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Giallombardo, Rose (1925–1993)

Rose Giallombardo is best known for her research on the inmate culture of a women's prison. Her 1966 book, Society of Women: A Study of a Women's Prison, helped raise questions about the degree to which studies based on field work in men's institutions were applicable to women. Giallombardo argued that women respond to the pains of imprisonment by re-creating traditional family roles among the inmate population. These informal systems sustain women's emotional need for social relationships and are shaped by their perception of female role expectations. Giallombardo's study ensured that gender issues could not be overlooked in prison research. Her findings continue to be cited in subsequent works that examine similarities and differences between male and female prisons and prisoners.

Biographical Details

Giallombardo completed her doctoral work at Northwestern University in 1965. Her dissertation, based on one year's ethnographic study at the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, was published in 1966 as Society of Women: A Study of a Women's Prison. The study has become one of the standard sources for descriptions of women inmate's culture. Her later work, The Social World of Imprisoned Girls: A Comparative Study of Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents, published in 1974, summarized her earlier research findings and examined the presence of similar cultural elements within differing juvenile institutional settings. In 1966, Giallombardo edited a widely used reader, Juvenile Delinquency: A Book of Readings, revised through 1982, as well as editing Contemporary Social Issues in 1975. She held faculty appointments at New York University from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Chicago from 1967 to 1972. During this period, she was a senior study director at the National Opinion Research Center and a research associate at the Center for Social Organization Studies.

Research Background

Giallombardo placed her research in the context of earlier publications on inmate culture, beginning with Donald Clemmer's 1940 classic ethnographic study, The Prison Community, and Gresham M. Sykes's Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison, published in 1958. These authors argued that inmate culture develops in an effort to lessen the pains of imprisonment within systems of near total control. The deprivations of prison are viewed as the source of a culture resistant to staff and supportive of an “inmate code” that values loyalty, within a violent environment marked by struggles for power and goods. The tension between inmate solidarity and exploitive alienation gives rise to argot roles—“rats,” “merchants and gorillas,” “wolves, punks, and fags” and “real men,” for example; as well as inmate norms—” do your own time,” “don't trust anybody” and “don't snitch”—that reflect this reality. Giallombardo sought to investigate whether similar norms and roles existed in women's prisons.

Society of Women

Giallombardo argued that women's responses to prison reflected their sexual roles and institutional expectations in the larger society. Her work was influenced by a dominant cultural perception that men's status was decided by their occupational positions in the market place, while women's prestige and status derived from their roles as wives and mothers within the home. This view led Giallombardo (1974) to conclude that homosexual “marriage” relationships and the extensive “family groups” and other kinship ties she found at Alderson integrated the women into a social system that represented “an attempt to create a substitute universe within the prison” (p. 2). She asserted that the homosexual relationship, pivotal in the women's lives, was relatively unstable and competitive, while overlapping kinship structures provided stable networks of mutual support for the women.

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