What is life like for women behind bars, and how different is it from men in prison? These are two of the questions investigative journalist Cristina Rathbone explored during the time she spent looking at the people inside and the people operating the country’s oldest women’s prison.
At MCI-Framingham in Massachusetts, she found more despair than violence in the prisoner’s stories. While nearly 70 percent of the state’s male inmates are serving time for violent crimes, a majority of women in jail are sentenced for non-violent offenses. And more than two-thirds of those women are mothers.
Rathbone talks about the implications of those distinctions for the inmates and the families in her book “A World Apart: Women, Prison and life Behind Bars.”
Guests:
Cristina Rathbone, author of “A World Apart : Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars.”