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There is a call for drawing on client voice to provide a rich, nuanced understanding of factors influencing substance treatment engagement as to maximizing treatment benefits. We interviewed 60 clients in a short-term inpatient substance treatment program and examined facilitators and barriers to treatment engagement. Thematic analysis yielded four themes, including perceived treatment needs, trust and counselor rapport, peer inspiration, and organizational factors. Perceived treatment needs serve as both a facilitator and a barrier wherein the acknowledgment of needs led to greater treatment engagement whereas a lack of perceived needs hindered treatment engagement. The establishment of trust and counselor rapport and peer inspiration facilitated treatment engagement. Clients rated several organizational factors including a lack of treatment provision, gender-responsive treatment and infrastructure, and ineffective communication with nonclinical staff as barriers to treatment engagement. Clinical implications include enhancing treatment motivation and counselor rapport, establishing gender-responsive treatment programs, and providing trainings for staff.

Food is a significant component of life; its preparation is gendered and associated with caregiving roles. For incarcerated women, food is especially salient. Inmate-created recipes can assist with asserting pro-social identities and responding to powerlessness. It is less certain if incarcerated mothers draw upon recipes to emphasize mothering identities. Therefore, this study uses focus groups at a jail and additionally analyzes contributed recipes to explore the way dessert-making behind bars affirms motherhood. Results suggest that dessert preparation aids in disrupting negative stereotypes, illuminates the fragility of incarcerated mothering, and highlights agentic practices. Implications for policy and research are included.

Cookbooks are cultural artifacts, providing glimpses into the ways in which a society views itself. Cookbooks of incarcerated individuals are notably absent from the landscape of scholarly work, although the genre can tell us much about a largely invisible segment of society. Using a narrative criminology approach, this project situates inmate‐authored cookbooks as narrative and examines 13 inmate‐authored cookbooks to determine how the structural elements of these narratives establish (or fail to establish) links with wider, mainstream society. Results suggest that the majority of inmate‐authored cookbooks employ narrative structures and strategies that engage with outside society by challenging the nature of ‘otherness’. Only a few cookbooks utilise such strategies as inside humour or violent narratives to mark the boundaries of prison culture. Findings help to extend the theoretical usefulness of narrative criminology, broaden and deepen our understanding of the prison experience, and establish the prison cookbook as a valid form of narrative.

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