1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Women's Experiences of Criminal Justice
This Handbook brings together the voices of a range of contributors interested in the many varied experiences of women in criminal justice systems, and who are seeking to challenge the status quo.
Although there is increasing literature and research on gender, and certain aspects of the criminal justice system (often Western focused), there is a significant gap in the form of a Handbook that brings together these important gendered conversations. This essential book explores research and theory on how women are perceived, handled, and experience criminal justice within and across different jurisdictions, with particular consideration of gendered and disparate treatment of women as law-breakers. There is also consideration of women’s experiences through an intersectional lens, including race and class, as well as feminist scholarship and activism. The Handbook contains 47 unique chapters with nine overarching themes (Lessons from history and theory; Routes into the criminal justice system; Intersectionality; Sentencing and the courts and community punishments; Specific offences; Incarcerated women’s experiences; Mothers and families; Rehabilitation and reintegration; Practitioner relationships), and each theme includes contributions from different countries as well as the experiences of contributors from different stages in their own journey.
International and interdisciplinary in scope, this Handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of criminology, sociology, social policy, social work, and law. It will also be of interest to practitioners, such as social workers, probation officers, prison officers, and policy makers.
- Introduction
- Womanhood as Weakness, or Why Witches Were Witches
- Infanticide Cases, Expert Evidence, and the Sympathetic Jury, in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century England
- ‘Completely innocent or wholly culpable’: Judicial outcomes of women tried for homicide in pre-modern England
- Shifting trends and discourses in women’s imprisonment in Aotearoa New Zealand
- Criminalised Women and the Risk Lens
- Women’s desistance: A review of the literature through a gendered lens
- Perpetrators and Victims: Women, double deviance, and the criminal justice system
- "She Should Have Known": Oversimplified narratives of the victim-offender cycle within women human trafficking ‘offenders’
- Care-Experienced Women in the Criminal Justice System
- Family violence, homelessness and criminalised women: accounting for systemic violence in the Australian post-release milieu
- Domestic abuse as a driver to women’s offending
- Muslim Women Moving on from Crime
- Making visible the invisibalised voices of criminalised women in Australia
- Women, Religion and Criminal Justice in Ireland
- Women’s Experiences of Criminal Justice System in Pursuit of Inheritance: Voices from Pakistan
- Lived Realities of Spouses of Incarcerated Husbands in India
- Lesbian Experiences of the Criminal Justice System: A Practitioner Perspective
- At the intersection of disadvantage, disillusionment and resilience: Black women's experiences in prison
- Remanding Women: Exploring the scope for using therapeutic jurisprudence as a framework in the bail and remand decision-making process
- Being a girl: does it matter in the Belgian Youth Court?
- Young Women in Norwegian Courts: A Study of Contemporary Control Strategies
- Assessing the viability of problem-solving courts for criminalised women
- The Gendered Harms of Criminalisation: Buying abortion pills on the internet in Northern Ireland
- The meaning of gender in sentencing domestic violence homicide cases in Poland
- Being female sex offenders inside the criminal justice system: The Colombian case
- Situating police legitimacy: The accounts of substance-using and sex-working women in Nigeria
- Out of sight, out of mind: The incarceration of cognitively disabled women in Australian prisons
- Incarcerated Women’s Experiences in Spain
- Peer mentoring for women in prison: experiences of power, control and reliving past trauma
- Carceral collectivism and incarcerated women’s experiences in Lithuania and Latvia
- Maternal Imprisonment: The enduring impact of imprisonment on mothers and their children
- Imprisoned Women and Reproductive Health: A Site of Reproductive Rights Violation?
- Mother-infant separations in prison: Why does context matter?
