From Neighborhood to Prison

By the end of the twentieth century, Portugal, like most other Western nations, had experienced a dramatic inflation in prison populations. ¹ The country steadily leads this trend in the European Union (EU), registering the highest carceral rate per 100,000 inhabitants throughout the last decade. In addition to its leading position in the relative general level of imprisonment, Portugal holds two other records in the EU context that are worth noticing: the highest proportion of convictions for drug-related offenses and the highest rate of women’s imprisonment. These facts are not unrelated. I wish to address here some aspects of their connections as well as some of their implications as they are reflected in a Portuguese major women’s penitentiary where I conducted fieldwork for two different periods of time (1986 to 1987 and 1997). Women represent 10 percent of the imprisoned population in Portugal. As far as ethnicity is concerned, the majority of the carceral population is Portuguese (86 percent). The more important non-Portuguese categories are composed of immigrants of African origin (more precisely from Portuguese-speaking countries), who represent 1 percent of the general population but amount to 9 percent of prisoners. ²