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Incarceration as a Gendering Strategy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Marie-Andrée Bertrand
Marie-Andrée Bertrand
Affiliation:
International Centre of Comparative Criminology, Université de Montréal
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Abstract

The 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.

Résumé

Une étude récente des conditions matérielles d'emprisonnement imposées aux femmes dans des pays réputés pour leur clémence en matière correctionnelle montre que les pratiques discriminatoires et l'usage excessif de la contrainte, dénoncés à plusieurs reprises par les groupes féministes et les militants des droits de la personne, sont encore partout la norme, souvent à l'encontre des lois et des politiques pénales nationales. Si cette conclusion n'était pas inattendue, un autre résultat de la recherche l'était plus: les initiatives récentes (programmes d'avant-garde, prisons ouvertes, efforts de décarcération, prisons mixtes, unités mères-enfants) sont si possible plus “genrées” que ne l'étaient les pratiques traditionnelles. Analysant ces résultats à la lumière des perspectives féministes matérialistes et postmodernes, l'auteure montre que la carcéralisation des femmes constitue une stratégie non seulement mâle, sexiste et genrée mais genrante et une forme d'appropriation des détenues par l'État au profit de la classe des hommes.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 14 , Issue 01: Gender, Ethnicity, (Hetero)Sexuality, and Norms Genre, ethnicité, (hétéro)sexualité et normes , Spring/printemps 1999 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1999

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References

1. To my knowledge, the expression “gendering strategy” was first used by Carol Smart in her article “The Woman of Legal Discourse” (1992) 1:1 Social and Legal Studies 29.

2. See Appendix I for the list of sites and countries.

3. The research was conducted with support from the Canadian Research Council on Humanities and Social Sciences, some contract money from the Department of the Solicitor General of Canada and occasional financial aid from the University of Montreal International Centre for Comparative Criminology.

4. The members of the research team were Professors Louise L. Biron and Marie-Andrée Bertrand who acted as co-directors of the project; the research assistants were Concetta di Pisa, Andrée B. Fagnan and Julia McLean. Concetta di Pisa and Julia McLean received respectively their M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in criminology in 1993 and 1994 and wrote their dissertation using the study data.

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11. The reader must be reminded that the findings reported date back to 1993 and 1995–1996.

12. Horserod is not the only open prison to which women have access in Denmark but it is the only one that the research team has studied.

13. I was told in 1998 by a European colleague that the situation had been remedied.

14. That is also the policy that seems to prevail in the new regional institution of Joliette, in Canada, although the full ‘mother-and-child’ unit had been planned originally.

15. As one Finnish expert told me, no adopted child was ever admitted inside, even though at least two adoptive mothers had claimed their right to have him or her with them.

16. My informant in that case was the founder of the Mutter-und-Kind Haus herself, Ms Helga Einsele, in a conversation in Hamburg in April 1993. Another expert in Germany is Dr. Uta Kruger, professor at the Institute for the Police in Hamburg.

17. Smart, supra note 8.

18. Ibid. at 33.

19. Ibid. at 37.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Guillaumin, supra note 7.

23. Rafter, supra note 8.

24. MacKinnon, supra note 8 at 219.