Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities

Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women

Alana Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754638292
• eBook ISBN: 9781351935982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Género y legislación

In this book Alana Barton explores the social control and disciplining of unruly and 'deviant' women from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Her particular focus is the 'semi penal' institution, a category that includes refuges, reformatories and homes. She suggests that these occupy a unique position within the social control 'continuum', somewhere between the formal regulation of the prison and the informal control of the 'community' or domestic sphere, but at the same time incorporating methods of discipline from both arenas. The book draws on Dr Barton's extensive fieldwork at one such institution, currently a women's bail and probation hostel, which opened as a reformatory in 1823. Barton begins by examining the ideological and social conditions underpinning the creation of this institution, deconstructing the dominant feminising discourses around domesticity, respectability, motherhood, sexuality and pathology that were mobilised to categorise and control its nineteenth-century residents. She goes on to discuss the contemporary experiences of women within the hostel and their strategies for coping with or resisting the disciplinary regimes and discourses imposed upon them. Her analysis reveals that many of the discourses used to characterise and discipline women in reformatories during the nineteenth century continue to be utilised for the same purpose in a probation hostel nearly two hundred years later. She also reveals that the distribution of power in institutions is not fixed, but can be subtly negotiated and redistributed. Concluding with an examination of current developments in community punishments for women, this book will make a significant contribution to the literature around alternatives to custody for female offenders by strongly challenging contemporary debates liberal, critical and feminist around 'appropriate' and relevant penal policy for women.

Chapter 1
Introduction

While convention requires women’s prisons to look like minimum security institutions economic reality decrees that they cannot be minimum security… .The result is an atmosphere that in spite of attractive facilities and peaceful surroundings is really very tense and oppressive. The inmate…is reduced to a state of childish dependency, …The reduction of women to a weak and dependent and helpless status is brought about by more subtle means than by the gun or the high wall (Gibson, 1973, quoted in Carlen, 1983: 21. Emphasis in original).

….this man was requiring his wife to keep a diary of her movements whilst he was serving his sentence. This diary was presented to him during visiting times and if he was not satisfied with her behaviour during his absence she was subjected to a barrage of insults, threats and other public humiliations (Morton, 1994:7).¹

The image of the ‘normal’ woman is based around an idealised concept of femininity, which in turn is constructed around dominant discourses of domesticity, respectability, motherhood, sexuality and pathology. For centuries this construct has been utilised to characterise what is appropriate and acceptable female behaviour (Hutter and Williams, 1981). Any deviation from, or violation of, these standards has mobilised a whole set of control strategies, the purpose of which has been to navigate and normalise the deviant female back into her ascribed role. As Smart and Smart (1978) have argued, the social control of women can assume many different guises. It can be formal or informal, public or private, explicitly expressed or subtly implied, and through various combinations of these forms, we see women’s lives controlled and their behaviour regulated.

The quotations above refer to two very specific but very distinct forms of social control. The first quotation refers to those practices and regimes that characterise the most formal method of control for women, that which takes place inside custodial institutions. The second concerns a very different, but much more prevalent, method - that being the control of women through ‘informal’ or ‘domestic’ processes, such as those that take place within their own homes.

Since the nineteenth century, when it was decided that the association of male and female prisoners was undesirable, particular and specific regimes have been constructed for women in prison, regimes that have primarily been assembled around idealised models of femininity (Zedner, 1991). Women, it was believed, could no longer be housed with male prisoners as they were a particularly ‘corruptible’ and ‘corrupting’ group who required ‘special, closer forms of control and confinement’ (Dobash et al, 1986:1).

These ‘special’ methods of control within women’s prisons have been subject to various modifications over the last 100 years or so but to a great extent they have remained centred around two powerful misconceptions regarding the nature of female offending. First, that the causes of women’s deviance stem from inherent pathological or biological weaknesses and second, that women offenders have fundamentally deviated from their ‘natural’ feminine roles (Carlen, 1985). This notion that criminal women have out-stepped the boundaries of ‘normal’ femininity has provided for the proliferation of custodial regimes based around reformation and domestication (Carlen, 1983; Dobash et al, 1986; Genders and Player, 1987; Zedner, 1991; Faith, 1993). Women who enter the masculine domain of criminal activity require disciplinary procedures that will ‘normalise’ them to a more appropriate and hence less ‘dangerous’ position within the social order.

