ABSTRACT
Having situated the female journey towards desistance in the broader context of points of departure and subjective experiences of moving through different penological landscapes, the focus now shifts specifically towards the comparative female route out of crime and criminal justice in Sweden and England. As has been noted, gender is a significantly neglected area in the desistance literature, with women’s experiences having received only minimal empirical attention (Shapland et al, 2016a). Even less is known about the female experience of desistance in different penal cultures. This is a limitation, as it is not unlikely that different criminal justice practices, welfare policies, and cultural arrangements can act to either promote or impede desistance (ibid.). For example, desistance studies in Ireland (though based on male samples) have indicated that factors such as shifts in religion and welfare expenditures may jointly act to undermine feelings of agency in an Irish desistance context (Healy, 2016). Equally, linked to “the role of familism in Spanish society” (Cid and Martí, 2016: 77), particular cultural norms around family structures – specifically a traditional ideal of the male breadwinner – is suggested to have a marked influence on the (male) desistance journey in the Spanish context. By looking at the female qualitative journey cross-nationally, we can start to shed new light on answers to what McNeill (2016: 268) suggests to be a more suitable question than ‘What Works?’, namely; ‘What Helps?’ and ‘What Hinders?’ in the desistance journey. With a pronounced focus on barriers and structural ‘ladders’, this chapter presents a comparative perspective on the female experience of the earlier stages of her route out of crime and criminal justice.
