Women's Imprisonment

A Study in Social Control

Pat Carlen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000387698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1983, Women's Imprisonment explores the meanings of women's imprisonment and, in particular, the wider meanings of the 'moment' of prison.

Based on officially sponsored research in Cornton Vale, Scotland's only women's prison, the book makes extensive use of interviews with sheriffs, policemen, and social workers, as well as observation in the prisons, the courts, and the lodging-houses. The author quotes from interviews with women recidivist prisoners, the judges who send them to prison, and the agencies which assist them in between their periods of imprisonment. In doing so, questions are raised about the meanings of imprisonment and the penal disciplining of women at the time of original publication. The book also examines the changing and various meanings of imprisonment in general and the invisible nature of the social control of women in particular.

Part one

The denial of women’s imprisonment

The felonies that took them there send shudders down the spine,

There are some who purloined property, and some drank too much wine,

And others, lost to decency who failed to pay a fine.

From The ballad of Holloway’ by Roger Woddis, first published in the New Statesman (1972) and reprinted by permission of the author and the New Statesman

1 The meanings of women’s imprisonment in Scotland

Scotland has only one female penal institution, Her Majesty’s Institution, Cornton Vale, which is situated near Stirling. It provides for all female offenders over the age of sixteen. On one site it has remand, borstal, young offender and prison facilities. This book is mainly concerned with the convicted women prisoners over the age of twenty-one and it is based upon research funded by the Scottish Home and Health Department during 1980-1.

In 1978 23,280 females were proceeded against in the Scottish courts, a total of 821 of them eventually being received at Cornton Vale to serve sentence.¹ 657 of the 821 women received to serve sentence were aged twenty-one and over, and of Cornton Vale’s average daily population of 169 females 73 of them were sentenced women over the age of twenty-one (see Appendix A). The average length of sentence imposed on women over the age of twenty-one was 74 days, though average length of sentence can be separated into whether the custodial sentence was imposed direct or whether it arose from failure to pay a fine. Approximately half of all Scottish women received under sentence are received as a result of failure to pay a fine and for fine-defaulters the average length of sentence was 35.9 days; for the directly sentenced women aged twenty-one and over received in 1978 the average length of sentence was 115 days. As will be seen from Table A (see Appendix A, p. 219), a third of all adult women received under sentence in 1978 had been convicted of breach of the peace; smother third were guilty of crimes against property without violence.

In 1980² 692 females were received to serve sentence, 569 of them being aged twenty-one and over. The average daily population of Cornton Vale was 147, 65 of the 147 inmates being sentenced women aged twenty-one and over. Again, in 1980 half of these adult women prisoners had been received as a result of a failure to pay a fine, the average length of sentence for fine-defaulters being 36.4 days and for directly sentenced women aged twenty-one and over 116 days. Again also in 1980, and as can be seen from Table B (see Appendix A, p. 220), nearly a third of all adult women received under sentence had been convicted of breach of the peace, whilst another third had been convicted of crimes against property without violence.

When Cornton Vale opened as the new female institution in 1975 the press referred to it as a Spanish hacienda. Some residents of Stirling nowadays refer to it as a holiday camp. I have heard prisoners and local authority social workers call it a concentration camp. To me it seemed rather like an extremely quiet small-scale university campus. The blocks are spaced well apart from each other, linked by trim paths and interspersed with flower gardens. Inside, the common rooms are brightly furnished, very warm in winter and light and airy in summer.

The adult women who are convicted prisoners are housed in the two prison blocks, Papa and Sierra. Papa is the main prison block and Sierra is the observation and more secure block. Each block is organised into units of seven women each. Papa is organised into eight units and Sierra has four units. Each woman has her own centrally-heated cell and each unit has its own sitting-room, kitchen and bathing facilities. Units in Papa are designated ‘open’ or ‘closed’ according to the degree of freedom allowed to the women. The units in Sierra are all ‘closed’, but, because of the electronic locking of cells in Sierra, women there who are considered to be sufficiently trustworthy do have access to night-time sanitation. Thus the different degrees of freedom allowed to women depends both on the staff assessment of them and the design of the buildings in which they are housed.

