Experiența maternității în cel mai mare penitenciar de femei din Mexic

This research represents a radiography of motherhood in the largest Women’s Prison in Mexico and Latin America - Saint Martha Social Rehabilitation Center for Women, located in Mexico City. In April 2020 there were detained 1247 women, 80% of them mothers. The focus of the study is on those female prisoners who became mothers during their detention period and chose to keep their babies with them inside the prison. Interviews have revealed that the average length of their sentence is approximately 27 years and, in many cases, the baby’s father is in prison as well. The study starts with analyzing the social costs of women’s incarceration and follows the respondents’ path, from the moment they find out that they are pregnant to day-to-day aspects of a mother’s and a child’s life in a prison and to the moment they are separated from their children. The reasons why couples decide to have a baby are taken into account, along with the living conditions, the baby’s nutrition, health care, early education and the way the mother expects her baby’s emotional development to be affected, by the fact that he/she had spent the first years of life in prison.

Pathways and penalties: Exploring experiences of agency among incarcerated women in South Africa

Despite the documented rise in the population of incarcerated women over recent decades, female offenders only represent about 5% of the total global incarcerated population. South Africa is no different – female offenders total less than 3% of the country’s incarcerated population, a populace that was previously counted as one of the ten largest correctional systems in the world. This small representation of women in the correctional system leads to interpretations of their pathways to offending and experiences of incarceration to be the same as those of male offenders, delegitimising any role that gender may play in offending behaviour. By utilising a feminist pathways research approach, the narratives of 17 women incarcerated in the Johannesburg Female Correctional Centre are contextualised in this study, to reveal conduits to women’s incarceration that primarily involve victimisation and socially constructed gendered vulnerabilities that are interconnected with poverty and oppression. As seen through excerpts of their life history interviews, this confluence of factors, coupled with pathways of narrowing options, contribute to female offending. Ultimately the research allows for a holistic understanding of the unique choices and challenges incarcerated women in South Africa face, and the role agency and patriarchy has played in the pathways taken.

Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago

Long famed as a mecca of African-American culture, New Orleans occupies a special place in studies of African diasporic music and dance. By outlining the historical and social factors that shaped unique expressions of African American cultural identity, Ausetta Amenkum provides an experiential account of the formation of the Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective, not only as a performance troupe, but also as a community institution. Utilizing poetry and an engaging tone, Amenkum situates the emergence of African dance companies founded by African Americans in the local cultural trajectory of New Orleans mid-20th century. She, then, chronicles her work and the use of African dance as a holistic approach, as she addresses a specific example: women’s incarceration issues in Louisiana.

Searching for Safety through Prison Capital

Women’s prison culture reflects gendered inequalities inside, mediating these inequities by mapping cultural routes toward survival and safety. At same time, this culture (the mix) creating the potential for risk and danger. Inequality within prison—with staff and among the confined women—is expressed in all relations in the prison community. This chapter outlines the strategies and tactics women deploy in their search for safety. Even in the face of risk and trouble, women do survive, endure, and sometimes thrive, as they learn how to protect themselves from the obvious and subtle threats to safety and well-being in the prison community. The search for safety is embedded in forms of prison capital—human, social and cultural capital women marshal to counter the myriad threats to their safety and well-being. These gendered strategies for navigating forms of violence and conflict specific to women’s incarceration can prevail over the gendered inequality that jeopardizes their search for safety.

Incarceration as a Gendering Strategy

The State's resistance to making prison law agree with the Charter of Rights and bring women's carceral conditions closer to the male norm is illustrated in a recent comparative research on 24 prisons for women in eight advanced countries. If that conclusion was not unexpected, despite the fact that the countries and establishments had been selected for being progressive and very ‘humane’ ones, and notwithstanding the relentless claims presented by feminist groups and human rights advocates, what came as a surprise was that avant-garde initiatives like mixed prisons, mother-and-child units, well-equipped modern programs in women's prisons proved to be, if possible, more gendering in their actual effect than old traditional male arrangements. Using materialist feminism and discourse analysis to interpret her data, the author concludes that women's incarceration is a powerful gendering strategy and a form of appropriation of women by State's apparatuses to men's advantage.