ABSTRACT
Despite the publication of many official and semi-official reports criticising the increased use of imprisonment as a punishment for law-breaking women, and deploring inappropriate regimes in women's prisons, the number of females held in custody in England continues to increase. Equally depressingly, reports from Canada about the fate of recent reforms in the federal prisons for women there are making British anti-prison campaigners think twice about some of the new programmes currently being implemented in the women's institutions in the UK. Indeed, many people, after reading about some of the unexpected outcomes of the Canadian experience (Hannah-Moffat and Shaw 2000; Hannah Moffat 2001), may conclude that in relation to prison reform, ‘nothing works’. Pessimists, moreover, may also conclude that this is inevitably so because of the seeming power of the state to incorporate all reformist discourse into the administrative machinery of the prison. One reading of what follows might suggest that that is my argument in this chapter. Such a reading would be unfortunate.
