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Female imprisonment worldwide

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Catherine Heard reflects on Female Imprisonment Worldwide, a recent event organised by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research. Listen to highlights from the speakers’ presentations on Birkbeck’s podcast.

Why this event? A rapidly increasing global female prison population

At ICPR we compile and host the World Prison Brief, a unique online resource that provides free access to the best available data on prisoner numbers in almost every country on the globe. This gives us a bird’s eye view of important trends in world prisoner numbers, which have been rising steadily in recent decades – particularly the numbers of women prisoners, as our World Female Imprisonment List (4th Edition) shows.

Numbers of women prisoners are rising in every continent, with significant increases reported in developed as well as less developed countries. This matters, not least because of the very high levels of vulnerability we know exist among women who get caught up in criminal justice processes. Women and girls in prison usually come from backgrounds of disadvantage and are likely to have experienced trauma, abuse, neglect or mental ill health before their imprisonment.

This event brought together experts in female imprisonment from around the world to discuss some of the causes and consequences of rising female prisoner numbers.

The scale and profile of female prison populations

Our keynote speaker was prison philanthropist Lady Edwina Grosvenor. Edwina has worked in criminal justice reform for more than 20 years. Perhaps her most ground-breaking contribution has been to advance the field of trauma-informed practice in the women’s custodial system in the UK.

Next, we heard from Roy Walmsley, who founded the World Prison Brief in 2000 and who compiles the population lists. Roy presented key data from the fourth edition of ICPR’s World Female Imprisonment List. There followed a presentation from Olivia Rope of Penal Reform International, an organisation that has contributed much to creating and promoting basic standards of decent, humane treatment for women and girls in custody. Olivia talked about some of the most common characteristics of women prisoners and explained why gender-informed approaches to women in criminal justice systems are so important.

Over-incarceration of women: drivers, harms and solutions
Marie Nougier from the International Drugs Policy Consortium then presented on the work they and members of their network have been doing to change the conversation around female drug offending, a major driver of the rapid rise in women prisoner numbers. View slide presentation here. 

Our next speaker, Teresa Njoroge had just given a TED talk in the United States, so we were all the more honoured to welcome her. Teresa heads up the NGO, Clean Start Kenya, which works with women and girls in Kenyan prisons. Teresa shared with us her own experience as an inmate in a Kenyan prison, spending a year in horrendous and needlessly humiliating conditions. She said many women never fully recover from the experience of prison in Kenya and in that sense their punishment lasts much longer than the term of custody they are sentenced to serve. View slide presentation here.

We then welcomed Madhurima Dhanuka from the Commonwealth Human Rights Institute in India. Madhurima’s presentation brought into sharp focus one hugely avoidable cause of high prisoner numbers – that is, the overuse of pre-trial imprisonment, a major problem in India. Madhurima also described the psychological damage prison causes many women, with awful conditions of custody followed too often by social isolation on release when their families abandon women due to the shame they are seen to have brought. View slide presentation here. 

Our last speaker was Jo Peden from the health and justice team at Public Health England. Jo has been working on a project to develop woman centred standards of health-care for female prisoners, something that is sadly lacking in too many prisons today. Jo’s presentation shed light on the alarmingly high rates of suicide and self-harm seen among women prisoners and the underlying vulnerabilities that they bring with them into custody. View slide presentation here. 

After the presentations, we had an open discussion with our audience. We were lucky enough to have Juliet Lyon CBE with us to chair this session. Juliet is now a visiting professor at Birkbeck. Prior to this, she was for many years the director of the Prison Reform Trust, which has long promoted better understanding of the needs of women prisoners and advocated to downsize the female prison population. Juliet reflected with honesty and a sense of sadness about the distance there remains to travel in achieving justice for women affected by the criminal justice system. If you listen to my podcast on the event, you can hear Juliet’s concluding thoughts on the presentations.

Where does female imprisonment fit within our world prison research programme?

Women prisoners are predominantly incarcerated for minor, non-violent, property or drug-related crimes, and are often primary carers for one or more children or older family members. This surely suggests that the economic and social costs of imprisoning women will, in most cases, outweigh the supposed benefits. That should prompt us to look more carefully at whom we imprison and ask, in every case, why we imprison and what we expect prison to achieve.

