Women's Incarceration Research Articles

Celling black bodies: black women in the global prison industrial complex

The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed an explosion in the population of women prisoners in Europe, North America and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison construction. This article argues that this new pattern of women's incarceration has been forged by three overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental shift in the role of the state that has occurred as a result of neo-liberal globalization. The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of what has been labelled a ‘prison industrial complex’ made up of an intricate web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs. These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex. The article calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. The article seeks to reveal the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever increasing numbers.

Incarceration as a Gendering Strategy

AbstractThe 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.

Patriarchy, Prisons, and Jails: A Critical Look at Trends in Women's Incarceration

Patriarchy, Prisons, and Jails: A Critical Look at Trends in Women's Incarceration