Long sentenced women prisoners: Rights, risks and rehabilitation
| Author | Elaine Player,Elaine Genders |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474520933097 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Long sentenced women
prisoners: Rights, risks
and rehabilitation
Elaine Genders
University College London, UK
Elaine Player
King’s College London, UK
Abstract
This paper re-examines critically the role of rehabilitative interventions for a seriously
neglected group of prisoners: women serving long sentences. Drawing on empirical
research conducted in a democratic therapeutic community in a women’s prison in the
south of England, it considers how far established criticisms identify insuperable diffi-
culties that exacerbate existing harms and inequalities. It argues that evidence can be
adduced to support rehabilitative interventions that are not predominantly concerned
with the reduction of criminal risk but which provide tangible benefits to the personal
wellbeing of women in prison and may increase their prospects of integration post
release. It explores how such rehabilitative policies and practices could be supported
and protected from attrition by penal power, by embedding them within a doctrine of
human rights. By challenging and replacing prevalent assumptions and justifications that
uphold existing power relations in prisons, we argue that a specific duty of care, owed
by the prison service to women serving long sentences, can protect, support and re-
imagine their right to rehabilitative opportunities.
Keywords
duty of care, gender equality, human rights, rehabilitation, therapeutic community,
women prisoners
Corresponding author:
Elaine Player, King’s College London - Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: Elaine.player@kcl.ac.uk
Punishment & Society
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520933097
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2022, Vol. 24(1) 3–25
Introduction
This article has evolved from two interconnected concerns about the treatment of
women in prison. The first relates to the re-emergence of rehabilitation in penal
policy and its justification as a strategy to reduce reoffending and protect the
public. Historically, the development and delivery of correctional programmes
for women prisoners have met with criminological criticism, focusing on the failure
of policy to distinguish the gendered needs of men and women and on the devel-
opment of treatment interventions that infantilise women and pathologise the
causes of their offending (Carlen, 1983; Rock, 1996). Our second concern stems
from the lack of criminological attention paid to women convicted of serious
offences and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. For women serving short
sentences, there is a growing consensus that rehabilitative interventions are more
effectively applied in a community rather than custodial setting. Whilst an empha-
sis on short sentenced prisoners is understandable and defensible given their
numerical dominance and the demonstrable lack of social utility that attaches to
these sentences, it has diverted attention from the experience and rehabilitative
needs of the minority of women prisoners destined to serve long periods in custo-
dy. This oversight is strangely remiss, not least because the numbers of women
falling into this category have grown substantially over the last three decades. In
the early 1990s there were a little over one hundred women serving a life sentence
and fewer than 30 serving a determinate sentence of more than 10 years (Home
Office, 2002). By the end of 2019, the numbers serving life and other indeterminate
sentences had trebled to 346, and 178 were serving 10 years or more (Ministry of
Justice, 2019). For these women, the reduction of reoffending and their resettle-
ment on release are distant objectives, overtaken by the need for immediate sur-
vival strategies that help to manage the disruption and consequential pain that
attaches to long determinate and life sentences. Criminologists have consistently
argued that the pains of long-term incarceration are not only gendered but unique-
ly harmful to women (Crewe et al., 2017; Walker and Worrall, 2000). Research
into the adaptations of young women in the early stages of a life sentence for
murder, has revealed group behavioural patterns that defend against the tor-
mented grief associated with both the taking of human life and an indeterminate
loss of liberty (Wright et al., 2017). It argues that their coping strategies provide
evidence not of individual pathology but of ‘processes of psychic defending’ that
reflect a reactive rather than proactive response to the existential reality of their
confinement (p.226). Under these circumstances rehabilitation in prison is as much
concerned with the trauma arising from penal practices as from the traumatic life
experiences that typically shape women’s pathways into crime.
In this paper we aim to re-examine critically the role of rehabilitative interven-
tions for women serving long sentences, drawing on empirical research conducted
in a democratic therapeutic community (DTC) located in a women’s prison. We
question how far established criticisms identify insuperable difficulties that exac-
erbate existing harms and inequalities and whether evidence can be adduced to
4Punishment & Society 24(1)
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