Bree Alice Carlton

Women's survival post-imprisonment: Connecting imprisonment with pains past and present

The article examines the issue of womens unnatural post-prison deaths in Victoria, Australia, through the lens of womens accounts of survival and near-death after exit from prison. Central to this analysis is the seldom addressed or acknowledged relationship between trauma and the multiple harms and disadvantages that women experience both in the prison system and on the outside. In seeking to explicate the centrality oftrauma to womens experiences inside and outside the system, we draw upon the accounts of the women with whom we have spoken in the course of this research. A key theme that emerges from these narratives is the prevalence of trauma, near-death experiences and harms faced by women who have survived. Such accounts run counter to assumptions within existing post-release research that imprisonment comprises a discrete traumatic episode within a womans life and that there is a useful distinction to be made between women who are strong enough to survive and those who die. In this way we offer a contribution towards revising possible future directions for critical feminist and prison scholars.

Pathways, race and gender responsive reform: Through an abolitionist lens:

In this article we take stock of a recent moment in penal history in Victoria, Australia, where agencies have implemented gender responsive policies to address the disproportionate growth in women’s prison numbers, and in particular the overrepresentation of women constructed as ‘culturally diverse’. We draw upon abolitionist and intersectional frames to provide a theoretical critique of this political event. Our analysis extends beyond the unitary frame of gender, which has until recently dominated critiques in this area, to highlight the ways in which racializing logics are reproduced through such policies and practices. We explore the implications of the adoption of the criminological notion of pathways through the language of liberal feminist reform, which signifies a reinvestment in the myth of individual rehabilitation. The consequences of these discursive practices include the reproduction of pathologizing and risk-focused practices that can only yield more racializing, interventionist and expansionist responses within correctional spaces.

Counting the costs of imprisonment: researching women's post-release deaths in Victoria

The prevailing body of research on post-release mortality is limited in scope, resulting in significant gaps in knowledge of post-release survival and unnatural death. The absence of current monitoring and research on women’s mortality rates in Victoria in combination with recent statistics indicating the high rates of unnatural death for women released from prison (in Victoria and elsewhere), provide key impetus for Surviving Outside, a project that sought to combine quantitative and qualitative data on women’s post-prison survival and death. This article documents the methodological challenges we faced in undertaking this research. Our experience encapsulates broader challenges presented to contemporary critical criminology and those who seek to develop independent and/or alternative research agendas to those devised by state institutions. In documenting these challenges we provide a critical examination of the relationship between government research agendas, the production of knowledge and the limitations associated with administrative research and reporting. We argue that future research in this area requires a departure from traditional modes of inquiry to enable a nuanced, comprehensive understanding of the circumstances that underpin post-release survival and death.

Rethinking women's post-release reintegration and 'success'

In this article, we interrogate three assumptions related to women’s post-release reintegration and success that are prevalent within and across official, institutional and criminological discourses and practice. Our analysis is based on qualitative interviews conducted with support workers and women about experiences and perceptions of support and success in Victoria, Australia. Ultimately, we contend that the introduction of women-specific policies and support programs in Victoria has had limited impact because they are at core premised upon the same problematic success-related assumptions that have failed to adequately serve mainstream prisoner populations, i.e. men. We issue a broader challenge to criminologists to rethink dominant understandings about post-release reintegration in the interests of facilitating alternative approaches that respond to the structural injustices that define the post-release trajectories of women and men.

Penal reform, anti-carceral feminist campaigns and the politics of change in women’s prisons, Victoria, Australia:

This paper emphasises the importance of locating contemporary abolitionist social movements within a continuum of broader struggles against structural injustice. Previous decades have seen the re-emergence of women’s penal reform programmes framed as progressive solutions for alleviating the structural disadvantages and harms associated with imprisonment. Abolitionists have provided fierce critiques of the risks these pose in reinforcing the legitimacy and scale of imprisonment. However, we have yet to articulate a clear vision regarding the utility of reform in relation to decarceration strategies. In presenting a critical exploration of anti-carceral feminist campaign work in Victoria, Australia, this paper advocates the need to move beyond the simplistically conceived dualism of reform and abolition. The analysis explores how anti-carceral feminists have used reform as a resistance strategy within Victorian anti-discrimination campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s. Placed in historical context, these campaigns demonstrate the transformative possibilities and risks associated with the necessary navigation and pursuit of reformist strategies that is fundamental to a politics and practice of abolition.

