ABSTRACT
This chapter accounts for the continuities and discontinuities in the cycle of punishment and resistance in Northern Ireland’s prisons for women. It follows from the arguments in the previous chapters which indicate that the resistance of women political prisoners was imbricated in power relations that reflected, and were constituted within, an alignment of the State, the prison, and political and gendered punishment. Political imprisonment also cast into sharper relief the interrelationship between institutional power, ideology and the criminalization of women prisoners. In the first instance, the State’s investment in the political and discursive integrity of the prison system was harnessed to restoring the legitimacy of the rule of law, and confirming that the ‘normal’ functioning of the legal and security apparatus was generally viable. Secondly, in order for the project of political imprisonment to function smoothly, the prison system utilized a number of systems of closure which involved political demonization, enhanced powers for punishment and containment, and justificatory principles for the exceptional measures taken to counter crises. Thirdly, women political prisoners were more explicitly involved in resistance than has been usually observed in prison studies. In these circumstances, conflict in the prisons took on a conspicuously dialectical character. However, whilst the cause of the prisoners’ campaign was ostensibly grounded in the fundamental contention over criminalization, the
dynamics of the women’s struggle meant that it developed, in practice, into a wider resistance to multifaceted penal controls. Consequently, the dialectical nature of the women’s prison campaign took on additional characteristics. It is therefore argued that:
Events in Armagh and Mourne House revealed the fluid, contingent and relatively unpredictable course of prison conflict. Thus, prison resistance can be seen in terms of Foucault’s concept of productive power, with its emphasis on the agency of the suppressed, the dispersal of conflict across different points of a social field, the subversion of institutional closure and the subsequent disruption of historically determined outcomes.
