Words Behind Walls: Exploring the Merits of Literacy Programs for Incarcerated Women
Open Access DepositedIn the wake of privatization and profit-driven practices, mass incarceration in the United States is a pressing issue with far-reaching consequences for families nationwide, imposing enduring psychological and physiological trauma on individuals. While various aids exist for reentry into society, insufficient attention has been devoted to exploring programs within prison walls, specifically those that operate with a gendered focus. Contemporary scholars dub this approach “gender-responsive programming,” in which interventions seek to address the intersection of criminality and gender, or how criminality uniquely impacts women. This research zeroes in on female prison populations and the post-incarceration impact of gender-responsive programming. While substantial literature exists on these individual subjects, this study aims to explore the intersection of these two fields to determine whether and how gender-responsive programming uniquely benefits incarcerated women, specifically considering recidivism rates. By conducting quantitative analyses on data describing the re-entry experiences of incarcerated women from Pennsylvania prisons, it is hypothesized that increased participation in gender-responsive prison programming will reduce recidivism rates for mothers upon reentry; if so, there may be great value in implementing such programming on a larger scale to reduce recidivism rates for mothers who might not benefit from traditional programming. Keywords: Incarceration, gender-responsive prison programming, incarcerated women, matricentric incarceration, maternal incarceration, recidivism, correctional education
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