Gender Equality Frames in the Criminal Justice System in Spain: From Design to Implementation

Over the last decades, several countries, such as Canada, the USA and the UK, have adopted initiatives to promote gender equality in the penal field. In Spain, it is not until the end of the first decade of the 21st Century when, as a result of the general expansion of gender equality policies in the country, the government at that time paid attention to the gender inequality and discrimination faced by women prisoners in the criminal justice system. In order to act upon this matter, in November of 2008, the government approved the first Gender Equality Action Programme between women and men in the penitentiary field. The aim of this paper is to analyze gender equality frames in the penal field in two different levels: on the one hand, we will consider how public policies and political actors have defined the problem of gender inequality in the prison system, taking particular attention to the role of different actors in this process. On the other hand, we will focus on the level of implementation in order to assess in what extent ideas are effectively transferred from political documents to practice. In doing so, we will analyze how the degree of permeability to gender equality ideas from those involved in implementing gender equality policies shape the way in which these policies are undertaken. Methodologically, we have used Critical Frame Analysis (CFA) to examine the Gender Equality Action Programme, transcriptions of interviews with political representatives and prison staff and parliamentary minutes, among others public policies and documents. The main results show that gender equality penitentiary policies reinforce maternal and caring roles, emphasize personal dependency and low self-esteem and characterize women prisoners as “shortcomings subjects” and victims, without employing an intersectional approach. Furthermore, the absence of key actors in the process, such as the feminist movement, can contribute to explain not only the main frames identified, but also the fragility of the initiatives adopted. At the level of implementation, along with the existence of multiple and contradictory frames in the ideas expressed by the actors, the research has also found a lack of recognition of the existence of gender inequality and discrimination in the penal field in some practitioners and political authorities. Some stereotypes integrated in the diversity of gender frames and the lack of recognition of the problem of gender inequality can activate dynamics of opposition leading to minimize or neutralize potential progresses in gender equality in the criminal justice system.