Gendering the carceral web: Public sector reform, technology and digital (in)justice
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231151657 |
| Author | Gemma Birkett |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
Gendering the carceral web:
Public sector reform,
technology and digital (in)
justice
Gemma Birkett
City University of London, UK
Abstract
The UK government’s Transforming Our Justice System agendarepresentsanemergingsys-
tem of penal governance. Its cumulative impact, manifested through the mainstreaming of
virtual hearings, a system of automatic online convictions and the Single Justice Procedure
is a story yet to tell, with the potential impact on marginalised women simply a footnote.
Such women, well-documented victims of the legal aid cuts as well as the digital divide,
must comply with and negotiate the requirements of the carceral web alone. Pursuance
of the reforms, representing the next instalment in the neo-liberal justice agenda, exposes
another example of life at the penal–welfare nexus. This precarious territory has burgeoned
since government-imposed austerity, with implications for self-criminalisation, net-widening
and social justice. Reforms couched in the language of ‘efficiency’and ‘common sense’are
likely to run in direct opposition to what marginalised women might need (or respond well
to) and may jeopardise official reductionist strategies.
Keywords
court modernisation, digital divide, social justice, women offenders, carceral web
Introduction
The fundamental changes to penal governance over the previous decade have been
widely documented in the field of criminology and criminal justice (Garland, 2002;
Corresponding author:
Gemma Birkett, Department of Sociology and Criminology, City University of London,Northampton Square,
London EC1V 0HB, UK.
Email: Gemma.Birkett.1@city.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(3) 439–456
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231151657
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Simon, 2009; see Rock, 2019, for a British perspective). Yet the latest developments,
initiated following election of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government
in 2010, are arguably overseeing the most radical reconfiguration of the UK penal state in
modern history (Bell, 2011;Birkett, 2018). Such changes are permeating all aspects of
the landscape and calling the very legitimacy of the ‘system’into question. From trans-
formations in summary justice and the court modernisation agenda to the failed ‘hollow-
ing out’of probation and the crisis of the custodial estate, recent developments have
heralded an unprecedented disruption of policy, practice and political discourse. The
impacts of such developments on the police, prison service and probation are routinely
debated within the field of British criminology (Ludlow, 2014; Teague, 2013), yet the
discipline’s limited attempts to make intellectual sense of the government’s historic
court digitisation agenda is striking (although see Donoghue, 2017; Easton, 2018).
This programme, overseeing the most fundamental changes to the administration of
justice since the Judicature Act of 1873, has also received limited academic attention
within the political sciences, yet it also speaks to the broader changes in governance,
policy-making philosophy and public sector reforms since 2010. Instead, this territory
is almost exclusively dominated by legal scholars who either fully support government
plans or who have expressed concern about the tendency in Whitehall to consider
‘justice’as simply another public service requiring an administrative update (see, for
example, Le Sueur, 2015; Susskind, 2019). Borne in part out of austerity and the nation-
wide court closure programme,
1
the government has indicated that the digitisation agenda
is necessary to keep up with the pace of modern life and the role of technology within it.
The overarching vision for this new system is one that is more responsive to modern pres-
sures, cuts wastage (with regard to judicial personnel and court time) and recognises the
fundamental role of technology in modern life, underused by the courts thus far. The
British government stated in 2016 that the court estate was to be viewed merely as a
‘resource’in future (Ministry of Justice, 2016), and it has routinely reiterated that
‘increased use of digital services will mean that fewer court and tribunal hearings will
be needed in a traditional courtroom setting’(Ministry of Justice, 2018b: 5).
This article questions the compatibility of the court digitisation agenda with traditional
notions of justice. It does so through a feminist framework, viewing technology as a conse-
quence of gender relations, with the very foundations of service delivery (in this case infor-
mation and communication technology [ICT]) developed through and for the White male
lens (Eubanks, 2011; Faulkner, 2001; O’Donnell and Sweetman, 2018; Wajcman, 2010).
In viewing ICT as a key vehicle for the successful (and swift) delivery of modern justice ‘ser-
vices’, government strategy threatens to exacerbate, exploit and develop multiple existing
webs of control in the field of welfare and the already tiered (gendered, racist, classist)
justice system in which the marginalised
2
are already disadvantaged (see also Sandefur,
2009, 2019). Consistent with decades of feminist criminological scholarship (Carlen,
1983; Eaton, 1986; Hedderman, 2004; Hedderman and Gelsthorpe, 1997; Hedderman and
Hough, 1994; Kennedy, 1992; Smart, 1976; Worrall, 1981) it views the courtroom as a gen-
dered space, where females are often judged differently from their male counterparts.
Like ICT, national criminal justice strategies have been traditionally designed by and
for men. Although the past 15 years have heralded vast improvements in relation to the
development of some gender-responsive services (Clarke, 2004; Gelsthorpe, 2005;
440 Theoretical Criminology 27(3)
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