ABSTRACT
Internationally, women represent a much smaller proportion of the offending population than men and have constituted a minority of the total prisoner population since the inception of the modern prison in the 19th century. This chapter discusses the available research on women in prison and the gendered penality that frames their experiences of the criminal justice system. It then reports on a cohort of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian women drawn from an administrative dataset of people who have been in prison and whose mental health and cognitive impairment diagnoses are known. Based on the findings and other evidence, in particular the Corston report in England and Wales, UK, the chapter proposes that more radical, holistic and trauma-informed approaches are required to better support women caught up in the criminal justice system and to address the social injustice of their rising rates of incarceration.
