It is old news that the conditions and policies of women's prisons are different from those for incarcerated men. Less evident, however, is how gender differences shape those policies, and how gender identity and roles shape women's adaptation and resistance to prison culture and control. The papers in this collection explore how the gender-based attitudes that women bring to prison frame how they respond to the prison environment -- and how gender stereotypes continue to affect the treatment and opportunities of incarcerated women today. It looks particularly at how the personal and social problems imported into the prison setting become part of the intricate web of prison culture and how extensively women's prison experience reflects the control and domination they experienced in the outside world.

This book presents a revisionist prison history which brings to the forefront the relationship between gender and policy. It examines women’s prisons in England from the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, drawing attention to the detrimental effect the orthodox closed prison has on penal reform. The text investigates the clash between what was conceptualised as desirable prison policy and the actual implementation and implications of such a penalty on the prisoner. It challenges previous claims made about the invisibility of women prisoners in historical penal policy, and provides an original analysis of the open prison, taking HMP Askham Grange as a case study, where the history of such an initiative is explored and debated.

This book examines the female criminals and the prison conditions and issues they must endure through the lens of a case study in the Karachi women’s prison in Pakistan. With higher events of crime and poverty due to COVID-19, this volume considers the worsening conditions for women inmates as it relates to psychological trauma, access to resources, economic factors, and working against the cultural forces and criminal justice forces that contribute to the unstable state of women’s prisons. This book includes case studies of women prisoners. Addressing a gap in literature about female inmates in South Asia and Pakistan this volume is ideal for researchers in feminist criminology, women’s studies, prisoners psychology, and for law enforcement agencies.

A thoroughly researched pioneering work based on personal interviews with inmates and prison personnel and on data compiled from questionnaires and inmate record files, Women's Prison reveals that homosexual liaisons are the primary foundation of the social structure of female inmates; shows that homosexual behavior can be a superficial kind of adjustment to particular situational privations; amplifies and broadens the application of earlier findings on men's prisons; opens the way for future studies involving the delineation of homosexual roles in the free community.This study began with both of the authors' interest in gathering data on women in prison to see whether there were female prisoner types consistent with the reported characteristics of male prisoners. Early in the course of this study it became apparent that the most salient distinction to be made among the female inmates was between those who were and those who were not engaged in homosexual behavior in prison, and further, of those who were so involved, between the incumbents of masculine and feminine roles.It has become increasingly apparent that prison behavior is rooted in more than just the conditions of confinement. Unlike their male counterparts who establish the so-called inmate code, women prisoners suffer intensely from the loss of affectional relationships and form homosexual liaisons as the primary foundation of their social organization. The great majority of homosexually involved inmates have their first affair in prison, returning to heterosexual roles outside prison.Women's Prison is a revealing study of social structure and homosexuality for sociologists; of vital interest to social workers, parole officers and chaplains dealing with female inmates as well as penologists and criminologists; and provocative reading for the non-specialist.

This book explores 50 years of Irish women’s prison writing, 1960s–2010s, connecting the work of women leaders and writers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This volume analyzes political communiqués, petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs, highlighting the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, Síle Darragh, Ella O’Dwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey (formerly Marian Price), Áine and Eibhlín Nic Giolla Easpaig (Ann and Eileen Gillespie), Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta D’Arcy. This text builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. Centering Irish women’s prison writings, in order to challenge canonization in history and literature, this volume argues that women’s lives and words offer a different view of gender and nation as well as offer a fuller and more inclusive archive of Irish history and literature. Additionally, this book will point to the ways in which their politics of everyday life and their cultural work is a form of anti-colonial civil rights feminism, for it speaks truth to power in a world in which compliance and silence are valued. Overall, this text focuses on rethinking and recasting women’s voices and words in order to document and promote the ongoing Irish freedom struggle from an abolitionist feminist perspective.

A fascinating look at the social life of women in prison. Intended to shine the light on prison social life in the face of allegations of all sorts of misconduct and deviant behaviors.

"If Kafka had been a feminist, his prisoner might have had Nawal el Sa'adawi's feistiness, maybe, like her, he would have hoed a prison garden, led veiled and unveiled cellmates in rebellious calisthenics, strategized with a murderess to foil state illogic. This book gives me hope, even makes me laugh."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After

An unauthorized women's prison with a dark secret. At a top secret tropical location, businessman Oliver Wilson and his associates are running a very unusual women's prison. It is themed on the stockade style penitentiaries that were common in the old 'Women In Prison' B-Movies of the Sixties and Seventies, and it is run in a similar fashion. The female inmates are all between eighteen and thirty years old, and are all extremely beautiful. They have been carefully selected and vetted, and are serving time here for one very specific reason: the entertainment of the paying clients, ardent fans of the old W.I.P. Movie Genre, who have come to observe their incarceration. Dee Nolan has eagerly accepted an invitation to live out her submissive fantasies as a prisoner in Wilson's strange prison, but, as the old saying goes, 'Be careful what you wish for'. Just like in the movies themselves, Dee encounters sadistic prison guards, a warped and wicked warden, and harsh, whip-wielding taskmasters, who oversee the inmates. Will Dee's submissive nature help her through her sentence, or will she falter within the harsh environment of Oliver Wilson's Top Secret Women's Prison? ----- Author's Note: This story contains themes of an adult (18+) nature. If the topics listed below offend, then you are advised to pass this title by. If not, then please purchase and enjoy. (Specific key topics: kink, fetish, bdsm, D/s, bondage, dominance, female submission, women in prison, hard labour, M/f, slave girl, corporal punishment, erotic discipline, spanking, whip, roleplay, forbidden desire, adult humour, erotic adventure, SSC.)

This book explores how power is negotiated in women’s prisons. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in three penal establishments in England, it analyses how women manage the restrictions of imprisonment and the manner in which they attempt to resist institutional control. It is proposed that power is negotiated on a private, individual level, as women often resist the institution simply by trying to maintain an image of control over their own lives. However, their image of themselves as active, reasoning agents is undermined by institutional regimes which encourage traditional, passive, feminine behaviour at the same time as they deny the women their identities and responsibilities as mothers, wives, girlfriends and sisters. Femininity is, therefore, both the form and the goal of women’s imprisonment. Yet paradoxically, femininity also offers the possibility of resistance, because women manage to rebel by appropriating and changing aspects of it.