In recent decades, the nature of criminal punishment has undergone change in the United States. This case study of women serving time in California in the 1960s and 1990s examines key points in this recent history. In this 2005 book, the authors begin with a look at imprisonment at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official discourse. They compare women's experiences in the 1990s, at the California Institution for Women and the Valley State Prison, when the recent 'get tough' era was near its peak. Drawing on archival data, interviews, and surveys, their analysis considers the relationships among official philosophies and practices of imprisonment, women's responses to the prison regime, and relations between women prisoners. The experiences of women prisoners reflected the transformations Americans have witnessed in punishment over recent decades, but they also mirrored the deprivations and restrictions of imprisonment.

"A fascinating account of the changing ways in which women experience and resist imprisonment. By revisiting David Ward and Gene Kassebaum's classic study of women's imprisonment and then comparing it to the experiences of contemporary women in the same penal institution in California, Rosemary Gartner and Candace Kruttschnitt provide a richly textured and original analysis of changes in the nature of punishment that occurred over the second part of the twentieth century. Marking Time in the Golden State should re-energize the flagging field of prison ethnography in the U.S.A. while providing a timely reminder of the gendered nature of punitive practices and beliefs." Mary Bosworth, Wesleyan University

"This is a carefully conducted and timely study of the evolving practices and ideologies of womenas imprisonment. It shows that women in prison are no longer too few to counta. It is stimulating, authoritative, and well balanced, and explains how the experience of imprisonment for women in prison has changed in very significant ways over time." Alison Liebling, Cambridge University

"Over the last four decades the experience of imprisonment has been mass distributed in the United States on a scale and to a degree of severity unprecedented in the history of democratic societies. During the same time, a once vigorous empirical sociology of the prison has largely slumbered, interrupted only by increasingly dark theoretical visions. This book is our wake up call." Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley