This was going to be the article on women's imprisonment. I did not want to write on women's imprisonment—for two main reasons. First, because I've been wondering with increasing frequency exactly why women's imprisonment should be studied separately from men's. Secondly, because nowadays there seems to be an urgent need to study prisons primarily as forms of punishment, rather than as instances or representations of just about every other aspect of society (e.g. gender, racism, class, human survival; teaching pottery, drama, or poetry, etc.). Why not just write on 'imprisonment', or, more fundamentally, why continue to study prisons—women's or anyone else's—at all? So I asked permission to transform the invitation to write a piece on women's imprisonment into an opportunity to try to unravel the questions about gender, punishment, abolitionism, and the iconography of'the Prison' which had been teasing me for several months. This indefinite article is the result. It is divided into four parts. The essay first discusses some of the problems of studying women's imprisonment separately from men's. The second bit of it analyses the circular and repetitive nature of prison studies in general. Part 3 suggests ways of both destroying the iconography of the prison and de-institutionalizing the prison research business. The final section calls into question the article's title and rationale, and implies that in a collection entitled Prisons in Context such interrogation might be a legitimate device for putting prison in its placeso long as such 'placing' is itself kept forever open to question. Why Study Women's Prisons? The most obvious reason for researching women's prisons separately from men's is that for most of this century women in penal confinement in Britain, North America, and Europe have been housed separately from their male counterparts. Prior to the 1970s, the composition of female prison populations, the disciplinary practices employed within the women's institutions, and the gender-specific needs of women prisoners were largely neglected by researchers. The situation was not remedied until women writing and campaigning in the last quarter of the century engaged in the unremitting research and investigative journalism which put issues of women's imprisonment on penal reform agendas. Yet the focus of the research gaze has always been extremely dispersed. The women's prisons have become sites for studying (variously) everything from differential bailing