Sierra Block has electronic locking of cells. This means that most women there have access to night-time sanitation. By pressing a button they can contact a central control point and request that the cell door be opened. This is done electronically, the door being left open for seven-to-eight minutes. It is reported by prison staff that this facility has not been abused. Due to a financial restriction imposed during the conversion and extension of the old Cornton Vale Borstal into the new institution for women, Papa Block does not have electronic locking. Women in three and a half of the eight units have their own keys to their cells, however, and, as a result, they too have access to toilet facilities at all times. This leaves about twenty women who are usually without access to toilet facilities during the night.

All women prisoners are initially housed in Sierra for observation. Those who appear both to have settled down to their sentence and to require minimum supervision are then moved to Papa. Of the women who move to Papa the more responsible are eventually allowed to have keys to their rooms. This latter privilege is usually achieved only after a woman has been in prison for at least six months. It is, therefore, a privilege not available to the bulk of prisoners whose length of stay is much less than that.

But enough of facts and figures. As I have already said, the elemental and usually denied meanings of women’s imprisonment in Scotland are to be found neither within the walls of Cornton Vale nor within the official crime statistics. Fragmented and transcribed, they are to be found within discursive forms and practices which, conventionally, are considered to be quite unrelated to penology — within, for example, the conventions of the family and the kirk; within traditional forms of public conviviality and ethics of domesticity and masculinity; within some peculiar absences in Scottish social work practice; within the ideological practices of contemporary psychiatry; and within some overdetermined presences (e.g. alcohol, unemployment, poverty,) within Scottish culture and society. Some of these elemental meanings are singly analysed in the following chapters. In the remainder of this chapter I will summarise those meanings, showing, where possible, how they relate to the meanings of women’s imprisonment in general and to the meanings of women’s imprisonment in England and Wales in particular. The focus of this chapter, therefore, is upon the female subject of Scottish penology. In the book’s final chapter I will place the study of Scottish women’s (short-term)³ imprisonment in its wider context and discuss its relevance to wider issues within British penal politics.

The book’s structure and argument

1 The Scottish female offenders most likely to be imprisoned are those who have stepped outwith⁴ domestic discipline. The three chapters which comprise Part Two of the book discuss the relationships between women, family and imprisonment. Chapter 2 describes how some unsung elements of Scottish domestic life have traditionally disciplined women in a multitude of non-penal ways. Chapter 3 suggests that when sheriffs and magistrates are faced with a sentencing dilemma in the case of a female offender the decision to imprison or not is made on their assessment of the woman as mother. Chapter 4 describes how the general organisational features of imprisonment increase women’s difficulties outside the prison at the same time as the prison authorities are claiming that the prison’s emphasis on domesticity can help rebuild family relationships. It is suggested that, given that most of the women beginning short-term sentences at Cornton Vale have either already had their family lives impaired by imprisonment or have already rejected conventional family life altogether, the emphasis upon domesticity is misplaced.

2 Cornton Vale’s disciplinary regime debilitates short-term prisoners by contradictorily defining them as being both within and without sociability, both within and without femininity and both within and without adulthood. Chapter Five (Part Three, ‘The Moment of Prison’) indicates that women’s imprisonment in Scotland is imprisonment in the general sense in that it has all the repressive organisational features common to men’s prisons; it also indicates that it is a form of imprisonment specific to women in that two modes for controlling many Scottish women outside prison, i.e. family life and isolation from each other, are also incorporated into the prison regime to produce a very fine disciplinary web which denies the women both personality and full adult status.

3 The female petty offenders who are imprisoned in Scotland are those who are seen as being beyond care by the social services and beyond cure by the medical authorities. The three chapters of Part Four describe how certain women become the ‘women that nobody wants’. Chapter 6 analyses contemporary Scottish social work practices and ideologies in relation to the supervision of offenders. Chapter 7 describes the world of the alcoholic and heavily drinking women offenders and the practices adopted by the various medical and non-medical agencies to distinguish between the ‘curable’ and the ‘incurable’. Chapter 8 analyses those contemporary practices of psychiatry which result in female offenders with previous histories of mental illness being sent to prison on the grounds that they are not mentally ill, and, once there, being controlled by drugs on the grounds that they are.