According to Hutter and Williams, ‘normal’ women are perceived as infantile, irresponsible and in need of protection and supervision.

The image of the ‘normal’ woman employed, time and time again, is of a person with something of a childish incapacity to govern herself and in some need of protection - a kind of original sin stemming from Eve’s inability to control her desire to seek new knowledge (1981: 12).

For women in prison, this concept of ‘childishness’ and the need for protection has led to a process of ‘infantilisation’ (Faith, 1993). Many women prisoners have reported that the custodial regimes they experienced encouraged a dependency culture in which they were denied the rights to make decisions about their lives and which hence reduced them to a child-like status (Carien, 1983; Rafter, 1983; Faith, 1993; Heidensohn, 1996). As Carlen has stated, for imprisoned women in Scotland ideas around appropriate female roles and behaviour were

….incorporated into the prison regime to produce a very fine disciplinary web which denies women both personality and full adult status (1983: 16).

However, it is not only behind the prison walls that women find themselves the objects of scrutiny, surveillance and regulation. On the contrary, as Faith and Davis contend, the term ‘deviant’ is insufficient to explain and account for the whole range of ‘normalised modes of social control’ (1987: 171) that have emerged to regulate and control women within their homes, their communities and their everyday lives.

The second quotation at the beginning of this chapter refers to this much more informal, but extremely repressive, method of social control. The woman discussed in the quotation is not formally incarcerated but her behaviour and movements are heavily monitored and governed through a process of manipulation, intimidation and threatened, and actual, abuse.

The family is a major ideological site of social control for women. Heidensohn (1996) argues that this control begins with the socialisation of daughters by mothers. Mothers, she states, may themselves be dominated and restrained by domestic responsibilities but at the same time they collude with these ideologies of ‘appropriate’ behaviour by attempting to socialise their daughters for the same role in the future. Several authors have likened the family and the home to a regulative institution for women. Dahl and Snare (1978) contend that women are privately and domestically imprisoned within the home and their seclusion and isolation cultivates an intensive web of control by children, husbands and neighbours. According to Christie (1978) the home, like the prison, can be seen as part of an all-encompassing system of regulation, control and surveillance for women. Both, he claimed, are institutions where physical structures and regimes create an environment of ‘high visibility’ with the potential for part, or total, restriction of movement and behaviour.

Thus, writers have predominantly contextualised the regulation and discipline of women within two distinct sites - the prison and the home. However, there is a third arena of social control and regulation that has, to some degree, been overlooked in much of the existing literature. For over 200 years, a whole range of institutions have existed for women, institutions which were neither ‘formal’ in the sense of a prison, nor ‘informal’ in the sense of the home, but which, at the same time, utilised the regulatory methods and disciplinary techniques employed in both the custodial and domestic arenas. The sole purpose of these institutions was to contain, supervise, control and, most importantly, to normalise ‘deviant’ women (both ‘criminal’ and ‘non criminal’) back to an acceptable standard of feminine behaviour. These institutions, which straddled the boundary between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, can be described as ‘semi-penal’ (Weiner, 1990: 130).

Semi-penal institutions originally developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to accommodate the increasing number of ‘exceptional cases’ within the prison system (Weiner, 1990: 321). Exceptional cases included juveniles, drunkards, imbeciles, lunatics, vagrants and, of course, women. Consequently a plethora of non-custodial, semi-incarcerative institutions, such as homes, refuges and reformatories were established to cater for such groups.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women were judged against very complex and specifically constructed ideas of womanhood, morality and respectability. Smart (1992) claims that working class women were categorised within a contradictory set of discourses, being seen as both powerful but at the same time powerless, and as corrupting and dangerous but at the same time easily corrupted and therefore in need of protection. Consequently, young women, like juveniles, were believed to be unsuitable for imprisonment primarily because of the fragility of their morality and their susceptibility to corruption and contamination from others. However, this susceptibility to external influence, the idea that women were in some way ‘malleable’, made them ideal candidates for reform (Zedner, 1991). If women were so impressionable with regard to negative influence then, it was assumed, they must also be equally receptive to positive influence. The female reformatory movement developed primarily around this belief that the behaviour of (some but not all) women who had ‘strayed’ or ‘fallen’ could be reformed due to their ‘infantile’ characters.

