The other female imprisonment. The prison experience of women relatives of inmate.

Abstract

The social investigation in prisons has shown the centrality that the women who visit their relatives inmates in prison comply with the configuration of the prison order as well as the way in which the prison experience of detainees acquires. Far from a lateral, external and provisional position, as it has traditionally been thought, their participation through the material contribution of goods for the sustenance of the inmate but also due to the adhesion of many of them to the corrections project of the prisons, become fundamental agents of the prison space. This article dwells on a series of constituent elements of the prison experience of these women, from the body examination for admission to the way of organizing the time dedicated to the visit, stopping at the tensions and divisions that the different positions of these women generates within the family universe and giving particular importance to the mechanism composed of prison socialization and the regulatory fear of prison relations as the defining element of the quasi-forced feminization of this universe.