Research
Current Projects
The Impact of Parental Incarceration on Children
Over the last three decades, the number of children experiencing the
incarceration of a parent has grown dramatically and in lock step with increases
in the size of the adult prison population. Research on parental incarceration
finds that children are adversely impacted across multiple domains: academic,
behavioral, economic, psychological, medical, and legal. For example, children
with an incarcerated parent are at considerably higher risk for suicide,
depression, substance abuse, sexual assault, homelessness, incarceration, and
poverty. These outcomes suggest that children are rendered vulnerable through a
complex interplay of socioeconomic conditions, family dynamics, law, and penal
policies. Dr. McCorkel's research investigates two
aspects of this. First, with Dr. Brittnie Aiello, she explores how prisons
have become, for many children, a site of socialization -- one that is
potentially as influential for child development as schools, community centers,
and places of worship. How do prisons socialize the children of prisoners and
what are the implications of this for families? The first article
from this project is available
here.
Second, Dr. McCorkel is investigataing how children's legal right of access to a parent
influences prison policies and family relationships. This latter project
is comparative, focusing primarily on children's rights in European countries
including Ireland, Italy, Norway, and Wales.
Post-Secondary Education in Prison
In January 2009, then-governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a radical solution to resolving
California’s $20 billion budget shortfall: immediately reduce the
state’s prison population by 40,000 persons and constitutionally cap
corrections spending at 7% of the state budget. This may well
prove to be the moment when the tide began to turn on mass
incarceration. Nationwide, states facing similar budgetary crises
as California’s have begun experimenting with ways to reign in
corrections spending and reduce the size of prison populations.
Among the forefront of solutions to the problems associated with mass
incarceration are efforts to reduce recidivism rates by reinvigorating
treatment and educational programming in prisons. This is a
promising development as numerous studies establish the benefits of
treatment and educational programming, however, it is not without its
challenges. This study, with Dr. Robert DeFina, examines the complexities of running an
undergraduate program in a maximum security prison.
The aim is to irmprove educational programming as well as to examine
the impact of such programming on prison disciplinary rates,
recidivism, and life outcomes for prisoners.
Prison Privatization and Drug Treatment
In August 2016, the Department of Justice announced plans to phase out contracts
with private prison companies with the goal of eliminating private prisons in
the federal system altogether. For many scholars and prisoner rights advocates,
the announcement was an important step in dismantling the prison industrial
complex. However, this perspective obscures the extent to which the
largest for-profit prison companies have broadly diversified the services they
offer to federal, state, and local municipalities and, concomitantly, the source
of carceral profits. In a series of articles, Dr. McCorkel traces the rise
and growing popularity of one of the largest of these for-profit services --
drug treatment. Although rehabilitation was once considered an antidote to
mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, it now fuels the growth of
private prison companies and serves as a bedrock of profitability, even in a
time of declining prison populations.
Book
Dr. McCorkel is the author of Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of
Imprisonment
(New York University Press, 2013). Her book explores the impact
of mass incarceration in women's prisons and for women prisoners.
It is based on ethnographic research that she conducted in a state
prison for women during the height of the War on Drugs. Professor
Lorna Rhodes, author of Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison, notes, "Breaking Women
is a remarkable achievement. Jill McCorkel's account raises
critical questions about the social and psychological consequences of
the current trend toward punitive, for-profit 'habilitation.'
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this is prison
ethnography at its best." Dr. Lynne Haney, author of Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire,
comments, "This is the book so many sociologists of punishment, law,
and gender have been waiting for! Through a captivating ethnographic
account, Breaking Women
takes readers the U.S. penal system to trace how a particularly
gendered mode of punishment emerged to discipline and humiliate
women." Finally, Professor Shadd Maruna, author of Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives,
observes, "It has been observed that the eclipse of the prison
ethnography corresponded almost perfectly with the rise of mass
incarceration. This hugely important book shows precisely why we
need to reverse both trends. The women's stories that are so
vividly captured in this work demonstrate in painful detail that
efforts to 'break' human beings, even if in the name of reform, only
succeed at creating more victims."
In 2014, Breaking Women was
selected by the Society for the Study of Social Problems as a finalist for the
prestigious C. Wright Mills Award. That same year, Dr. McCorkel received
the Distinguished Scholar Award given by the American Society of Criminology
Division of Women and Crime for this book along with her accumulated body of
research on gender and incarceration.
Reviews of
Breaking Women
Nurse, Anne. 2014.
American Journal of Sociology 120(1):293-295.
Carlen, Pat.
2014. British Journal of Criminology 54(6):1232-1235.
Cumley, Samantha. 2014. Gender & Society 28(5):789-791.
Chesney-Lind, Meda. 2014. Punishment & Society 16(1):126-126.
Tiger, Rebecca. 2014. Theoretical Criminology 18(3):391-393.
Sered, Susan. 2014. Women's Review of Books
March/April
Mustakeem, Sowande'. 2014. Women's
Studies Quarterly 42(3 & 4):319-323.
Curriculum Vita
For the complete CV click here
Selected Publications
McCorkel, Jill. 2018 (In Press).
"Banking on Rehab: Market Logic and the Reconfiguration of Mass Incarceration."
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society.
Aiello, Brittnie and Jill
McCorkel. 2017. "'It Will Crush You Like a Bug': Maternal Incarceration,
Secondary Prisonization, and Children's Visitation." Punishment & Society.
McCorkel, Jill. 2013.
Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment.
NY: New York University Press.
Becker, Sarah and Jill
McCorkel. 2011. "The Gender of Criminal Opportunity: The
Impact of Male Co-Offenders on Women's Crime." Feminist Criminology 6(2):79-110.
McCorkel, Jill and Jason
Rodriquez. 2009. "Are You an African? The Politics of Self
Construction in Status-Based Social Movements." Social Problems 56(2):357-384.
McCorkel, Jill. 2004. "Criminally Dependent? Gender, Punishment, and the Rhetoric of Welfare Reform." Social Politics 11(3):386-410.
McCorkel, Jill. 2003. "Embodied Surveillance and the Gendering of Punishment." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32(1):41-76.
McCorkel, Jill and Kristen
Myers. 2003. "What Difference Does Difference Make?
Position and Privilege in the Field." Qualitative Sociology 26(2):199-231.