Thus, the perceived infantile nature of women, along with their own incapacity for self governance, made them appropriate beings for reformatory supervision where the practices and discourses that were normally at work within both the prison and the family combined to produce a particular form of regime. Discipline was instilled through religious doctrine and appropriate training (similar to that found within women’s prisons), and supervision was provided by a ‘matron-mother’ figure whose purpose was to provide a good moral role model for the undisciplined inmates, producing a form of the ‘mother-daughter’ model of social control.

It is a primary contention of this book that semi-penal institutions, with their intensive supervisory regimes and reformist ideals, did not disappear with the demise of the reformatories, refuges and other similar nineteenth century institutions. On the contrary, many of the identifying characteristics of nineteenth century semi-penal institutions could be found in twentieth century establishments such as homes for unmarried mothers, halfway houses and, I will argue, probation hostels for women.

Since the 1914 Criminal Justice Act, the courts have had the power to append additional conditions onto probation orders, most significantly that an offender be required to complete his or her period of probation at a designated address or within a nominated institution (Home Office, 1998). The early ‘nominated’ institutions were, like the reformatories, largely autonomous of state control and funded and run by voluntary organisations. In addition, with regard to women, their regimes were organised around religious instruction and domestic training. By the end of the 1940s the majority of these institutions came under the central control of the Home Office. However, as far as women were concerned, the regimes and disciplinary techniques changed only superficially. The Home Office Notes on Homes and Hostels for Young Probationers (1942) indicates that women were still expected to conform to idealised standards of feminine behaviour and the training schemes established in hostels, which were very close to those provided in custodial institutions (Barry, 1991), were primarily aimed at reforming women and girls into respectable wives and mothers or productive domestic servants.

Both the reformatory and the modern day probation hostel have their roots in the reformist movement of the nineteenth century and, like the reformatory, the probation hostel is neither truly formal or custodial, nor completely informal or ‘domestic’. Instead it could be seen to occupy a position somewhere between these two sites on the social control ‘continuum’.

There is a distinct lack of literature pertaining to the probation hostel for women. That which does exist (see for example Buckley, 1987; Wincup, 1996) is primarily concerned with conceptualising the probation hostel as a more appropriate environment for women offenders than prison. Consequently, the level of theoretical scrutiny that has been applied to studies of custodial regimes for women (Carlen, 1983, 1998; Faith, 1993; Howe, 1994; Smith, 1996; and Bosworth, 1999 to name just a few) has not been employed to analyse the experiences of women within probation hostels.

In addition, although there have been studies which have theoretically analysed various semi-penal institutions for women (for example Hunt et al, 1989; Mahood, 1990; Zedner, 1991), these have mainly focussed on specific nineteenth and early twentieth century establishments and have therefore not been concerned with exploring the theoretical issues and discourses that may link these institutions to each other and, more importantly, which may identify historical themes of continuity between institutions of the past and institutions of the present.

The aims of this book therefore are threefold. First, it is my intention to fill a theoretical gap in the feminist literature by analysing the history and consolidation of semi-penal institutionalisation for women, identifying themes of continuity and discontinuity between the nineteenth century reformatory and the twentieth century probation hostel for female offenders. In order to complete both a historical and contemporary analysis, one particular institution will form the basis of my study. Vernon Lodge² is currently a bail and probation hostel for women. It is today funded by the Home Office and staffed by Probation Service personnel but it has its origins in the nineteenth century when it was opened, in 1823, as the County Refuge for the Destitute, to accommodate and reform ‘deviant’ women. Between 1823 and 1948 it was utilised for a variety of purposes. It acted as a refuge for women on release from prison, as a reformatory for recalcitrant or ‘wayward’ young females, as a home for women released from the court on ‘recognizances’ (the forerunner to the modern concept of probation) and as an institution for those women deemed to be ‘feeble minded’. Finally, in 1948 it became an approved probation hostel for women and continues to fulfil that role today. Through an analysis of original historical data, this book will uncover the experiences of women within this institution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will conclude with an examination of the experiences of women in Vernon Lodge in the 1990s and I will argue that what primarily links the past with the present, in terms of this form of institutionalisation, is the historical constancy of the discourses and practices mobilised to identify, explain and manage ‘deviant’ women.

