Women, Punishment and Social Justice by Gill McIvor

Author:Gill McIvor [McIvor, Gill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Shortcoming of the gender responsive approach and the expansion of punishment to communities

Community correctional facilities, gender responsive models of punishment, and similar alternative to prison programmes are problematic for a number of reasons. To begin, like prisons and jails more generally, such programmes focus on ‘personal, individual trauma’ (Haney 2010: 211) and do not address the injustice of structural inequality as a root cause of crime and punishment (Lawston and Meiners 2011). As Haney (2010: 211) argues, ‘social marginalisation is seen as the outcome of inmates’ problems, not as a factor contributing to them’. Community corrections emphasise individual choice, pathology, and personal failings as leading to punishment in the criminal justice system. Like the programme Liberty attended, individual and group therapy are seen to be the key to one’s liberation and empowerment. While therapy can certainly be helpful to an individual, structural inequality and policing patterns that target racial minorities and the poor for punishment and incarceration are not discussed, and remain entrenched in society. The gender responsive model – and other forms of community-based sanctions – fail to examine the ways that injustices such as racism, sexism, economic inequality, and social marginalisation more generally lead to imprisonment and punishment within the community. Indeed, ‘large-scale social change that addresses these problems at their core, including creation of jobs, eradication of laws that target poor women of colour, and community anti-violence programmes, would lessen the need for incarceration in the first place’ (Lawston and Meiners 2011: 17). Gender responsive prisons, and community sanctions more generally, fail to address social injustices that cause and perpetuate punishment.

The gender responsive model also examines gender oppression in isolation, assuming that all imprisoned women are united by common gender experiences. That is, it fails to explore the often complex ways that prisoners experience subordination based on the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability (Lawston and Meiners 2011). Related to this, the model makes essentialist assumptions about who ‘counts’ as women in prison, and erases the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming prisoners, who also serve time in women’s prisons and are subject to violence because of their gender identities (Lawston and Meiners 2011).

What is more, gender responsive community correctional facilities do not reduce punishment or incarceration rates. Rather, they are an expansion of punishment to communities. Progressive activist groups such as CURB and JusticeNow have registered their opposition to gender responsive approaches, arguing that such models result in the expansion of the prison system. Cynthia Chandler, director of Oakland-based JusticeNow, which advocates for women and transgender prisoners, explains:

There’s been a history of the Department of Corrections saying they’ve identified four to 5,000 inmates who pose no threat and should go home and have only nonviolent property related offenses on their record, who are mothers, who really just need vocational training and drug treatment and shouldn’t be in prison … but when we delve into the language of the bills and the policy, the plan turns out to actually be to construct new prisons that

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