Our prisons research at ICPR aims to do just this. It seeks to bring about a deeper understanding of the many interwoven factors that combine to drive up prisoner numbers. We are doing this so that we can come up with some concrete, practical solutions to these harmful and unsustainable increases in the imprisonment levels of recent decades. We know that in order to do this, we must provide a better account of who it is that our states choose to imprison, and why.

This is a key goal of our current project, Understanding and reducing the use of imprisonment worldwide. The project entails an in-depth exploration of imprisonment in ten jurisdictions across all five continents. Those countries are: Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, India, Thailand, England & Wales, Hungary, the Netherlands and Australia. Among these are countries with some of the largest prison populations in the world: the USA, Brazil, India and Thailand are all in the top six globally. Most of these countries have seen very significant increases in their female prison populations since 2000. You can learn more about the project here.

  • Catherine Heard is director of ICPR’s World Prison Research Programme. Catherine has also recorded a podcast on the event, with audio content from each of the speakers’ presentations.
  • Speakers’ short biographical details can be found here. 
  • ICPR would like to thank all our speakers for their contributions to this event.
  • We are grateful to Clifford Chance for their generosity in hosting the event.
  • ICPR’s World Prison Research Programme is funded by Open Society Foundations.

Fixing the economy: rebuilding macroeconomics

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First year BSc Economics student Lydia Evans provides a recap of an event organised by Birkbeck’s Economics + Finance Society, at which Dr Angus Armstrong introduced the new research network he directs.

The story is infamous: the Queen visits the London School of Economics and asks why no one saw the recent global financial crisis coming. Angus Armstrong believes that it’s not that people didn’t see a catastrophe on the horizon, “it’s that the institutions almost didn’t want to listen to them”. Raghuram Rajan, Joseph Stiglitz and others attempted to warn the world that a seismic shock was going to take place. The main question is how have we moved forward? Armstrong thinks that the financial world has not, it continues to choose willful ignorance. He directs a new network that wants to re-evaluate the entrenched economic models and the collective consciousness of those who use them.

Rebuilding Macroeconomics, a network of economists and academics, are attempting research that is disruptive, not immune to failure but genuinely independent to ask uncomfortable questions. The key to the efficacy of this research is how it is sourced. The network’s blueprint is set out as three tributaries: Discovery Meetings, Research Hubs, and Pilot Projects. Discovery Meetings are notable for their inclusivity. They seek to attract people from all backgrounds to discuss the most important macroeconomic questions. These discussions lead to fresh insights and methodologies to be examined by policy-makers and scholars in the Research Hubs. The most promising ideas turn into pilot projects. The network is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and hosted by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

Does the UK really need such reformatory research? He finds something “profoundly wrong” when a country as rich as the UK requires food banks to feed some of its population. Government debt is 90% of GDP. The Bank of England is only able to claim pyrrhic victories. It may hit its inflation target but other economic measures are in turmoil. Mark Carney has himself confessed that 95% of the movement in interest rates is determined by international events.  Current interest rates may not be what the UK actually needs them to be. Armstrong feels that the established institutions are reliant upon Knut Wicksell’s Rocking Horse. Whatever the instability, the assumption is that the status quo will always return. This is no longer the reality and nothing has been done about it. The failure is intellectual, not regulatory, and economists must be brave enough to confront the zeitgeist.

When Armstrong returned from study in America and expressed his wish to research financial crises, he was told that these were a problem only for the developing world. He mentions a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, considering how those who disagree with the mainstream in Economics are labelled dilettantes. Is the discipline consumed by an ill-conceived adherence to orthodoxy? Not all new ideas are worthy but it’s difficult to ignore a belligerent spirit against outliers. Whatever the future holds, Armstrong is not alone in arguing that the existing economic paradigm must urgently be confronted.

Further information

 

Strategic litigation: anti-racism in the courtroom?

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Rebecca Sparrow, second year LLM student, discusses a recent event about how to challenge structural and state-sanctioned racism in law.