Counter-carceral acoustemologies: Sound, permeability and feminist protest at the prison boundary

This article provides an analysis of sonic protest strategies used by anti-carceral feminist coalitions in Melbourne, Australia. Our research demonstrates that sound is a particularly powerful boundary-crosser that can challenge the exclusionary spatial ordering of the prison. Under certain political and geographical conditions, the carceral soundscape, which increasingly restricts ‘who gets to hear what’, can be temporarily breached, altered and re-made by protest noise, rhythm and music, and radio technology. Counter-carceral acoustemologies create alternative ‘soundtracks’ of resistance that both reveal and momentarily displace carceral-spatial control, re-patterning the aural environment of the prison. Such breaches can be countered, however, by various modes of boundary fortification over time. We propose that a more nuanced understanding of carceral space and soundscapes—as relational and in flux—provides greater opportunities for denaturalizing the prison and challenging its seeming permanence in our political and cultural landscapes.

Book Review: Out of order: The political imprisonment of women in Northern Ireland

Mary Corcoran’s Out of order presents a significant and valuable contribution to the small body of published research focusing on women and political imprisonment in Northern Ireland. The Irish political conflict represents one of the most heavily researched areas in the world, yet there are limited academic contributions focused specifically on women’s political imprisonment. In contrast there are a number of contributions focused on men and political imprisonment and particularly the resistance campaigns and hunger strikes by Republican men in the H Blocks during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Campbell et al., 1994; McEvoy, 2001; McKeown, 2001). At the time of the H Block protests, women prisoners in Armagh Prison also resisted the withdrawal of their political status through the initiation of a dirty protest, smearing the walls of their cells with their bodily refuse and menstrual blood. As Corcoran notes, in addition to the Armagh dirty protest and during the peak of the prison struggle, three women prisoners, Mairead Farrell, Mary Doyle and Mairead Nugent, defied Provisional IRA orders and initiated a hunger strike. The stories of the Armagh women at the peak of the prison struggle have been the subject of a number of notable journalistic and descriptive accounts by authors including Margaretta D’Arcy (1981), Nell McCafferty (1981) and sections of Ellen Fairweather et al.’s (1984) popular text. Yet, there is a scarcity of contemporary literature providing a broader analysis of women’s political imprisonment in the late 1980s and particularly the 1990s (Scraton and Moore, 2004). Several important contributions, including Margaret Ward (1995), Begona Aretxaga (1997) and Sharon Pickering (2002) have focused generally on Irish women, politics and resistance in the contexts of the political conflict and the women’s movement. Until now, however, there has been no definitive account of women, resistance and political imprisonment. This is not to suggest that no primary research has been collected. Paradoxically, there is concern by the community that over the years a large amount of fieldwork and interview-based research has been conducted and women speak of having been interviewed about their experiences ‘hundreds of times’.1 Yet until now the realization of such research in the form of any substantial, accessible published work has not taken place. In this text Corcoran sets out to document the reactive relationships between the prison authorities, staff and political prisoners in Northern Ireland during the 1970s through to post-conflict and release in the late 1990s. Corcoran’s primary theoretical focus is on the productive dynamics of institutional power and corresponding ‘weapons of the weak’ or acts of resistance by Republican and Loyalist women within Armagh Prison and the Mourne House Unit of Maghaberry Prison between 1972 and 1998. She frames her analysis within three, major, chronologically identifiable stages of Northern Ireland prison administration: ‘reactive containment’ (1969–76); ‘criminalization’ (1976–81); and ‘normalization’ (early 1980s onwards). Corcoran argues that each era of prison administration aimed to return women political prisoners to conformity and ultimately generated the conditions and contexts for various individual and collective resistance campaigns particularly by Republican women. BOOK REVIEWS