Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present Sarah McNeely Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present, by Christina M. Quinlan, pp. 272. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011. $74.95 Distributed by International Specialized Booksellers, Portland, OR. Christina M. Quinlan’s Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons Past and Present provides a comprehensive sociological and ethnographic study of Irish women’s experiences with incarceration from the nineteenth century to the present day. A pointed critique of the gendered ideological impulses behind the criminalization of women and of the poor conditions that have characterized women’s imprisonment in Ireland, Inside Ireland’s Women’s Prisons questions the purported rehabilitative function of the patriarchal Irish prison institution with regard to its female inmates. As Mary Robinson states in the foreword, “It is a publication that is not always a comfortable read but is an essential one for all involved and interested in our prison system – and what it says about us as a society.” Quinlan’s research, drawing on memoirs, prison records, news stories, photographs, and interviews with prison officials and prisoners themselves, presents an attitude of advocacy with regard to women prisoners in Ireland. The first chapter clearly articulates the theoretical impulse of Quinlan’s research: to bring into light the discursive construction of the female prisoner and her subjectivity in relation to her gender and to the institution that contains her. In this helpful chapter, Quinlan takes care to explain the major concepts and terminology—particularly her utilization of the terms “discourse,” “subjectivity,” and “space”—that motivate and guide her study of women’s imprisonment in Ireland. Quinlan’s explanations may occasionally seem redundant, but they clarify maters for the nonspecialist reader. This is especially true as she moves from explaining the historical perspective of women’s imprisonment in Ireland to the socio-ethnographic work of examining female prisoners’ representation, both by others and by themselves. Chapter two, “The Historical Perspective,” explains the petty, nonviolent nature of the majority of women’s criminal activity. Female imprisonment in [End Page 152] Ireland has been generally as short-term but frequent through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter three, “The Contemporary Perspective,” continues this explanatory work, describing the state of women’s prisons in present-day Ireland. Not much has changed over time with regard to the female prison population, which remains transitory and unstable largely because of the petty nature of women’s crimes and high rates of recidivism. Chapter four, “The Women’s Perspectives,” profiles Irish women prisoners to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the population of imprisoned women. When Quinlan transcribes interviews conducted with the prisoners, the immediacy and pathos of their words offer compelling support for her claims about the troubled construction of identity in the prison environment. Chapter five, “The Scholar’s Perspective ” reviews the extant body of literature relating to women’s imprisonment. Quinlan begins by tracing the two strands of analysis in this research, one of which represents women in prison as victims, and the other which represents them as resisters. Following this review of literature, “Space and Identity in Women’s Prisons,” moves into more theoretical territory. Here, Quinlan invokes the theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to expand on her observations of institutional power and women’s performed identity as prisoners. Quinlan concludes her study by restating her claim that Irish constructions of femininity have had profound influences on women’s experiences with imprisonment. Her overarching argument, that women prisoners have been and continue to be the most marginalized members of Irish society, finds strong support here A monograph entirely concerned with the Irish prison system might at first glance seem sufficiently esoteric to discourage many readers. Despite the book’s specialized subject matter and in-depth historical overview, Quinlan produces an engrossing, relevant book. Scholars of women’s history and the Irish press will also find value here: for example, a section of the historical overview includes a discussion of such women nationalists of the nineteenth century as Maud Gonne, who, as middle-class, educated women, did not fit the profile of the disenfranchised female prisoner. Quinlan also discusses the press’s skewed representation of...