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This article focuses on human actors and a spatial setting which are rarely the subject of criminological inquiry. Both the actors (drug-involved low-level female offenders) and the setting in which they reside (the rural-urban fringe) have been relegated to some nether world of criminal justice scholarship: they are considered neither significant nor consequential enough to warrant scientific interest, and when they do enter the scholarly picture it is often in a caricaturelike way. Indeed, the women of interest here, drug-involved recidivist property and public order offenders, often have been reduced in the media to drug-addled, crystal-meth scarred beings with minimal voice, little context, and even less meaning, inhabiting a world that is defined simply for what it is not -neither urban, nor rural. The research took place in four upstate New York counties, with data collected by way of intensive, qualitative interviews from four sources: the Sheriffs in each county, other law enforcement personnel (including members of the road patrol and drug task forces for the county), jail staff, and 20 women being held in local county jails who met the selection criteria. In framing the inquiry, emphasis was placed on exploring the effects of the rural-urban fringe setting on the women's entry into drug / criminal activity and the roles played by community institutions, arrangements, and opportunity structures to facilitate their involvement in these pursuits.

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The Rochester Study: A Quasi-Ethnography of Women Street Hustlers L isa Maher (1997), in her critique of early feminist research, described how the typical woman offender is portrayed: [She is a] passive [victim] of oppressive social structures, relations and substances, or some combination thereof.... Constituted by and through [her] status as victim,... devoid of choice, responsibility, or accountability; [a fragment] of social debris floundering in a theoretical tide ofvictimage. (p. 1)Similarly, Daly (1992) discussed how in this literature the "concept of blurred boundaries" or the "seamless web of victimization to criminalization" produces "accounts which focus on victimization and leave little agency, responsibility, or meaning to women's law-breaking" (p. 48). Although later researchers certainly attempted to redress this deterministic portrayal, they likewise proceeded in the context of a gender-based framework, with assumptions about women's complete emancipation from gender restraints made because of the mistaken observation that any activity is the same thing as liberation (Maher, 1997).The picture I developed of the women in this study was far more complex than that suggested by much of prior research. In fact, there was more than one picture generated by these women. Although some indeed appeared to be true victims-or, as Maher wrote, were constituted solely through their "victimage," with every bad thing they had ever done justified as a way to hurt someone from their pasts-there were far more 53

Designing the Research and Analyzing the Data I n the summer and fall of 2005,1 became a daily visitor to the Monroe County Correctional Facility (MCF), a direct-supervision 1 local penitentiary located in a suburb of Rochester, New York. Housing inmates sentenced to 1 year and under only, 2 this facility, built in 1990, lies on a stretch of heavily traveled commercial highway and is bordered by the county medical examiner's office on one end and a community college on another. There is no fence around the jail and, unlike the county's maximum security detention facilities in downtown Rochester, it is classified as a medium security institution. Looking more like a school than a penitentiary, on both the outside and the inside, the facility consists of six large dormitory-like housing areas where inmates occupy separate cubicles at night and congregate in a communal living space, with tables and chairs and two televisions, during the day. I conducted my research with the women housed in this facility.In chapter 3 of this volume, I used the term quasi-ethnography to describe the design of my research, and I briefly discussed its commonalities with and differences from more traditional, field-based ethnography. I do not repeat that discussion here, but I do highlight the parameters of my data 1 Direct-supervision facilities have several distinguishing characteristics. First, they typically entail an open style of housing, consisting of dormitory-like arrangements or individual cubicles instead of cells. Second, they usually are marked by a style of supervision that places the deputy within the housing unit itself with nothing encumbering his or her line of vision. Finally, they are supposed to have a more open style of living, with inmates freely circulating and coming and going from his or her cubicle at will. 2 In New York State, local correctional facilities, known as penitentiaries, are county run, usually but not always under the supervision of the sheriff. They house inmates who have individual sentences of 1 year or less.