Women's Imprisonment in Britain and Ireland

• Author: Christina Quinlan
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00328855221079251
• Date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Women’s Imprisonment

in Britain and Ireland

Christina Quinlan

Abstract

This research, utilizing a case study design, focused on prison operations in

women’s prisons and compared those across each of the four jurisdictions of

England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland.

The numbers of women in prison, the crimes for which they are imprisoned,

and their sentences are considered, along with women’s prison policy initia-

tives in each jurisdiction. The differences between these policies and the

realities of women’s experiences in prison are highlighted.

Keywords

women in prison, Britain, Ireland, prison policy

Women’s Imprisonment: A Brief Review

of the Literature

Worldwide, women represent a smaller percentage of prison populations

compared to men, comprising 7% of the incarcerated globally (Walmsley,

2017). Throughout the world, as detailed by Tripkovic and Plesnica (2018),

incarcerated women are more likely to be imprisoned for offences of a less

serious, generally non-violent nature.

The typically less serious nature of female offending, along with their rel-

atively small numbers, might suggest that women are provided with compar-

atively more compassionate and lenient criminal justice and correctional

Technological University Dublin, Ireland

Corresponding Author:

Christina Quinlan, Technological University Dublin, Graduate Business School, Aungier Street,

Dublin, DO2, HW71, Ireland.

Email: Christina.Quinlan@TUDublin.ie

Article

The Prison Journal

2022, Vol. 102(2) 134–153

© 2022 SAGE Publications

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00328855221079251

journals.sagepub.com/home/tpj

system experiences. This, of course, is not the case. It has been documented

that women are sometimes committed to prison for offending behaviors for

which men would not receive a prison sentence (Carlen & Worral, 2004).

Quinlan (2011, p. 92), for example, outlined the views of Irish professionals

working with women in prison: ‘men get many more chances than women,

men would not receive custodial sentences for the trivial offences for

which women might get six or nine months’. In addition, due to their fewer

numbers, women are often accommodated in separate sections of male

prisons, consequently the same prison experience is provided for women

and men. This is particularly problematical due to the gender-specif‌ic needs

of women prisoners

The fact that women in prison have gender-specif‌ic needs is now widely

accepted. Critically, this has been recognized by the United Nations. The

UN Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial

Measures for Female Offenders, known as the Bangkok Rules, were

adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2010 (The Bangkok Rules).

While this is the case, traditionally and for a very long time, the focus of

prison studies was on men and their experiences of imprisonment. With the

development of feminist criminology in the late twentieth century, a research

literature on women offenders in criminal justice and correctional systems has

emerged (See for example Carlen, 2002, 2021; Carlen & Worral, 2004;

Chesney Lind, 1991; Chesney Lind & Morash, 2013; Daly & Chesney

Lind, 1988; Gelsthorpe & Morris, 1988; Morash & Schram, 2002; Quinlan,

2011, 2016; Rafter & Heidensohn, 1995; Renzetti, 2013; Smart, 1977).

Arguably, it was this traditional emphasis on the male experience of imprison-

ment that facilitated the development of a widely held view that women, for

seemingly logical, common sensical, logistical, and other reasons, should be

provided with the same prison experience as men.

The experiences of women in prison in the US, detailed by Chesney Lind

(1998), are, in general, ref‌lective of the experiences of imprisoned women

across the world. Chesney Lind noted that throughout US history, due to

their small numbers, women were correctional afterthoughts. Female

inmates were overlooked, she suggests, because when they were unhappy

with the prison experience provided for them; they tended to complain

rather than riot. She explains that in the mid 1970’s, only half of the

states had separate women’s correctional facilities, and many women

were imprisoned in male prisons. In the three decades following the

1970’s, the numbers of US women in prison began to grow substantially.

Where women represented 3% of the prison population in 1970, they con-

stituted 7% in the mid 1980’s, and 11% by the end of the twentieth

century (Chesney Lind, 1998).

Quinlan 135