Working Together? Gendered Barriers to Employment and Desistance From Harm Amongst Criminalised English Women

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15570851231151728
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Date: 01 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Feminist Criminology

2023, Vol. 18(2) 156–177

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/15570851231151728

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Working Together? Gendered

Barriers to Employment and

Desistance From Harm

Amongst Criminalised English

Women

´

Una Barr

1



Abstract

Drawing on narrative interviews with 16 criminalized women and a year of observation

at English Women’s Centers, this study explores the women’s qualitative experiences

of employment and volunteering. Findings indicate traditional perspectives on desis-

tance from crime ignore the intersectional disadvantages women face. Criminalized

women experience trauma and stigma that have long-lasting effects on their mental

health. Women present as desisting from crime by taking on unpaid employment. This

reinforces perspectives on desistance which disregard the many generative roles which

women are often quietly involved in. This article contributes to emerging discourse

around critical anti-carceral, intersectional feminist desistance (Hale, 2020).

Keywords

women’s desistance, female criminality, intersections of race/class/gender, reentry

from prison to community, qualitative research

Introduction

Criminalized women experience barriers to f‌inding employment including the double

stigma of being a woman with a criminal record (Grace, 2022). Feminist research on

1

Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

Corresponding Author:

´

Una Barr, Liverpool John Moores University, 80-98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L3 5uz, UK.

Email: u.m.barr@ljmu.ac.uk

pathways to crime indicate additional barriers such as childhood victimization and

associated traumas, extreme economic marginalization and dysfunctional intimate

relationships which Roddy et al. (2021,p.6)suggest‘impact women’sefforts to carry

out their employment-related personal projects’. This indicates criminalized women’s

structural disadvantage in access to the workplace. Only 14% of prison leavers have a

job 6 months after release in England and Wales. Women are more than twice less

likely than men to be in work 6 weeks after leaving prison (WorkingChance, 2021b).

In addition, the ‘good woman’(Rutter and Barr, 2021) who supports her partner’s

desistance often has to do this additional unpaid care work whilst maintaining her

own desistance. There is a drive in policy and practice to view and promote desisting

women as ‘hyper-moral’(Matthews et al., 2014) in their generative activities and

work, and as a reaction to their double deviance. This adds to the unpaid labor of

women, and amplif‌ies gendered, racialized (Dehnavi, 2021;WorkingChance, 2021a)

and neoliberal pains of being a woman in the workplace, where jobs are precarious

and underpaid, childcare is prohibitively expensive, working poverty is a salient

reality (Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), 2022), and women’s services bear the

brunt of austerity measures (Mansf‌ield & Cooper, 2016).

Desistance research which examines how and why people move away from

crime has been concerned with the ‘social bonds’individuals make to conventional

life. This work often highlights the importance of meaningful, generative em-

ployment (Carlsson, 2012;Horney et al., 1995;Laub & Sampson, 2003;Maruna,

2001;Sampson & Laub, 1993;Verbruggen et al., 2012). Yet Barr (2019) has argued

for a shift in focus in the drive for desistance from crime to desistance from harm

including from the gendered harms of interpersonal and state violence. This a r-

gument is solidif‌ied by feminist (Hart, 2017;Hart & van Ginneken, 2017;¨

Osterma n,

2018) and abolitionist (Hale, 2020;Barr and Hart, 2022) perspectives which note

that individual intentions to desist by criminalized women can be eclipsed by

historical and ongoing disadvantage and trauma (Kashy & Morash, 2022). Hale

(2020) for example has noted amongst the criminalized women participants in her

research, a fatigue from drug use. Hale notes that the women’schildreninthiscase

can be a motivator to desist and/or impetus for reoffending, if for example their

children needed something they could not provide. (Re)offending can be survival

(Garcia-Hallett, 2019;Hale, 2020;Opsal, 2012). What is more important in these

intersectional perspectives is a move away from harm. Disadvantageand trauma can

emerge from state neglect and violence through interaction with education, welfare

and ‘care’systems. Across both traditional and more critical examinations of

desistance is an agreement that meaningful, unionized, well-paid employment can

act as a desistance-promoting social bond, in terms of both crime and harm. Yet

feminist researchers are keen to draw attention to the unpaid labor of women, which

is particularly salient in criminalized women’s experiences (Barr, 2019). Crimi-

nalized women are doubly demonized Heidenshohn and Silvestri, 2012;Leverentz,

2014;Worrall, 1990) and desisting women often have to live up to gendered and

racialized understandings of the ‘good woman’(Rutter and Barr, 2021). This affects

Barr 157