Women at the Wall: A Study of Prisoners' Wives Doing Time on the Outside.

This thesis examines the social accommodations made by prisoners' wives as their husbands pass through various stages in the criminalization process. A combination of methods--in-depth interviews with wives, structured interviews with married prisoners, systematic examinations of prison records, summaries of women's "rap sessions," and a variety of other sources of data--were used to construct an ethnographic account of the social worlds of thirty women married to men incarcerated in two prisons in Vermont.