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Transgender-responsive policies might seem like a radical idea for prisons, but California's creation of tailored housing policies for gender-nonconforming prisoners began in 1941. In Gender Bound, Joss T. Greene investigates how and why California prisons have attempted to manage gender nonconformity over the past eighty years, and how incarcerated people have responded in turn. Drawing on archival research, ethnographic observation, and 136 interviews with formerly incarcerated trans people, advocates, policymakers, and former prison staff, Gender Bound offers new insight into the history of gender, the intersectional nature of punishment, and steadfast struggles for freedom.
 

"Deeply researched and brilliantly theorized, Gender Bound is one of the first historical accounts of gender nonconformity in the US penal system. Spanning several decades, it reveals how prisons redrew the boundaries of gender as they monitored and managed those under their control. An incisive and timely analysis that teaches us as much about the present as the past."—Lynne Haney, author of Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers“With a precise focus on how gender-nonconforming prisoners challenged the changing control logics in California's prison system from World War II through the era of mass incarceration and into the current era of "care"-oriented reform, Gender Bound offers a unique lens to understand the racial and gender dynamics of penal change. A major contribution to the sociology of punishment and gender."—Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, UC Berkeley School of Law"Gender Bound is a brilliant and deeply original text that transforms how we understand punishment, state power, and the shortcomings of traditional reform. Joss Greene's careful sociological analysis powerfully centers trans and gender-nonconforming prisoners and, through their experiences, reveals how prisons produce gender as a technology of governance. A remarkable achievement."—Monica C. Bell, Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Sociology, Yale Law School