ABSTRACT
Feminist criminological work has revealed the presence of sexism, gendered logics and ‘gendered agents of power’ within criminal justice systems (Silvestri and Crowther-Dowey, 2008: 33); proven to be an international phenomenon (Barberet, 2014). Due to women up until recently being an afterthought in the development of penal policy (Kruttschnitt, 2005), women have been, and continue to be, slotted into a male-orientated and male-dominated system (Heidensohn, 1996). In the UK, this was recognised on a political level in the Corston Report in 2007, where it was argued that women for too long have been marginalised in a system largely designed by men and for men. Women-centred criminal justice approaches were accordingly called for. However, restricted budgets, along with ideological and political barriers (Carlen, 2002a), can make it challenging to implement reform. Already lagging behind on the level of implementation, the Corston agenda was further diluted with the shift to a Conservative government in 2010 (Corcoran, 2010–2011). In a similar vein, Sweden has seen recent progress in terms of recognising gender inequality within the criminal justice system, especially since the Swedish Women Peace reform in 1998. However, as noted by Burman (2010), gendered assumptions and masculinist ideals still permeate the system. Positively, in the last decade unprecedented attention has been drawn to the plight of imprisoned women globally (Silvestri and Crowther-Dowey, 2008), including the gendered nature of the carceral experience (Barberet, 2014). It has accordingly been found that the female prisoner experiences the ‘pains of imprisonment’ more harshly than their male counterparts (Matthews, 2009); often leading to destructive and harmful consequences (Lempert, 2016).
