Suchergebnisse

This paper emphasises the importance of locating contemporary abolitionist social movements within a continuum of broader struggles against structural injustice. Previous decades have seen the re-emergence of women's penal reform programmes framed as progressive solutions for alleviating the structural disadvantages and harms associated with imprisonment. Abolitionists have provided fierce critiques of the risks these pose in reinforcing the legitimacy and scale of imprisonment. However, we have yet to articulate a clear vision regarding the utility of reform in relation to decarceration strategies. In presenting a critical exploration of anti-carceral feminist campaign work in Victoria, Australia, this paper advocates the need to move beyond the simplistically conceived dualism of reform and abolition. The analysis explores how anti-carceral feminists have used reform as a resistance strategy within Victorian anti-discrimination campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. Placed in historical context, these campaigns demonstrate the transformative possibilities and risks associated with the necessary navigation and pursuit of reformist strategies that is fundamental to a politics and practice of abolition.

Women's incarceration is on the rise globally and this has significant intergenerational, economic and humanitarian costs for communities across the world. While there have been efforts to implement reform, particularly in countries such as Canada, UK, US and Australia, the growing evidence suggests women's prisons and the support structures surrounding them are in crisis. This collection of critical essays presents groundbreaking research on women's post-imprisonment policy, practice and experiences. It is the first collection to offer international perspectives on gender, cr

Women's incarceration is on the rise globally and this has significant intergenerational, economic and humanitarian costs for communities across the world. While there have been efforts to implement reform, particularly in countries such as Canada, UK, US and Australia, the growing evidence suggests women's prisons and the support structures surrounding them are in crisis. This collection of critical essays presents groundbreaking research on women's post-imprisonment policy, practice and experiences. It is the first collection to offer international perspectives on gender, criminalisation, the effects of imprisonment and women-centred approaches to the short and long-term support of women exiting prison. It offers cutting-edge insights into contemporary policy developments and women's experiences across the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and Northern Ireland. The collection makes two important contributions. First, it marks a departure from an instrumental and individual focus on 'what works' to reduce women's offending and re-offending behaviour - a prevailing approach within competing collections focused on post-release issues. Second, it presents critical, original research with robust empirical foundations to revive feminist criminological engagement around gender, imprisonment, and most critically, post-release management, support and survival. The collection will appeal to academics and community-based advocates, activists, lawyers and practitioners engaged in advocacy and service provision for imprisoned women. It is also an important and unique analysis for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying criminological and social science courses particularly those related to gender and crime, imprisonment and correctional policy and qualitative research methods. Bree Carlton is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Monash University, Australia. Marie Segrave is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University, Australia. Publisher's note.

AbstractIn this article we document women's experiences of post‐release survival and death in Victoria, Australia. In particular, we map the interrelated impacts of trauma, criminalisation, institutionalisation and imprisonment. We build upon the existing post‐release mortality research, which has focused on quantifying and describing death, and provide a critical account of survival through the lens of women's experiences. Critically, we challenge the assumption that there is a distinction between survival and death, as many participants reported near‐death experiences occurring in a range of contexts. Ultimately we highlight the need to attend to these contexts in order to advance depth of understanding regarding the structural nature of post‐release disadvantage and survival.

The article examines the issue of women's unnatural post-prison deaths in Victoria, Australia, through the lens of women's accounts of survival and near-death after exit from prison. Central to this analysis is the seldom addressed or acknowledged relationship between trauma and the multiple harms and disadvantages that women experience both in the prison system and on the outside. In seeking to explicate the centrality oftrauma to women's experiences inside and outside the system, we draw upon the accounts of the women with whom we have spoken in the course of this research. A key theme that emerges from these narratives is the prevalence of trauma, near-death experiences and harms faced by women who have survived. Such accounts run counter to assumptions within existing post-release research that imprisonment comprises a discrete traumatic episode within a woman's life and that there is a useful distinction to be made between women who are strong enough to survive and those who die. In this way we offer a contribution towards revising possible future directions for critical feminist and prison scholars.

Taking an abolition feminist standpoint, this article develops a critique of the absorption of the language of 'trauma-informed practice' into gendered penal policy. We use Carol Bacchi's methodology for post-structural policy analysis, which centres around the question, 'what is the problem represented to be?', and apply it to an Australian correctional policy document designed to inform practice in the Victorian women's prison system: Strengthening Connections. We find that the policy constructs criminalised women's trauma as an individual psychological pathology that causes 'criminal offending' and makes them vulnerable to further harm. In effect, the prison is framed as both necessary for the protection of the community and for the protection of criminalised women themselves. We argue that these discursive distortions sanitise the structural violence of the prison and revalorise the carceral state under the guises of rehabilitation and therapy. Our contribution highlights broader implications and challenges for criminological research that engages attempts to 'soften' carceral conditions without reckoning with their capacity to entrench gendered carceralism.

The article examines the motivation and role of the insider activism that resulted in the preservation of a major historical site of female incarceration, the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, in suburban Sydney. For much of the 20th century the site was a "Girls' Home," in which children who had committed no offense were incarcerated under child welfare regulations and literally treated like criminals. Life in the institution was characterized by routine extreme maltreatment of children, many of whom have carried the psychological legacy of their time there throughout their lives. A group of survivors, moved to preserve and reclaim the space, spent many years contending with obdurate and indifferent bureaucracies before successfully having the site Heritage-listed, and it is now a member of the international Sites of Conscience. The Precinct's significance as a site of feminist carceral history is discussed, and its place in today's cultural landscape examined.

Building on this work, the authors conceive abolition in the Australian context primarily through a postcolonial and neocolonial lens that begins by recognizing Indigenous experiences of dispossession, genocide, and ongoing struggles for self-determination. They focus on Indigenous women because their experiences embody and exemplify the intersections between colonial and neocolonial oppression and the multiple sites of gender disadvantage and inequality that stem from patriarchal domination. They illustrate how abolitionist advocacy work and campaigns related to Indigenous women have been translated into official and institutional penal inquiries and reform programs in ways that neutralize critiques while legitimizing and preserving the status quo. As has been the case in the US and Canada, some reform programs and initiatives may have contributed, directly and indirectly, to the promulgation of discriminatory and punitive practices as well as to an expansion of the penal system. This process has been characterized as co-option or absorption, which is a complex process of direct and indirect system machinations. Adapted from the source document.