Abstract
Even though international research on men’s prisons is no longer oblivious to gender, approaches to women’s prisons have tended to be more gender-bound as a whole. Besides having informed a specific reflexive agenda of representation, the angle of gender has presided over most research issues as an analytical overall parti pris—from the gendered nature of prison regimes to the gendered character of prison cultures, socialities and ‘pains of imprisonment’. This more ‘gendercentric’ agenda is, however, becoming more diversified for theoretical and empirical reasons alike. These involve a recognition of the diversity of women prisoners’ experiences and identities, and an attention to a wider variety of aspects of carceral life. Drawing on field approaches to the Portuguese carceral world spanning three decades, I propose to take this debate further by focusing on contextual shifts in the actual saliency of gender as a category of identity and social life in women’s prisons.
(UID/Ant/04038/2013)
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Notes
- 1.
The tensions between what is formally defined in the legal requirements (which promote gender equality ) and everyday social practices are particularly visible in parenting in prison, for example. Prison regulations have also incorporated the principles of neutrality and formal equality between women and men. Currently, the law regulating children’s stay in prison is gender neutral ; that is, both imprisoned mothers and fathers are allowed to keep their offspring with them inside prison facilities (Law 115/2009). However, the implementation of this principle is unequal. Logistics and practical dispositions render most men’s prisons hardly suitable for children to reside with their imprisoned fathers. For example, there are no day-care centres in male institutions, nor adequate cells that are physically separated from other prison blocks (cf. Law 51/2011). Furthermore, although the need to meet female prisoners ’ ‘special needs’ regarding motherhood is mentioned in state guidelines about parenting in prison, there is no equivalent reference regarding fathering (Law 115/2009).
- 2.
Estatísticas da Justiça, Ministério da Justiça (1987–2000).
- 3.
As an example analysed in Cunha’s study (2002) documenting these shifts during the 1990s, in 1997 46% of incarcerated men were imprisoned for property offenses and 34% for drug-related crimes , against 16% and 69%, respectively, in the female case (Estatísticas da Justiça, Ministério da Justiça, 1997).
- 4.
Fieldwork was conducted in two- and one-year periods (1987–1989 and 1997, respectively). It benefitted from unrestricted access to all prison facilities. Besides 70 in-depth interviews , this allowed for the observation and participation in most prison activities and daily life, as well as for engaging in informal individual and group conversations with prisoners on a regular basis and under varied circumstances. In both periods a trusting relationship with prisoners was established, although not at the same pace or by the same processes (see Cunha 2002) . In both periods women were selected by combining a snowball progression that followed ‘natural’ networks and a systematic sampling that diversified inmates along lines of penal and social profile, as well as length and experience of confinement (Cunha 1994, 2002) .
- 5.
Tires was created in 1954 on the outskirts of Lisbon and continues to be the main female penal institution in the country; Santa Cruz opened in 2005 near the northern city of Oporto, and was intended for a similar kind of penal population.
- 6.
The prison population of Tires, which in 1997 reached 823 inmates, had developed a striking social and penal homogeneity in the span of only a decade. In 1997, a total of 76% of the women there were imprisoned for drug trafficking , compared to the 37% registered 10 years earlier, and property offenders represented no more than 13%. The majority of those convicted (69%) were serving sentences of more than five years. Prisoners increasingly came from the segments of the working class most deprived of economic and educational capital: from 1987 to 1997 the proportion of women who held jobs in the bottom tier of the service economy rose from 4% to 33%, and the proportion of those who had never attended school or gone beyond the fourth grade rose from 47% to 59%. A significant proportion of prisoners had relatives imprisoned in the same institution or in other prison facilities. According to a conservative estimate based on data registered in social-educational files, between one-half and two-thirds of the inmates in Tires had family members inside the same institution (sisters, cousins, aunts, nieces, mothers, grandmothers). This estimate does not include male partners and kin serving their own sentences in other facilities.
- 7.
Based on neo-Lombrosian perspectives addressing female criminality, during the first half of the 20th century prison policies in some European countries and in the United States adopted a therapeutic treatment based on medical and psychiatric intervention . Although this trend has lessened over the years, according to Carlen and Tombs (2006) there is a revival of these approaches in policies that address women’s socio-economic problems by repositioning them as ‘cognitive’ problems.
- 8.
For recent general regulations see the General Regulation for Portuguese Prisons, Law 51/2011.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
This ideal further excludes fathers and exonerates them from their own emotional, socio-economic and moral responsibilities.
- 12.
Mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law, aunts, cousins, sisters and sisters-in-law now find themselves doing time together, in a circle of kin that often amounts to more than a dozen people, sometimes encompassing four generations (when a great-grandson is born in prison to a prisoner whose daughter and granddaughter are also imprisoned).
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Cunha, M.I. (2018). Onstage and Off: The Shifting Relevance of Gender in Women’s Prisons. In: Gomes, S., Duarte, V. (eds) Female Crime and Delinquency in Portugal. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73534-4_4
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