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.



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