Women’s Imprisonment

Abstract

The analysis of crime and punishment has suffered from a masculinist bias. Much of the literature on imprisonment has assumed the existence of an undifferentiated system of incarceration and has paid little attention to the differences between the imprisonment of men and women. As a consequence many of the standard texts, such as those by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1968), David Rothman, (1971) and Michel Foucault (1977), which make only a passing reference to gender differences, require some qualification — if not fundamental rethinking. Adrian Howe (1994), for example, claims that: ‘from a feminist perspective, conventional masculinist histories are simply scandalous’, and although she acknowledges both the value of developing a political economy of women’s imprisonment and of adapting Foucault’s insights on power and discipline, she is critical of those accounts of the history of incarceration which have focused on ‘master’ patterns and which remain insensitive to gender issues. As Eileen Leonard (1982) demonstrated in her incisive critique of conventional criminological theory, gender cannot simply be added onto the existing analysis. Rather, she clearly demonstrates that by ignoring gender the major strands of criminological theory are at best partial, and at worst seriously deficient, and that a number of theories which present themselves as gender-neutral turn out on closer inspection to suffer from gender bias.