Search results

There is limited research on the mental health of pregnant women in prison in England, mother and baby unit (MBU) applications and associated factors. Eighty-five pregnant women were interviewed in eight different prisons in England, UK. Schedules for the Clinical Assessment of Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) and Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) were used to assess mental health; Severity of Dependence Questionnaire (SOD-Q) for drug misuse; Alcohol Use Identification Test (AUDIT) for hazardous drinking and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-II) to identify personality disorder. About 51% of participants had depression and 57% had anxiety. Those with prior social services involvement, diagnosis of personality disorder or history of suicidality were less likely to be admitted to MBUs. The high levels of depression and anxiety can have negative impacts on both the mother and her unborn child. Factors which influence MBU admission suggest those who might benefit most from MBU placement are least likely to be admitted. Other countries offer feasible alternatives to imprisonment for pregnant women and mothers which could be implemented in England.

The development of information technologies has led to the restructuring of the boundaries within and between organizations in a number of areas of social life. Examines the impact of a specific form of information technology being introduced in the field of punishment and control – the electronic monitoring of sentenced offenders. Electronic surveillance and home imprisonment are features of the current restructuring of the boundaries between prison, work and family life. It is both the physical and the cultural boundaries between “home” and “prison” that are being readjusted. Over the past 200 years these two spheres of social life have been constructed around incompatible sets of values. However the complex contradictions involved in making the boundaries between these two spheres more permeable have not been fully explored in current penal discourses.

According to the German penal code, offenders can basically be sanctioned to a prison sentence or (in cases of misdemeanours) to a fine. If an offender is sentenced to a fine, but is not able or willing to make the payment, then the German state can administer a custodial sentence as a replacement. This is called an “Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe” (EFS). The proportion of EFS prisoners accounts for 10% of the German prison population and thus appears to be strikingly high considering the consequences of an imprisonment for the detainee. It has been considered that this is due to high levels of mental disorders in the population of EFS prisoners. This article thus aims at delineating the prevalence of mental disorders in EFS prisoners according to socio‐demographic data and ICD‐10 diagnoses of two recent German studies. Results of these studies indicate that EFS prisoners indeed are for the most part socially and economically deprived and show a high prevalence of mental disorders. It is argued that their resulting lack of social competence may lead to incapability of avoiding their fee being converted into a prison sentence. As a consequence EFSs have to be seen as supporting social stigmatization and risking a further exclusion from society.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlines fundamental protections for all human beings. Critically, such rights and protections are particularly applicable to those imprisoned throughout all carceral spaces: the right to physical security; freedom from torture and other cruel and unusual punishments; equal protection under the law; and a right to a community standard of living, including food, clothing, medical care, and social services. The need for special vigilance in applying these principles to justice settings for children and women entwined in these spaces has been met with the development and implementation of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders (2010) or the Bangkok Rules. These Rules provide for a women-centered approach to human rights within correctional environments. The Bangkok Rules are based on several dominant themes relevant to women in prison and additionally emphasize the importance of alternatives to custody. Since their adoption over 10 years ago, there has been clear progress in implementing and promoting the Bangkok Rules throughout Southeast Asia, as we will describe in this chapter. While we applaud these efforts, there is still much work to do within the region. We argue that attention is needed both within and outside of women’s prisons to expand the promise of the Bangkok Rules beyond current efforts. In our view, the attention inside prison walls must now turn to addressing intersections between gender and other marginalized statuses, ensuring all forms of safety, dignity, and respect. Outside prison, reform of egregious and punitive drug laws is essential. Equally important, is the critical need to develop a more robust response in terms of non-custodial measures and other non-prison-based responses to women in conflict with the law.

This chapter argues that the concept of ‘mass supervision’, and indeed the concept of ‘mass incarceration’ from which it derives, is both quantitatively and qualitatively indeterminate when applied outside of the context of the US. However, the qualitative indeterminacy of mass supervision only holds so long as one treats the word ‘mass’ as being an analogy to mass consumption. This chapter therefore considers an alternative construction of ‘mass’ punishment in terms of mass production. Comparing the philosophies of production associated with Henry Ford and William Morris with the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Fergus McNeill reveals that mass supervision can authentically claim to be qualitatively ‘massive’, given the bespoke and one-on-one nature of traditional supervision. It is thus possible to speak coherently of ‘mass supervision’ in an international context, although this negative conception of a problem invites questions about the best solution that it generally leaves open.

This chapter provides a brief overview of community sanctions in Australia and examines the extent to which McNeill’s analysis in Pervasive Punishment (2019) is applicable in the Australian context. Two key issues in the Australian context are, firstly, state and territory-level variations within a federal political structure, and secondly, disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment and community sanction rates and the generally destructive impact of the criminal legal system on Indigenous communities and peoples. The chapter argues that developing a better agonistic politics around community sanctions requires descending from the broad level of historical and sociological analysis to examine state and territory-level variations in judicial and correctional structures, histories and cultures. Further, that Australian community sanctions cannot be understood without a primary focus on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates, experiences and meaning. The key to addressing the destructive impact of criminal legal processes and practices on Indigenous peoples lies in developing Indigenous governance, empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty and nation-building. Two recent developments promoting Indigenous governance are examined: the Uluru Statement from the Heart and Justice Reinvestment projects initiated by First Nations communities, highlighting the importance of activism, contest and struggle by community organisations.

In this introductory chapter, we discuss the impetus for this edited book. We introduce activist, critical and feminist criminological theorizing and research on gender, intersectionality, criminalization, and carceral experiences. The scene is set for the chapters to follow by providing a general overview of gender, criminalization, imprisonment, and human rights in Southeast Asia with particular attention being paid to Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines. We consider trends and drivers of women’s imprisonment in the region, against the backdrop of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders, also known as the Bangkok Rules, which were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly just over a decade ago. We reflect on the dominance of western centric feminist (and malestream) criminological works on gender, criminalization and imprisonment, the positioning of Southeast Asian knowledge on the peripheries of Asian criminology and the importance of bringing to light, as this book does, gendered activist scholarship in this region of the world.