The Centre for the Research of Race and Law’s most recent event, Strategic Litigation: Anti-Racism in the Courtroom?, hosted two panels, each of which broadened understandings of what strategic litigation does and might look like. How, whether, and when to litigate, and how to ethically, and effectively occupy Mari Matsuda’s ‘multiple consciousnesses’ of working within and against the law, is a constant and pressing concern for anyone involved in social justice or political campaigns, critical academia and legal advocacy. This set of workshops provided a stimulating space for discussion and exploration of this fraught battleground of the law, particularly in the context of challenges to structural and state-sanctioned racism, including in its ever-increasing formulation through immigration policy.

In the first session, Ioannis Kalpouzos from the Global Legal Action Network suggested a challenge to Upendra Baxi’s suggestion that all political issues of salience in the second half of the 20th Century must be articulated through human rights. Kalpouzos described the Network’s efforts to use the International Criminal Court to challenge offshore detention in Australia, a country he described as the ‘envy of the Western world’ when it comes to brutal immigration regimes. He explored the potential of using International Criminal Law to name and label western state-sanctioned violence – even when that violence is not spectacular or radical, but bureaucratic and all-pervasive. This raised questions from the audience about whether using criminal law might exceptionalize particular moments of violence, and therefore also serve to normalise violence that we should be pushing to be accepted as human rights violations. The responses to these questions made the particularly strategic nature of such litigation clear.

Lewis Kett from Duncan Lewis Solicitors, one of the main law firms with legal aid contracts to represent those in UK immigration detention, spoke about his recent successful case challenging laws on segregation in immigration detention centres. Although this, and previous wins of Duncan Lewis’, have been important, and provided some of the only real positive changes to detention policy in recent years, Kett also expanded on the extent of the problems within existing policy, and how much further there is to go. In response to queries from workshop participants, he reflected on whether improving structurally violent institutions such as detention can serve to make them more palatable without removing their inherent violence, but concluded that as a solicitor it is ethically impossible not to litigate for reform where possible, not only to change practice but also to provide accountability, and as part of wider campaigns.

The second panel began with Muhammad Rabbani, the director of CAGE recently charged and convicted under terrorism legislation for refusing to hand over the passwords to his mobile phone and laptop in Heathrow airport. He was stopped under Schedule 7, the law introduced in 2000 that sees 50,000 people per year stopped in airports, with no right to remain silent, to seek legal advice, to refuse a strip search or the handing over of data. The 99.8% non-arrest rate, as Rabbani highlighted, signifies a breach of the Magna Carta principles against suspicionless arrest. Rabbani asked brave, poignant questions about how he might have been treated, both during his arrest and during legal proceedings, particularly when unable to find any lawyer willing to submit a judicial review on his behalf because he had a ‘pigmentation problem’, and so wasn’t considered ‘the ideal case’. Thus Rabbani questioned the possibilities for strategic litigation when the law is actively constructed to target Muslims. Where, in this context, is the space for strategic litigation? Rabbani had to take his strategy beyond the courtroom and run his own campaign.

Gracie-Mae Bradley’s presentation followed on perfectly from Rabbani’s warnings. She spoke about her experience both within human rights organisation Liberty, and as an organiser of the Against Borders for Children (ABC) campaign. In particular, she highlighted ways in which litigation, however strategic, is severely compromised if it is not accompanied or preceded by wide-reaching social campaigns. She drew attention to previous strategic wins in the context of UK immigration detention, such as the retracting of the Detained Fast Track programme, and the way in which the Home Office is finding ways to re-introduce slight variations on the same policies only a couple of years later. Litigation, she reminded us, is a way of challenging policy that is fully incorporated within the limits of the system that created it, and controversial policy changes are often actively channeled by Government into legal frameworks, as the delays entailed by public consultations often mean that any successful litigation has to be applied retrospectively, which makes old policies easier to reinstate later. Quoting Gary Bellow, himself quoted by Derrick Bell, in the context of Leroy Clark’s insistence that an over-reliance on the law limited the potential of the black community’s success in pushing for school desegregation in the South, Bradley noted that ‘rule change, without a political base to support it, just doesn’t produce any substantial result because rules are not self-executing: they require an enforcement mechanism.’ Thus she showed that ‘riding on a technicality’, to which much strategic litigation must often be confined, though often crucial, is never enough to establish real change alone. Using the examples of data collection in schools that can be used to inform the Home Office of undocumented children and their parents, she argued that litigation must be accompanied by campaigns that highlight the implications and mechanisms of damaging policies, rather than just channelling the technicalities of their implementation.

