Disrupted lives, fragmented care: illness experiences of criminalized women

Thirty-three women recently released from a Massachusetts correctional facility were included in a qualitative study, carried out between January and July 2007, in which semi-structured, open-ended, individual interviews were conducted. The women described lives repeatedly disrupted, typically by sexual and physical violence, and then again by homelessness, joblessness, bad relationships, loss of their children, legal troubles, fractured physical and mental health, and fragmented medical attention by a large, disjointed variety of providers and facilities. This article argues that rather than repairing life disruptions, the women's fragmented health care histories tended to echo or even become part of that fragmentation. We suggest that criminalization and medicalization actually served as two sides of the same coin in the women's life experiences.