Abstract
Women’s imprisonment in Portugal was marked in the first decade of this century by the increasing proportion of foreign nationals. This circumstance had implications not only in the official statistics of crime, contributing to a great preponderance of drug trafficking but also in the dynamics of women’s prisons and in the social discourses that associate immigration and crime. The present study is part of a research project on life trajectories of foreign national prisoners in Portugal, and it aims to analyze the social, demographic, criminal, and penal dimensions of female foreign nationals arrested in the country for drug trafficking. To this end, we collected and statistically analyzed data from 148 individual case files of foreign women prisoners. Results show the existence of at least two different scenarios of foreign national women arrested for drug trafficking in Portuguese prisons: on the one hand, women who come from European or South American countries, who did not live in Portugal, and who are held by international trafficking (drug couriers) and, on the other hand, women from African countries living in Portugal and arrested for drug trafficking practiced mainly in the country. These results allow us to deconstruct the idea that the high proportion of foreign national women in our prisons is unequivocally related to the phenomenon of immigration. Furthermore, results validate the importance of understanding, through qualitative research, these women’s pathways to imprisonment in a foreign country.
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Notes
- 1.
Official statistical data released by the General Directorate of Rehabilitation and Prison Services (DGRSP) in 2015 shows that from a total of 653 women serving time in jail, 257 (39.4%) are convicted of drug trafficking.
- 2.
This proportion rose from 18% in 2002 to 30% in 2008 (Matos, 2016).
- 3.
This hypothesis when we look at the numbers of female prisoners in absolute terms: in 2000 there were 138 female prisoners among a total of 1206 women imprisoned in Portugal; in 2010, the foreign women were 183 out of a total of 623 female prisoners (cf. Justice Statistics).
- 4.
Cf. statistical 2018 data from the DGRSP.
- 5.
Cf. statistical 2018 data from the DGRSP.
- 6.
Cf. statistical 2018 data from the DGRSP.
- 7.
The methodology used for data collection, the analysis of female prisoners’ individual files, contains certain limitations. Namely, the fact that the majority of these women (66.9%) did not live in Portugal prior to the detention, and for that reason it was difficult to have access to their eventual former legal and criminal record. Other difficulties rely on the divergences found between the Portuguese system and the system in force in their home countries, educational or labor divergences, for instance.
- 8.
There is a record of female prisoners with dual nationality, for instance, one of the African prisoners also had Portuguese nationality, two women from Central and South America were also Portuguese and another had Spanish nationality as well. The dual nationality situations reveal, on the one hand, these women’s birth place (Africa or America) and, on the other hand, their living place (Europe).
- 9.
Official statistical data from the DGRSP shows the percentage of Portuguese female prisoners who completed higher education was just 2.1%, in 2015.
- 10.
Cf. statistical data from the DGRSP.
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Matos, R., Cunha, M.I., Santos, J. (2019). Foreign National Women Arrested for Drug Trafficking: A Dynamic Socio-Penal Portrait. In: Guia, M., Gomes, S. (eds) Prisons, State and Violence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13077-0_9
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