Social Work With Criminalized Women: Governance or Resistance in the Carceral State?

Drawing on findings from a Foucauldian-inspired critical discourse analysis, this article examines the hegemonic ways in which social work engages with criminalized women. Utilizing the analytic of governmentality, I explore the construction of criminalized women in contemporary social work discourse and ask how those constructions support and shape practice with criminalized women. Results show that knowledge production in social work serves as a significant site through which the profession draws on, but also resists, carceral logics. I begin by discussing contemporary social work as a form of neoliberal governance. Specifically, I illuminate the ways in which social work is implicated in surveillance and control and how this involvement is obscured under the framework of helping. I then describe how bold counter discourses, such as those offered by abolitionist and anti-carceral thought foster spaces of resistance within the profession. I argue that social work should claim a stance of radical imagination in which we take seriously the calls to abolish the varying manifestations of the carceral state.

Female “Deviance” and Pathways to Criminalization in Different Nations

Global-level data suggests that the number of women and girls in prison is growing and at a faster rate than the male prison population is. In order to meaningfully address this shift in female deviance and criminalization, more attention should be given on the specific ways that women and girls are labeled “deviants” and subsequently criminalized. Women and girls have been criminalized, imprisoned, and harshly punished for “moral” offenses such as adultery or premarital sex or for violations of dress codes or even for being a member of the LGBTQ community. Women and girls have also been reportedly been imprisoned for running away from their homes (often from abusive situations), for being raped, and even for being forced into prostitution. Furthermore, victims of domestic violence or sex trafficking and sex workers have been administratively detained or simply detained for seeking asylum, having committed no crime. The feminist criminological perspective has widened an understanding of all forms of female deviance. This perspective stresses the importance of contextual analysis and of incorporating unique experiences of women and girls at the intersection of not only gender, race, class, and ethnicity but also nationality, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and immigration or migration status, and against the backdrop of national as well as international conflict. Now the challenge is develop effective solutions both to address female victimization and to end the silencing of women and girls through criminalization on a global level. Effective implementation of a gender-mainstreaming strategy, adopted in United Nations policies such as “the Bangkok Rules,” is one of the proposed solutions.

Advocating Sex Workers’ Rights by Identity-Based Associations in Nepal

There is no specific law in Nepal that directly criminalizes sex work. However, many sex workers have experienced arbitrary detention by law-enforcement authorities. The Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act, 2007 (HTTCA) criminalizes pimps and clients, but not sex workers directly. However, the Act was overinclusive and often criminalized women engaged in voluntary sex work. The new Criminal (Code) Act 2017 criminalizes advertising and providing facilities for sex work in the section concerning crimes against the public good. These laws are used to prosecute sex workers. Two identity-based associations (IBAs) emphasize the importance of decriminalization, but do not support the legalization of sex work. A licensing system, if introduced under legalization, may exclude the most vulnerable sex workers, including housewives, migrants, and sexual minorities, who are secretly engaged in the business. I conclude that ongoing advocacy of IBAs should seek to provide safe working environments for sex workers in Nepal.

Good Intentions: Women’s Narratives of Post-Release Anticipatory Desistance in the Context of Historical and Contemporary Disadvantage and Trauma

Desistance theorizing has concentrated on the male experience resulting in relatively less knowledge about how criminalized women negotiate nonoffending, particularly from a qualitative perspective. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with eight formerly incarcerated women in Victoria, Australia, this research explores the anticipation of desistance in the context of experiences preceding and following incarceration. The findings highlight how individual-level intentions to cease offending can be eclipsed by historical and ongoing disadvantage and trauma. In emphasizing the gendered socio-structural barriers affecting women’s desistance efforts, this article contributes to a small, yet important, emerging discourse—a form of critical feminist desistance.

The Victimization of Criminalized Women and Trauma Trails: Pathways to Criminalization and the Dichotomy of the Victim/Offender Continuum

This paper explores the victimization/criminalization dichotomy as women who are criminalized are often marginalized and have extensive histories of trauma; they have often experienced victimization through abuse, colonialism, familial instability, poverty, addiction, and mental health struggles. The trauma women experience further informs their life courses, and in many instances results in further victimization. The ways in which the criminal justice system and correctional institutions contribute to the victimization of women is addressed. There is no catch-all solution to the issues that contribute to the criminalization of marginalized women—many of the challenges that they face are multifaceted and systemic. Despite this, criminalized women cannot only be considered victims of circumstance, and their voices are necessary to improving the system that perpetuates their marginalization.

Inside the penal voluntary sector: Divided discourses of “helping” criminalized women

Neoliberal austerity measures and welfare state retrenchment have meant that voluntary organizations around the globe are increasingly called upon to perform statutory social services. Despite a large and rising presence in criminal justice service delivery, volunteers and voluntary organizations have scarcely received scholarly analysis. This paper uses interviews, ethnography, and document analysis to explore the penal voluntary sector in Canada. Specifically, how individuals in the penal voluntary sector understand their roles in helping criminalized women and how these perspectives vary across different positions. This paper illuminates how agents occupying different helper positions cultivate divergent understandings of (and justifications for) the help they provide. Bourdieu’s field theory is mobilized to demonstrate how variegated discourses of helping co-exist, conflict, and impact the relational dynamics of the penal voluntary sector and its engagement with criminalized women.

Punishment, powerlessness and bounded agency: exploring the role of welfare conditionality with ‘at risk’ women attempting to live ‘a good life’

This chapter explores the lived experiences of women at the penal-welfare nexus, a space where social policy and penal policy overlap. Drawing on new empirical data from qualitative interviews with 24 women who have been subject to criminal justice supervision and interventions in the community and who are in receipt of social assistance benefits, it explores their attempts to move away from the social margins and move closer to the labour market. It therefore examines how UK social institutions, and in particular a welfare system characterised by increasing conditionality, impact on women engaged in community-based services which aim to divert them from prison and reduce recidivism. In doing so, it foregrounds the context of gendered precariousness which criminalized women inhabit at the penal-welfare nexus. This author argues that the problem for this group is not so much the behaviour change agenda and sanctions that underpin the UK’s increasingly conditional social security system; many make attempts to live a 'good life', and the experience of sanctioning is low – rather, for women experiencing advanced marginality, it is the dearth of support available to help them reach their goals.

Printing Abolition

Chapter 3 analyzes women’s prison newsletters as a feminist counterpublic that enabled incarcerated women to communicate with one another and with anticarceral feminist activists in the “free world.” Two newsletters, Through the Looking Glass and No More Cages, which were produced by lesbian feminist collectives from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, document prisoners’ resistance and collective action against gendered and racialized violence. Addressing the chasm between a prisoners’ rights movement focused on men’s institutions and a feminist antiviolence movement increasingly enmeshed with the carceral state, these newsletters created solidarity between criminalized women and those outside the walls.