Nursing Practice with Incarcerated Women: Caring Within Mandated (Sic) Alienation

The number of incarcerated women in the United States is increasing at an alarming rate. Incarcerated women often come from environments that are significant for violence, drug abuse, and a kind of chronic chaos. Many enter the penal system with acute and chronic physical problems along with mental health issues that have long gone unaddressed. From a critical hermeneutical perspective, professional and personal experience and dialogical engagement with other prison nurses are combined to examine the structure and development of caring practices behind prison walls. Analysis to date reveals the distorting and perverting effect prison systems have on the practice of nursing, a situation in which personal relationships are forbidden. In substantive ways, nurses are ordered not to care.