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From Good (White) Girls to Bad (Black) Women: The Racial Order of the
Gendered Organization*
Jill A. McCorkel, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology
736 Thompson Hall
University of Massachusetts – Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003
## email not listed ##
413/545-4069
*Do not circulate or cite without the author’s permission
This study explores the significance of race in the gendered organization.
Specifically, to what extent are the gendered features of organizational life premised on
set of assumptions about race and racial relations? The study is based on an ethnographic
examination of the changing conditions in women’s prisons over the course of the last
decade. Beginning in the early 1990s, the ideology and enactment of punishment in
women’s prisons abruptly shifted. The number of women sentenced to incarceration
increased, the period of time women spent behind bars lengthened, and the conditions of
prison life became increasingly punitive. In short, women’s prisons adopted the “get
tough” and “hard core” punishment practices associated with men’s prisons. Participant
observation and interview data reveal that what caused the shift was not so much the
larger, top-down policy mandate of the War on Drugs, but a bottom-up legitimation crisis
that was linked to overcrowding, recidivism, and limitations on much-needed resources.
A crisis of structure gave rise to a crisis of meaning that resonated with the perceptions of
working and middle class whites regarding their vulnerability within both the institution
and the community. As the racial demographics of the inmate population shifted and
resource crises became increasingly pronounced, state actors discovered/constructed a
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