Shining a light from a different direction, though with many of the same implications, Chai Patel explored the difficulties litigating strategically in anti-racist campaigns, when many of the effects of harmful and racist policy are not quantifiable in the terms required by the law. Speaking about the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants’ attempts to challenge the Right to Rent legislation of 2016, Patel described the insidious ways in which even though the requirement on landlords to ensure the immigration status of their tenants encouraged, in their own words, discrimination on the basis of perceived race or nationality, it was very difficult to quantify and record such prejudice. In particular, the detail that landlords will be fined for not checking documents if tenants are found to be residing unlawfully, but not for failing to check if they are legally renting, encouraged this discrimination. Thus the detail in the legislation makes it particularly likely to encourage biased assessments of prospective tenants’ immigration status. It also makes it particularly hard to collect data, pushing all conclusions into the realm of the hypothetical. Although litigation might, in this case, be one way to challenge the policy, it has been incredibly hard to show that it was the policy itself that was causing discrimination.

To sit in a room with such a broad mix of academics and practitioners, getting absorbed in the details, methods, implications, ethics, efficacy and revolutionary potential of strategic litigation against racist policy was inspirational. The mood was neither of cynical criticism nor naively hopeful for impossible change. And though the workshop participants, panellists and audience, provided necessary and timely reminders not to put all our faith in litigation, however strategic, the conference itself was inspiring testament to Rabbani’s moving encouragement that if we strive for compassion and courage, much is possible.

 

Happy Birthday Feminist Legal Studies! “We can share the joy of killing joy!”

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PhD candidate Alexandra Koenig reports on the recent 25th anniversary of journal Feminist Legal Studies, which was celebrated with a lecture from Professor Sara Ahmed on The Institutional as Usual: Sexism, Racism and the Politics of Complaint.

If Audre Lorde once wrote “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, Sara Ahmed’s talk took this on board and offered the refreshing journey of a critical engineer of thought, who tours around the neatly cemented brick walls of the university. Equipped with a theoretically sophisticated and highly creative toolbox, and a flashlight that literally cuts through the building’s substance, she did not want to leave anything as it stands. As her poignant analysis advances, the flashlight moves around, in a circular fashion and she exposes what first appears as neat surfaces, in which each stone so happily seems to fit, just to dig beyond and ask “what’s the use?”

Sitting at my desk, it feels pleasantly impossible to give an appropriate summary of Sara Ahmed’s recent talk delivered on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the journal Feminist Legal Studies and hosted by the Centre for Research on Race and Law. What will therefore follow is a subjective journey through what made strong impressions on me. I will offer selective glimpses on a rich talk that contributed much to queer-feminist, critical legal scholarship and de-colonial thought, but that also devised important tools for activist interventions in grappling with the violence of the “institutional as usual”.

Rather than celebrating the university as a safe haven for critical thought, the concept of “use”, as developed by Ahmed, does the job of dismantling what seems tidy and sacrosanct. The university is a built environment, brick by brick – but put to use for what and for whom? A lot of decisions went into its institutional design to satisfy dominant ideas of “good use” for the “right kind of people”. However, the picture is more complex, as uses can be appropriated for something else, the institution occupied by those for whom the use was not intended. It is along this line of tension that Sara Ahmed developed her thoughts on the “institutional as usual” and the “politics of complaint” throughout her paper. The talk was based on her forthcoming book project, in which she traces the uses of use.

