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Collins, Angela Browne
(2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00100270
Abstract
This is a broadly ethnographic, qualitative, mixed methods study of women’s experiences of community punishment at a women’s centre in the North of England. Drawing on participant observation, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, it uses the concepts of gendered governance, risk and, responsibilisation to understand the practice and experience of gender responsive criminal justice.
Using the theoretical framework of gendered governance, this PhD makes key contributions to feminist criminological debates as it explores gendering processes in governing structures, inherent within the gender responsive model of supervising women serving a community sentence. It furthermore makes key contributions to criminological debates surrounding community punishment, as it challenges the commonly held assumption that community rehabilitation is a ‘softer’, or less painful form of punishment. This study highlights the specific gendered challenges for women serving a community sentence, while supporting themselves and fulfilling their responsibilities to their dependants, employers and members of their wider family and social networks. In terms of its policy relevance, this study was completed during the post-Corston period which shaped the development of community justice for women in England and Wales and resulted in the expansion of women’s centres. The study also took place after the implementation of the Transforming Rehabilitation programme and was conducted when the impact austerity was being felt. The policy impacts of these programmes are discussed and assessed throughout, as are their impacts on gendered governing structures.
Data was analysed thematically within a framework that drew on the conceptual connections made by The Corston Report (2007). This explanatory approach helped frame women’s past histories of criminalisation and victimisation within the context of their personal, domestic, and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. This study includes reflections on the practices of criminal justice and supervision at the women’s centre and found that Transforming Rehabilitation changed how the women’s centre was able to meet the needs and vulnerabilities of criminalised women. It found that gender responsive justice policies resulted in responsibilisation and were typically neoliberal projects of criminal justice reform. As resource and staff capacity reduced the priority was given to risk-based approaches in the supervision of criminalised women. As a result, this study concludes that the gender responsive community justice model in operation at time of this study was not capable of responding meaningfully to the needs of criminalised women in the community.
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