Gendered Human Rights and the Search for Safety

Women’s prisons, because they are unsafe, have become the site of state-sponsored suffering in reproducing and reinforcing multiple forms of inequality in the gendered harm of imprisonment. Using the concept of state-supported suffering, women’s prisons harm women and their life chances in unnecessary ways. Overt gender discrimination in the wider society and within the prison adds another punishing layer to the gendered cumulative disadvantage faced by justice-involved women. A focus on human rights reframes the discussion and directs attention to both reducing women’s imprisonment through non-custodial measures and incorporating a human rights approach based on respect, dignity and non-discrimination within the prison. The promise of the Bangkok Rules and other human rights instruments provide the way forward.

Prison Community, Prison Conditions, and Gendered Harm

Chapter 3 examines the prison conditions and the prison community which contribute to women’s fears over safety while confined. Conditions of material scarcity, substandard living quarters, and few program and treatment resources are exacerbated by the crowding that characterizes contemporary corrections. Women have real concerns about cleanliness, disease, and medical care as primary threats to safety. Crowding, a feature of all contemporary prisons, aggravates the injurious impact of these minimal living conditions as they combine to create a context bound by tension and conflict.

Pathways and Intersecting Inequality

Chapter 2 describes women’s pathways to incarceration, focusing on the significance of gender and other inequalities in women’s lives within the free world. An extension of expansion of pathways emphasizes intersectional inequities and the historical and structural trauma that propel them into prison. This focus on cumulative and structural disadvantage moves beyond an individualized and blaming explanation of women’s crimes in setting out the context of constrained choice. This chapter also includes sections on prison policy and its impact on women; shared characteristics of imprisoned women; and enhancing the pathways approach through the inclusion of structural and historical inequalities.

Intersectional Inequality and Women’s Imprisonment

In addition to witnessing and documenting women’s experience with imprisonment, this book offers offer a new analysis of the contemporary prison by re-framing the questions of trouble and violence as a further expression of broader societal inequalities and human rights violations. Combining this more structural critique with a human rights approach to imprisonment expands our understanding beyond the individualized and pathology-based explanations of women’s prison experiences. The way forward is based on this structural appraisal of the consequences of imprisonment, providing direction towards reducing unnecessary suffering and increasing prisoners’ capital inside prison and once released.

Inequalities and Contextual Conflict

Chapter 5 explores the contextual context of the inequality of women’s imprisonment as it creates and sustains conflict. Individualized vulnerabilities and components of prison capital combine to create this gendered context for trouble. Forms of gendered violence are connected to economic, social, and cultural demands of prison life. Troubled relationships inside often reproduce patterns of interpersonal violence reflect women’s pathways. Much of the violence in prison is embedded in these conflicted relationships in the form of interpersonal or domestic violence.

Intersections of Inequality with Correctional Staff

Chapter 6 expands on the consequences of the obvious inequality between correctional worker and prisoner. Much of this inequality is routinely expressed in disrespectful and derogatory comments made by staff about women prisoners. Narrative and survey data is used to describe how staff sexual harassment, misconduct, and physical violence are relatively rare, but are a serious concern to most members of the women’s prison community. The problem of staff sexual misconduct is not one of magnitude. Rather, the fact that any number of staff employed to provide care and custody of women prisoners harm women through sexually-based actions should be troubling to all of us.

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.