, starting at age three, because you are too high on crack cocaine to notice or care? Dealing the crack whose use will inevitably lead to more battered children–and battered women as well? These are all incidents from the lives of the women whom Rathbone interviews. Rathbone represents a certain kind of highly educated romantic who imagines, à la Michel Foucault, that prisons exist not so much to punish wrongdoing or deter crime as to define social boundaries. It’s ‘locking up society’s most marginal citizens,’ punishing prostitutes and drug mules for ‘having sex and getting high.’…


“Rathbone’s central character is Denise, 32 at the book’s beginning and sentenced to a mandatory five years for selling cocaine to an undercover agent. Denise is mother to Patrick, an innocent boy of nine at the beginning of her term, and a hardened, angry juvenile-court prisoner himself at age 13 when she gets out. Patrick’s plight is heartbreaking, but one would feel more sympathy for Denise had she not spent her son’s childhood years smoking crack and going into denial while her husband, an alcoholic and chronically unemployed carpet-installer named Alan, regularly beat Patrick to a pulp, even as a toddler. Denise finally leaves Alan–to go to work as a stripper, even though she has college credits and middle-class parents. (That sort of job seems standard among Rathbone’s interviewees: Julie’s profession on the outside was dominatrix.)


“In prison, Denise enjoys frequent visits from her mother and college correspondence courses paid for by her father, yet the aimlessness that characterized her life on the outside continues. She alternates between despondency over Patrick and, when transferred to a now-closed co-ed minimum-security facility in Lancaster, nurturing a crush on (and arranging trysts with) a male prisoner named Chuck. Chuck’s profession on the outside: armed robber. …”