Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland

Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison

Elaine Farrell

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781108839501
• eBook ISBN: 9781108880893
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Focusing on women's relationships, decisions and agency, this is the first study of women's experiences in a nineteenth-century Irish prison for serious offenders. Showcasing the various crimes for which women were incarcerated in the post-Famine period, from repeated theft to murder, Elaine Farrell examines inmate files in close detail in order to understand women's lives before, during and after imprisonment. By privileging case studies and individual narratives, this innovative study reveals imprisoned women's relationships with each other, with the staff employed to manage and control them, and with their relatives, spouses, children and friends who remained on the outside. In doing so, Farrell illuminates the hardships many women experienced, their poverty and survival strategies, as well as their responsibilities, obligations, and decisions. Incorporating women's own voices, gleaned from letters and prison files, this intimate insight into individual women's lives in an Irish prison sheds new light on collective female experiences across urban and rural post-Famine Ireland.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘Another generation of jail-birds’
• Case Study 1 ‘The terrible temptation’: Mary Enright
• Case Study 2 ‘A gang of coiners’: The Carroll Family
• Case Study 3 ‘The workhouse girls’: Arson in the South Dublin Union
• Case Study 4 ‘A person of very superior attainments’: Delia Lidwill
• Case Study 5 ‘A most remote part of the country’: Suspected Murder in Mayo
• Conclusion: ‘I think of the time that you and myself ust [used] to be to gether’
• Bibliography
• Index