ABSTRACT
Situated at the crossroads where feminist criminology meets cross-national qualitative research, this book has aimed to make a new contribution to the internationalisation of criminological knowledge about female desistance and penal cultures. An explorative study that, by offering a unique comparative exploration of the first-hand female journey towards desistance in Sweden and England, hopes to pave the way for a more global and gender-aware desistance field. Cross-national analysis has the power to extend knowledge of alternative ways of doing (Bryman, 2008), and with a criminology that disproportionately focuses on the Anglo-American world (Barberet, 2014), there is arguably much we can learn by exploring, and comparing, experiences across less chartered penal territories. To echo Farrall (2016), this is the ‘next move’ for the desistance field, allowing us new perspectives on the role of societal structures and conditions within the desistance puzzle. Beyond limitations in terms of cross-nationality, the desistance literature, though growing exponentially in recent years, has received criticism for giving limited attention to the female experience (Shapland et al, 2016a). It is also accused of overwhelmingly focusing on separate and single domains of life-transitions and desistance factors (Skardhamar and Savolainen, 2016). This book has aimed to do the very opposite. Specifically, it has attempted to situate the female desi-stance process in a broader life-story scenario in diverse macro-contexts, adopting the metaphor of a journey, and thus acknowledging the role of both departure points and ‘stop-over’ experiences in criminal justice settings. The aim has accordingly been, in line with feminist ideals and approaches to exploring women’s experiences of crime and criminal justice (Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2004), to situate the female desistence journey within the ‘totality’ of her life. However, lives are lived, each day of the year, each minute of the hour. Thus, they are inevitably complex and intricate entities, with multiple factors and identities constantly weaving and re-weaving together. As powerfully noted by ‘Carmela’, a woman serving life in America; “I committed the crime, but that was one day in my life. I am not that person every day” (Lempert, 2016: 48). We need to remain mindful of the fact that criminal activity is merely one aspect of these women’s life-stories, and my aim has been to also give some attention to who they are on days that are not that ‘one day’ (or indeed those ‘days’).
