Gender in the Prison Setting: The Privacy-Equal Employment Dilemma

• NCJ Number: 167954
• Journal: Women and Criminal Justice Volume: 7 Issue: 2 Dated: (1996) Pages: 23-42
• Author(s): K J Maschke
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 20 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study identifies and analyzes the gendered dimensions of cases that involve privacy rights for inmates and equal employment opportunity for correctional officers.

Abstract

The court cases examined are Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977), which examined whether Alabama could prohibit women from working in its male maximum-security penitentiaries; Forts v. Ward (1978), which considered whether female inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York had their privacy right violated because male correctional officers were assigned to duties in housing and hospital units; and Torres v. Wisconsin (1988a, 1988b), which examined whether male correctional officers could be restricted from working in the living units of a women's prison. In Dothard v. Rawlinson, the court held that when their "womanhood" poses a threat to prison security, female correctional officers can be prohibited from working in male institutions. Male correctional officers were also excluded from some positions, but not because their "manhood" threatened the maintenance of security (Forts v. Ward). In the second "Torres" decision, the court agreed that men could be prohibited from working in some areas of women's prisons in order to implement a feminist theory of rehabilitation. The privacy-equal employment cases show the limits of litigation in the prison context. Litigation that asserts "rights" for inmates and correctional officers occurs against the backdrop of the gendered dimensions of prisons and detracts attention from the "unprecedented imprisonment binge" in the United States and its impact on women offenders (Chesney-Lind, 1991). The narrow legal lenses through which judges viewed the privacy-equal employment dilemma made it difficult for them to see how multilayered dimensions of gender were embedded in the cases before them. Although judges tended to rule that equal employment rights outweighed the privacy interest of male and female inmates, they also upheld some job restrictions for both male and female correctional officers. In doing so, they showed the complexities of gender in the prison setting. 13 notes, 44 references, and an appended list of cases cited