Let me pause shortly and set out some of the analytic insights Ahmed offered about the uses of use in her talk: use, as a verb signifies something to be employed, consumed. It is connected to the idea of relation and activity, how we get hold of or a grip on something. Use designates what an object is for. However, slides happen, as objects are put in and out of use. Something may be out of use because it is occupied. The occupation may be rooted in an activity that has no relation to the previous beaten track of use. It may be occupied for a short period – like a kitchen turning into the buzzing heart of a party, or it may be occupied for longer, for instance when a body makes itself at home in a space that was designed to accommodate for the needs of completely different bodies. A university built for white, old, able-bodied male professors of upper-class background, for instance, will not fit as easily around different bodies. For many bodies, the university is not a friendly, welcoming environment. A university is not just a building, but also an institution, and with this the idea of what and who it is for. However, as much as there may be a designated use, it cannot determine its actual use(s). This is the hopeful horizon – the queer potential when working on and in institutions, such as the university. This is how the “institutional as usual” can be challenged.

Use, Ahmed reminds us, is necessary to preserve something, a space, a path, the beaten track. Preservation, it seems, works like cement: it solidifies the walls and maintains the paths that some-bodies can so easily and comfortably tread upon without even noticing how little effort it demands, as if those spaces belonged to them. According to Ahmed, this is privilege, this is the normativity of the beaten track.  When effort becomes normal, a form has been acquired, you are not, but you become, the stone that happily fits the wall of institution.

Connecting the idea of complaint to the “institutional as usual”, Sara Ahmed engages with the complaint as a biography, a genre, and the politics of complaint. This way we can cut through to power relations in which complaints are going somewhere, but very often nowhere, except into the archival box, to gather dust. It is not a coincidence that a large proportion of complaints at universities is about how the complaint has (not) been dealt with; in other words, they are complaints about the (lack of) institutional response. Like talking to walls. There were also discussions throughout the evening about the role of policies of non-disclosure and how these wall in the complaint, contain it, keep it from being taken beyond and speaking back more effectively to the university from elsewhere. Tracing a biography of complaint also means looking into how often complaints are not made and why. The figure of the complainant is racialised and gendered. When you inhabit a space that is not made for you, it can be very uncomfortable. Your body is made to feel out of place. This is the institution at work. As the world has been assembled around other bodies, you have to make a lot of effort to work on your shape, not to appear too much, or to push too much. As Ahmed reminds us, “sometimes no amount of pushing will get you in”.

According to Ahmed, the existence of a complaint policy can be the blockage, the brick that allegedly posits, yet hinders the performativity of complaint. Complaint policies can be watered down to lip-service. A box-ticking exercise of the neo-liberal management culture at universities, here to show that “something” has happened for the statistics. Complaints and diversity work can, and are, getting co-opted into this culture, performing damage control rather than contesting the usual path of use. To make a complaint, Ahmed argues, activates a process which locates the problem as you. Hardly surprising that you may end up being perceived as the one who cut herself off from the collective, the institution, “because you get used to it, or get out of it!”, Ahmed underlined so that the “institutional as usual” can go on, must go on, and on.

“Lifting the lid” is for Sara Ahmed a call for creative engagements with complaint, for the art of feminist killjoy – against the grain of the foreseeable institutional paths. It means to think of other trails, multiple fora which might be more fertile for the performativity of the complaint. It could translate as resisting the institutional containment as much as you can. It is the hard labour of spillage, and spilling over, a call to puncture pipes, the need for more explosions, trafficking wires and acts of vandalism. Professional modes of conduct are trying to keep the lid on, trying to stop things from changing to preserve the “institutional as usual”. If we are to displace the university’s usual use, it means taking the university apart, brick by brick. It means scratching the surface and leaving marks proclaiming “We are here and did not get used to it!”, it means writing the “I” into the structures, for “I” am not you, and these paths are not mine. If we are privileged enough to get more comfortable, to occupy an institution or alternative spaces, then we hold a responsibility to make hostile environments more habitable, to consider how we take up and hold the space and how to accommodate others. We need to keep asking and responding to the question “whose use and what use”? We need to help build feminist shelters inside and outside of inhospitable environments because complaints come at a high cost and personal loss. Complaint calls for solidarity. The biography of complaint is also ours, for if many of us are here, we are here because others complained.