ABSTRACT
This chapter places women who have offended in the context of a criminal justice system suffused by religious influence. Focusing on women prosecuted for murder from independence in 1922 until substantial law reform in 1964, the analysis investigates the sensemaking in relation to the use of religious sites of punishment for women, and how the women themselves negotiated these sites. In this period in Ireland, women who were deemed as offending experienced a system in which religious actors could be as powerful as state actors. Convicted women were often sentenced and punished according to religiously constructed modes of understanding. Crucially, although evidence of women’s own interpretations of their fate within these systems is scarce, the chapter foregrounds women’s personal experiences drawing on the extant archival material. Analysis of these historic cases reveals that while religious actors could occasionally offer support and sustenance to women, this was always enacted within a deeply coercive and controlling landscape. Twentieth-century Ireland presents a counter-narrative to the increasing secularisation of criminal justice in this period, demonstrating the emergence of an explicitly gendered criminal justice system in which the power to punish women was vested in religious organisations.