This leads to my second aim, which is to analyse the specific strategies through which women within this institution were historically disciplined and controlled and the extent to which these strategies survived through to the end of the twentieth century. The book will explore the ways in which the female inmates have been characterised and categorised according to feminising discourses around domesticity, respectability, motherhood, sexuality and pathology throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The manifestations of these discourses in terms of the regimes and practices adopted within the institution will also be examined.

Of course, women do not always willingly accept the discipline and methods of control imposed upon them. On the contrary, as many authors have argued, women have historically been able to utilise a range of strategies in order to resist or manage regulatory regimes (see Zedner, 1991; Shaw, 1992; Faith, 1993; Bosworth, 1999). Although much of the literature pertaining to women’s resistance has been concerned with women formally incarcerated within custodial institutions, it is the final aim of this book to employ these debates in order to scrutinise the methods through which women managed, or resisted, the disciplinary regimes and discourses they faced within the semi-penal arena.

In order to achieve these aims the book will be organised as follows: Chapter Two will provide a critical examination of the theoretical debates around the punishment and social control of women, the objective being the generation of a feminist theoretical framework within which the experiences of women in the semi-penal institution (past and present) can be analysed. Providing for the fact that there exists a lack of theoretical literature, feminist and critical, relating to the semi-penal institution, and in particular the women-only probation hostel, this chapter will utilise the existing literature around the formal (custodial) and informal (domestic) control of women and will examine the way in which feminising and normalising discourses are utilised to regulate and control ‘deviant’ females. Finally, the ways in which women (incarcerated or otherwise) are able to take responsibility for their lives, thus asserting a sense of agency or resisting the disciplinary procedures, even when confronted by powerful constraints and confining pressures, will be discussed.

Chapter Three will present a theoretical and chronological examination of the history of ‘semi-penal’ institutions from the reformatories of the late eighteenth / early nineteenth centuries to the probation hostels for women in the late twentieth century. This history will analyse various nineteenth century institutions such as the Magdalene Homes for prostitutes, the ‘rescue’ institutions for ‘wayward’ young women and the reformatories for inebriates, the ‘feeble minded’ and those women released from prison. In addition, twentieth century institutions such as the halfway houses for ‘delinquent’ girls, homes for unmarried mothers and probation hostels for women will be examined.

Chapters Four, Five and Six will present my case study. Chapter Four will examine the development of the County Refuge for the Destitute during the nineteenth century, examining the ideological and social conditions that underpinned its creation and the discourses mobilised to categorise and control its female residents. Chapter Five will continue the analysis by examining the development of the institution throughout the twentieth century, through its conversion to a probation hostel in 1948 and its progress in this form up until the 1980s.

Chapter Six brings the case study up to the end of the twentieth century by providing an analysis of the data collected from the period of participant observation and the series of interviews conducted in Vernon Lodge between 1992 and 1994. It is the intention here to draw out some common themes and issues with regard to the ‘semi-penal’ control of women over two centuries.

Finally Chapter Seven concludes the book by revisiting and dra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women Behaving Badly: Feminist Theory and the Social Control of Women
• 3 ‘Wayward Girls and Wicked Women’1: The History and Development of the Semi-Penal Institution
• 4 Domestic Discipline: Semi-Penal Institutionalisation in the Nineteenth Century
• 5 Between the Church and the State: Semi-Penal Institutionalisation in the Twentieth Century
• 6 Vernon Lodge: The Probation Hostel for Women as a Semi-Penal Institution?
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix: Methodology
• Bibliography
• Index