Doing her own time? Women's responses to prison in the context of the old and the new penology

Assumptions about gender role socialization dominated explanations for gend er differences in responses to incarceration. We suspend these gender compa risons, which produced the focus on homosexuality and kinship networks in w omen's prisons, to determine how women's pre-prison experiences, lit the co ntext of two different institutions, influence the way they "do time." We a nalyze in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 70 female inmates house d in the California Institution for Women (CIW)-the oldest prison for women in the state-and Valley State Prison (VSP)-the newest prison for women. Th ese two institutions differ in structure, size, and management/philosophy, and accordingly necessitate the consideration of moderating situational eff ects. We use qualitative analysis to examine how women do time and to deter mine whether individual variations in doing time ave similar across very di fferent institutions.