- Mothering within a Prison Nursery – a review of the literature
- (Wo)men in the middle: the gendered role of supporting prisoners
- A holistic approach to understanding and responding to the multiple and complex needs of women prison leavers in Wales: breaking the cycle of homelessness and reoffending
- "It is nice to know that for once someone is not just saying that they’re backing your corner, they are actually fucking backing your corner": The significance of relational factors in women’s experiences of probation intervention
- Women, the pains of imprisonment and public health interventions
- A Darker Tale of Exceptionalism: How Punitive Drug Policies Impact Women’s Experiences of Desistance in Sweden
- Accounting for the gendered nature of ‘collateral consequences’ of a criminal record
- A New Emancipatory Script: gendered post-sentence discrimination and experiences of reintegration
- Experiencing the Juvenile Legal System as a Girl: Lessons from Gender-Responsive Approaches and Trauma-Informed Care
- Imprisoned Women’s Experiences of Trust in Staff-Prisoner Relationships in an English Open Prison
- Supervising women in the community: A view from Catalonia
- ‘I don’t know where to fit...how to fit back in...as a mum...as a person’: Exploring the implications for practitioners of women’s experiences of resettlement following short-term custody
- "She has nothing really when she goes out of prison": Community-based practitioners’ perceptions of young women’s pathways through the criminal justice system in Scotland
Isla Masson and Natalie Booth
Trace M Maddox
Rachel Dixon
Stephanie Brown
Fairleigh Evelyn Gilmour and Kirsten Gibson
Hazel Kemshall
Madeline Pertrillo
Vicky Seaman and Orla Lynch
Alexandra L. A. Baxter
Claire Fitzpatrick, Jo Staines and Katie Hunter
Rebecca Bunn and Elisa Buggy
Jo Roberts
Sofia Buncy, Alexandria Bradley and Sarah Goodwin
Debbie Kilroy and Tabitha Lean
Lynsey Black
Iram Rubab
Rashmi Choudhury
Kath Wilson
Angela Charles
Lisa Mary Armstrong
Sofie De Bus
Jane Dullum, Elisabeth Fransson and Sven-Erik Skotte
Carly Lightowlers and Nicole Benefer
Goretti Horgan and Linda Moore
Anna Matczak and Emilia Rekosz-Cebula
Angie Borda-Montenegro
Ediomo-Ubong E. Nelson and Aniekan S. Brown
Julie-Anne Toohey
Carmen Navarro, Anna Meléndez and Jenny Cubells
Melissa Henderson and Rosie Meek
Rūta Vaičiūnienė, Arta Jalili Idrissi and Artūras Tereškinas
Lucy Baldwin and Sophie Mitchell
Emma Milne and Vicki Dabrowski
Klare Martin and Claire Powell
Jacqui Johnson
Natalie Booth and Isla Masson with Ferzana Dakri
Caroline Gorden and Kelly Lockwood
Natalie Rutter and Julie Eden-Barnard
Jennifer Ferguson and Maggie Leese
Robin Gålnander and Linnéa Österman
Nicola A. Collett
Caroline Bald, Rachel Tynan and Olivia Dehnavi
Nicole C McKenna, Valerie R Anderson, Eurielle Kiki, and Destinee L Starcher
Sarah Waite
Cristina Vasilescu
Laura Haggar
Annie Rose Crowley
Biography
Isla Masson is a Criminologist and Researcher at The Open University. Her research interests include women in the criminal justice system, motherhood, incarceration, remand, care leavers and restorative justice. Her book Incarcerating Motherhood (Routledge, 2019) was based on her doctoral research, which explored the longevity of short terms of incarceration on mothers. She is a trustee at The Boaz Project, which is a therapeutic work environment for adults with learning disabilities, and previously volunteered with the Independent Monitoring Board.
Natalie Booth is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Bath Spa University. Her doctorate explored ‘maternal imprisonment and family life’ resulting in a book revealing the previously untold experiences of those charged with the responsibility of looking after children of female prisoners ‘from the caregivers’ perspectives’ (2020). Her written work also contributes to our understanding about the maintenance of relationships and family contact during imprisonment, mothers and women in prison and developments in penal policy relating to women and families.