Jennifer Fleetwood

Keeping out of trouble: Female crack cocaine dealers in England

This paper offers a rare insight into women’s experiences dealing crack cocaine. Drawing on interviews with eight women, this research finds that, although the retail-level crack trade is male dominated, it is not simply a man’s world. This paper examines the strategies that successful female dealers employed, demonstrating that women reflexively took their gender into account to made cognizant choices about what, when and how to deal. Dealing strategies were a response not solely to the gendered nature of the drug market but also to women’s gendered social positions, relationships and identities. Performing respectable femininity was a key strategy for keeping dealing hidden and keeping out of trouble. This paper is underpinned by the concept of ‘doing gender’.

Narrative habitus: Thinking through structure/agency in the narratives of offenders

Starting from the premise that experience is narratively constituted and actions are oriented through the self as the protagonist in an evolving story, narrative criminology investigates how narratives motivate and sustain offending. Reviewing narrative criminological research, this article contends that narrative criminology tends towards a problematic dualism of structure and agency, locating agency in individual narrative creativity and constraint in structure and/or culture. This article argues for a different conceptualisation of narrative as embodied, learned and generative, drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Social action, which here includes storytelling, is structured via the habitus, which generates but does not determine social action. This theorisation understands structures and representations as existing in duality, according a more powerful role to storytelling. The article concludes by discussion of the implications of such a shift for narrative interventions towards offending.

A Narrative Approach to Women’s Lawbreaking

This article argues for the value of narrative criminology for feminist explanations of women’s lawbreaking. Contemporary theories note the significance of material gendered inequalities; however, narrative offers a way to include discursive aspects of gender. Drawing on recent developments in narrative criminology, this article analyzes how women may “talk themselves into” lawbreaking. Analysis draws on interviews with three women with diverse experiences in the drug trade and shows how drug trafficking was narrated as impossible, meaningful, and inevitable. A narrative approach therefore offers ways to understand how for some women, under some circumstances, lawbreaking may become meaningful.

Street talk and Bourdieusian criminology: Bringing narrative to field theory

The work of Bourdieu has increasingly gained interest in criminology. His theoretical framework is rich and arguably the most sophisticated approach to social inequality and difference in sociology. It has however, been criticized for bias towards the structural aspects of social life, and for leaving little space for the constitutive, and creative role of language. We argue for the inclusion of narrative for understanding street fields. Based on qualitative interviews with 40 incarcerated drug dealers in Norway, we describe the narrative repertoire of the street field, including stories of crime business, violence, drugs and the ‘hard life’. The narrative repertoire is constituted by street capital, but also upholds and produces this form of capital. Street talk is embedded in objective social and economic structures and displayed in the actors’ habitus. Narratives bind the street field together: producing social practices and social structure.

Gendering the agenda: women drug mules in resolution 52/1 of the Commission of Narcotic Drugs at the United Nations

Purpose – This paper seeks to analyse the content and implications of resolution 52/1 of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations (UN) titled ‘‘Promoting international cooperation in addressing the involvement of women and girls in drug trafficking, especially as couriers’’. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on socio-legal analysis and an extensive search of UN databases, the resolution is contextualised and the findings of the resulting report which examines the scale of women’s participation in the global drug trade is summarised. Findings – The article demonstrates that the data produced are unreliable as a measure of women’s participation in the international drug trade. Practical implications – It is argued that this resolution is weakened by lack of clarity about how gender ought to be mainstreamed in global drug control. Originality/value – As the first resolution on women and girls’ participation in the international drug trade, Resolution 52/1 is a significant step towards raising awareness and systematically accounting for their participation. Keywords Women, Drug mules, Drugs, Gender mainstreaming, Drug trafficking, International drug policy, United Nations Paper type General review

Women, Drugs and the Death Penalty: Framing Sandiford

This article examines the impact and significance of women subject to capital punishment for drug offences. Women are subject to the death penalty for drug offences; wherever data are available they describe low‐level offenders, primarily drug mules. Sandifords death sentence prompts widespread discussion about her, her culpability and the appropriateness of her punishment drawing on drug war discourse, and death penalty tropes. Framing analysis reveals the powerful and persistent nature of gendered binaries. The use of capital punishment against female mules troubles the gendered binaries that underpin US‐led drug war discourse, and highlights the death penalty as a gendered punishment.

For Money and Love: Women’s Narratives about Becoming Mules

Amanda was ten months from the end of a four-year sentence when I interviewed her about the circumstances that led to her involvement in the international cocaine trade. She was in her late twenties, Latina (but grew up in North America), and was living in one of the newest pavilions of El Inca. This was our third interview. We had agreed to talk about the trafficking part of her story, and she began by reading me a short passage written in her journal: I was with my children’s father since the age of 13 […] and had my son at 15, my twins at 19, and my other son at 23. […] So [he] was the first man in my life. He took my virginity, and I have my kids from him. I guess I could say I watch ‘Little House on the Prairie’ too much, cause I’m like, you know, I didn’t marry him, but he took my virginity, so that calls for me to stay with him no matter what. Even though he put me through hell. I would work; I would do so many things and on top of that, hustle the system to get extra money.

The backpacker’s guide to the prison: (In)formalizing prison boundaries in Latin America

Ordinarily the vast majority of visitors to prisons across the world consist of prisoners’ friends and family, legal advisers and social workers. However, during the 1990s and 2000s prisons in Latin America admitted a large number of backpacker prison tourists under the guise of visiting fellow Westerners imprisoned for drug trafficking. This chapter examines this novel form of penal tourism in Garcia Moreno Prison in Quito, Ecuador. Unlike most penal tourist sites, such as the historic prisons of Alcatraz and Robbin Island, Garcia Moreno1 was a working prison. Tourism was not facilitated officially, but was an informal, uncommodified practice established and continued by inmates. In this chapter, we take this unique example of backpacker prison visiting, which disrupts conventional notions of penal tourism that typically take place in closed, disused former prison spaces, offering new insights into penal tourist experiences.

Ethnographic research on crime and control: Editors’ introduction

Jennifer Fleetwood and Gary R. Potter introduce a Special Section on ethnographic research on crime and control.

Law for ethnographers

Despite a long history of ethnographic research on crime, ethnographers have shied away from examining the law as it relates to being present at, witnessing and recording illegal activity. However, knowledge of the law is an essential tool for researchers and the future of ethnographic research on crime. This article reviews the main relevant legal statutes in England and Wales and considers their relevance for contemporary ethnographic research. We report that researchers have no legal responsibility to report criminal activity (with some exceptions). The circumstances under which legal action could be taken to seize research data are specific and limited, and respondent’s privacy is subject to considerable legal protection. Our review gives considerable reason to be optimistic about the future of ethnographic research.