Can prisons serve to empower women?

Gwenola Ricordeau. My interest in the prison system began twenty or so years ago, through the experiences of relatives being incarcerated. I saw that there was a particular manner that women were affected by the existence of the prison system. As partners, wives, sisters, mothers, daughters or friends, women are expected to show more solidarity (and care¹) than men are. This can be seen in countries all around the world: men in prison receive primarily visits from women. Women in prison mainly receive visits from other women. Incarceration, like other hardships in life (such as illness or hospitalisation), reveals a facet of the patriarchy: women receive less solidarity from men than from other women.

These reflections on gender and the prison system were the starting point of my academic and political work, centred around two questions: how are women’s lives affected by the existence of the criminal justice system? and what can they expect from it? Mainstream feminisms are not particularly interested in women in prison or women with criminalised² relatives. When the criminal justice system is mentioned, it is done so primarily to condemn the failure to punish perpetrators of sexual offences and to call for further criminalisation of these perpetrators. The assumption is that the criminal justice system could be in the service of women. My work challenges this idea. Rather, I would say that prisons, and more broadly, the criminal justice system, cannot be used to empower women.

To arrive at this conclusion, I conducted a feminist analysis of the criminal justice system in which I examined the three principal situations that lead women to interact with this system: as victims, when they are criminalised and when they have a relative who is criminalised. Various remarks could be made about each of these situations, but we can start by saying that the criminal justice system does a very poor job protecting women. Violence against women has a structural nature, and the effectiveness of criminal penalties in reducing instances of this violence has not been proven.

The criminal justice system does not adequately meet the needs of victims, especially the need to be recognised as a victim, making it impossible to give meaning to what they have endured.

Certain populations are overrepresented: working classes, descendants of colonised peoples or immigrants. Among incarcerated women, many were victims of domestic violence and/or sexual violence. This victimisation often played a role in their past and their criminalisation. Incidentally, this aspect of women’s victimisation is also a blind spot of mainstream feminisms, which calls for sisterhood while seemingly forgetting women who are incarcerated.

GR. The expression “carceral feminism” comes from the US sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, who coined it in a 2007 article. It has since spread across the English-speaking world. Bernstein refers to the fact that, for mainstream feminist movements, the empowerment of women relies on the criminal justice system. For example, these movements present as fact that imprisoning the perpetrators of violence against women is progress for women’s rights. The expression “carceral feminism” highlights the growing importance of repression and use of the legal system in the strategy of mainstream feminisms since the 1970s and ‘80s. This phenomenon can be observed in many other social movements: empowerment was increasingly thought of as a legal battle against discrimination (such as racial discrimination or discrimination against LGBT individuals, etc.). The law was considered more and more often as a tool to serve empowerment rather than a tool of the state, of the capitalist system and especially of the patriarchy. Actually, “carceral feminism” refers to mainstream feminism although mainstream feminism hasn’t aligned itself with “carceral feminism”. For that matter, no one truly has.

This expression puts a label on what is not often stated explicitly by these feminist movements: that the solutions they propose require the expansion and escalation of the use of the criminal justice system.

There are many criticisms that could be made against the policy proposals of mainstream feminism. Firstly, these movements take as read that punishing certain perpetrators would lower the rate of violence against women. But the only thing that prison does fairly well is protect (often temporarily) some victims, and it sometimes satisfies a desire similar to vengeance (wanting the perpetrator to “pay” for what they’ve done). Yet given the very high number of women who have been victimized, sentencing policies to fight violence against women are a tremendous failure. Not only do they do little to dissuade perpetrators from committing assault, but they uphold the myth that victims should seek redress through the judicial system.

“Carceral feminism” can therefore be criticised as being a type of feminism which serves the cause of some women by criminalising some men. To put it plainly, calling for more criminalisation and for more use of the criminal justice system (and thus of a system which primarily targets poor people and racial minorities) actually means criminalising some men. As a descriptor for certain feminist movements, the expression “carceral feminism” indicates that there are numerous feminist policy options and that the increased use of the criminal justice system is not the only available option.

GR. By that I mean that the criminal justice system cannot be a tool for the empowerment of women – or of anyone, for that matter. It is part of the machinery of the state and as such contributes to the capitalist, racist and patriarchal system. I think it is important to challenge mainstream feminism’s demand for increased repression. It is often made somewhat naively, but it feeds into an historic movement of manipulation by sentencing policies of certain social justice issues. This movement, which is not limited to any one country, is called “penal populism”. In France, it can be seen at work in the renewed debate surrounding the death penalty, based on the issue of violence against women and children. It was recently seen in Bangladesh, where rape became punishable by death.

I think that, as feminists, it is important to refuse to let our struggles be manipulated to serve as a pretext for taking a tougher stance on sentencing policies. This position is not the same as accepting violence against women. In my opinion, when we consider the victimisation of women, and thus the patriarchy, we are well aware that toughening laws and sentences is a simplistic solution.

The opposite of “carceral feminism” is “abolitionist feminism”, which advocates for the abolition of the criminal justice system. Penal abolitionism suggests starting with the needs of the victims to establish autonomous systems separate from the state and the criminal justice system. If we think about the issue of violence against women, rather than reflecting on how to control the perpetrators, we can instead rely on women’s ability to take action, on their material circumstances and on collective processes for changing social structures (such as the patriarchy). I believe more in the power of autonomy that is formed collectively than in the protection we could expect from the state – because what is given can always be taken away.