Judith Pallot and Elena Katz, Waiting at the Prison Gate: Women, Identity and the Russian Penal System. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017, 352 pages

Over the last three generations, nearly every Russian family have had a family member in prison at some time. Meanwhile, wives and female relatives of prisoners have been ignored by research, while there is abundant scholarship on Russian crime and prison subcultures, especially on the so-called Thieves-in-Law (vory-v-zakone). Finally, Judith Pallot and Elena Katz, in Waiting at the Prison Gate: Women, Identity and the Russian Penal System, encapsulate the experience of wives and female relat...