Reconfigurations of penality
| Date | 01 August 2006 |
| Author | Jacqueline Tombs,Pat Carlen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480606065910 |
| Published date | 01 August 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Reconfigurations of penality
The ongoing case of the women’s
imprisonment and reintegration
industries
PAT CARLEN AND JACQUELINE TOMBS
University of Kent, UK and University of
Stirling, UK
Abstract
Illustrating their arguments with empirical examples drawn from
two recent research projects—one cross-European, the other
Scottish—the authors argue that the new multi-layering of carceral
forms in both prison and the community is one major, but under-
explored, cause of continuing increases in women’s prison
populations. Whether it is because sentencers believe the
reintegration industry’s rhetoric about the effectiveness of in-prison
programmes in ‘reintegrating’ ex-prisoners, or whether, conversely,
it is because sentencers are reluctant to award transcarceral and
over-demanding community sentences which set women up to fail,
the result is the same—more women go to prison.
Key Words
imprisonment • reintegration • sentencing • transcarceralism
• women
Introduction
This article is about the cultural and political economies of the imprison-
ment and reintegration industries, and the ever-evolving reconfigurations of
penality upon which those industries are currently founded. In using the
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© 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
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Vol. 10(3): 337–360; 1362–4806
DOI: 10.1177/1362480606065910
term ‘cultural economy of imprisonment’, we are referring to the iconic
status historically given to the prison’s mythic powers to protect govern-
ments and citizens against threats to the body politic as a result of
lawbreaking, unemployment, immigration, visible marks of exclusion from
citizenship and threatening otherness of any other kind. In using the term
‘political economy of imprisonment’, we are referring to the transfer of
goods and services between the non-penal and penal realms.
The arguments presented here were provoked by the separate involve-
ment of the authors in two entirely different research projects: an EU-
funded research programme known as the MIP project 2003—2004
(www.surt.org/mip; SURT, 2005) but which will be referred to hereafter as
the EU Women Prisoners’ Reintegration Project; and a sentencing project
which was funded by the Esm´ee Fairbairn Charitable Foundation’s Re-
thinking Crime and Punishment Initiative and conducted from 2003–4.
The MIP project (in which Carlen participated) first analysed nationally,
and then compared cross-nationally, the in-prison and post-prison experi-
ences of women prisoners in six jurisdictions—England, France, Germany,
Hungary, Italy and Spain.1The main object was to assess the levels of
‘integration’ (or ‘reintegration’) of women following a period of imprison-
ment. Analysis of the interviews of the ex-prisoners and prison staff for the
‘English’ part of the project suggested that, although there has been a great
deal of change in the professional discourse of English prison officials over
the last 30 years, there has been very little change in either the demographic
characteristics of women prisoners or the post-prison experiences of female
ex-prisoners. For, whereas English prison staff nowadays engage in a newly
revived psychologistic and official rhetoric about the desirability of women
learning to accept their place in society via cognitive relocation of the
sources of their problems—that is, from their faulty social circumstances to
their faulty psyches—women prisoners have the same social histories of
poverty, abuse, lone parenthood, homelessness and poor mental health as
they had 30 years ago. Once released from prison, moreover, they are
as badly off in terms of accommodation, job prospects, etc. as they were in
the 1970s. When the findings from all six jurisdictions were compared
in the final report (www.surt.org/mip), it was found that women prisoners
in the six countries (even in those like France, Germany and England which
had the most developed reintegration rhetoric) had similar socio-
biographies and that after prison they were at least as excluded from most
social goods as they had been prior to their imprisonment (SURT, 2005).
And though all had been imprisoned by heavily bureaucratized modern
criminal justice and penal systems, if, upon their release from prison, they
were to be deported to countries totally alien to them, they could also
expect not only to suffer from the casual cruelties of the internationalized
policing of national interests, but also from much of the same casual
brutality which was inflicted on prisoners in earlier centuries by the pre-
modern punishments of transportation and banishment. Meanwhile, in the
sentencing project conducted by Tombs (2004),2analysis of the interviews
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