This thesis examines the social accommodations made by prisoners' wives as their husbands pass through various stages in the criminalization process. A combination of methods--in-depth interviews with wives, structured interviews with married prisoners, systematic examinations of prison records, summaries of women's "rap sessions," and a variety of other sources of data--were used to construct an ethnographic account of the social worlds of thirty women married to men incarcerated in two prisons in Vermont. / Wives' accounts are quite consistent with other data sources. Prisoners' wives display considerable ingenuity in devising explanations and interpretations of their husbands' criminal behavior which allow their marriages to continue. The effect of these definitions is to "normalize" this behavior and to buffer the wives from external definitions of the situations in which they find themselves. While wives vary these interpretations--and the attendant normalization strategies they employ--depending on circumstances, five major techniques emerge: (1) nurturing, (2) "pain-in-the-ass" behavior, (3) passive distance, (4) co-deviance, and (5) reluctant co-deviance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.71858 |
| Date | January 1984 |
| Creators | Fishman, Laura. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Sociology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000191303, proquestno: AAINK66572, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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