4 Women’s imprisonment in Scotland is women’s imprisonment denied. The overall argument of the book is that the Scottish female prisoner is first debilitated by being defined as being both within and without sociability, femininity and adulthood; and then defined out of existence as being beyond care, cure and recognition. Throughout the empirical investigation I was faced with evidence of this denial. At my first meeting with the Governor of Cornton Vale she told me that although she was very interested in my research she had very few ‘prisoners’ for me to study. When I quoted the official prison statistics for Scotland in puzzlement at this statement she immediately clarified the issue by stating that she had not realised that I would be interested in interviewing fine-defaulters and drunks whom she did not count as real prisoners. In similar vein sheriffs denied that they send women to prison. Sometimes when they said that they never send women to prison they were referring to the fact that between 50-60 per cent of sentenced women at Cornton Vale at any time are likely to be there for failure to pay a fine. Sometimes they meant that Cornton Vale is not a real prison because it has none of the disgustingly insanitary and overcrowded conditions of many male closed prisons. Many prison officers also claimed that Cornton Vale is not like a ‘real prison’. Some of the prison officers who made this point thought that it is not a real prison because the disciplinary regime is ‘too soft’. Others thought that because so many of the prisoners have previous histories of mental illness the institution is ‘more like a mental hospital than a prison’. Yet others thought that because the majority of prisoners are in for so short a time ‘you can’t set up the training programmes that you’d have in a real prison.’ Furthermore, some of the prison officers also claimed that the prisoners of Cornton Vale are not real women either. In fact several of the officers made the same point as Prison Officer No. 10 who said, ‘Except for the embezzlers and one or two of the women serving long sentences the women coming here sire not ordinary women. By and large, the normal ordinary woman who commits a crime doesn’t get sent here.’ Thus it is that Scottish women’s imprisonment is denied and that so many officials within the judicial and penal systems were able to echo the sheriffs who said, 1 could talk for hours about men offenders but women are really no problem’ (Sheriff No. 1); and ‘Physically, we don’t actually see them in the courts because physically we don’t see them as a danger. Women don’t constitute a social problem’ (Sheriff No. 2).

Women’s imprisonment in Scotland, England and Wales⁵

In general, the motto of those charged with the penal regulation of deviant women has been ‘discipline, medicalise and feminise’! Women’s imprisonment both in Great Britain and in the United States has traditionally been characterised by its invisibility, its domesticity and its infantilisation.

The invisibility of women within the American penal system has been widely commented upon. According to Jane Roberts Chapman, Lieber complained as early as 1833 that ‘unhappily the small numbers of crimes committed in our country by women has caused a comparative neglect of female criminals’ (Chapman, 1981:8-9). This neglect has continued for over one hundred years and by 1972 Hendrix was claiming that it has a sexist dimension. She claimed that, ‘characteristically male officials in the criminal justice system regard the problem of female offenders as insignificant’ (Chapman, 1981:4). In 1973 Helen Gibson summarised the more obvious reasons for the invisibility of women offenders and prisoners:

First, women represent only a small percentage of those arrested and an even smaller percentage of those incarcerated. Second, the crimes they commit are usually related to sex or property, and, instead of harming others, women criminals usually harm themselves. Finally, with the public and official awareness of a general increase in crime and serious prison disorders, the problems of women prisoners pale into insignificance. (Gibson in Crites, 1976:93)

In the main these reasons also hold as a part explanation for the invisibility of women prisoners in Scotland, England and Wales⁶ though the recent rise in the numbers of women charged with violent crime has done much to sensitise the public to the ‘problem’ of female crime while pressure groups such as the National Council for Civil Liberties, the National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders and the Howard League for Penal Reform have campaigned tirelessly to bring the plight of female prisoners to the attention of parliament and public (NACRO, 1978; Howard League 1978).⁷ Officials, however, have not been alone in their neglect of women prisoners. The prison literature has also neglected them. In England and Wales, of course, the extreme secrecy of the Home Office in relation to prisons and prisoners has resulted in very little independent research access being granted either to male or to female institutions (Cohen and Taylor, 1978). That being recognised, however, the fact remains that more is known about the insides of British men’s prisons than of women’s, just as more is known about British male offenders in general.

Training for domesticity and motherhood has been a dominant feature of women’s prison regimes both in Great Britain and in the United States. The so-called training programmes are nearly always linked to traditional (and totally unrealistic) conceptions of women’s roles, idealisations in fact which working-class women have seldom had opportunity (and, maybe, not even inclination!) to realise. Training for domesticity, far from helping a woman develop as a person, can often increase her dependency upon the ‘male’. As Price (1977) commented:

In the women’s institutions, usually small in size, the inmate is often more isol...