Comparative Mapping of Feminist Prison Systems Policies: A First Step

Scholarship in feminist policy analysis has flourished in parallel with the development of gender policies since the early 1970s in Western postindustrial democracies. A rich and ever growing international and comparative literature has identified the complex and transversal sector of gender equality/ feminist policy and has studied the dynamics and determinants of gender equality policy in pre adoption, adoption and most recently in post adoption – implementation, evaluation and impact in Western post industrial democracies and increasingly outside of the global north or West. One crucial sector of policy for gender equality has virtually been ignored by feminist policy studies – gender equality and criminal justice, particularly gender equality in prisons. Moreover, as research has shown each sector of feminist policy has its specificities, path dependencies and patterns due to its particular history and development. In this vein, the prison system itself and the diversity of prison cultures create an environment that pose specific challenges to the development of gender equality policies in this arena. The goal of this paper is to take the first steps to systematically map out this understudied, yet crucial sub sector of gender equality policy in comparative perspective in terms of the dynamics of policies that seek to promote gender equality in prison reform and the determinants and/or obstacles to policies that actually promote gender equality. The paper aims to first report on a systemic comparative review of research on gender and prison reform, focused on grey literature – from NGOs, government reports, databases, etc. From this inventory and assessment, the analysis begins mapping out prison reform policies in western postindustrial democracies in terms of the politics of the pre-adoption, adoption and post adoption of feminist prison reform policies. Initial research on Spain, suggests that there are five contextual factors found within a given country that have the potential to explain the actual forms adopted by feminist penal reforms: first, historical configurations of the penal domain - i.e. a more punitive or rehabilitative approach; second, varieties of gender regimes in institutional domains; third, the state of gender equality overall; fourth, policy approaches to gender equality; the institutional framework in a twofold way: how gender equality policy is being overseen with regards to the penal system (i.e. women’s policy machineries) and what is the position of the gender agencies and their role in the development of gender equality policies in the prison system; and fifth, the subsystem of policy actors and stakeholders, advocates, organizations supporting prisoners, NGOs, etc., with special attention to feminist and women’s groups. Already the expectation is that these five factors combine in complex ways to facilitate or obstruct the advances in gender equality and that paradoxes emerge from the attempts to advance gender equality within a complex and highly mutable institution such as the penal system and prisons. This paper, therefore, seeks to set the research agenda for a more systematic comparative analysis of feminist prison system policy.