Exploring the Tensions Between Care and Carcerality in the Breddon Centre

• In Event: Carceral Care and Anti-carceral Alternatives

Abstract

In this paper, I present findings from my doctoral research at the Breddon Women’s Centre in England. Highlighting the deep sense of gratitude and appreciation that many of the clients had for their caseworkers, I found that the Breddon Centre played an important role in the lives of the women that they worked with, many of whom had severe histories of trauma and social marginalisation by operating as a gender-responsive alternative to incarceration.

However, while ameliorating the harshness of women’s circumstances, the women’s centre did not address the structural dynamics of oppression that contributed to women’s criminalization and maintained the ideology that all social problems can be solved through intervention from the carceral state.

This did not necessarily negate the care work that the Breddon Centre caseworkers performed for their clients. And yet, by working closely with the carceral state, it was inevitable that the Centre, at times, embodied a ‘penal drift’: the influence of carceral ideologies within non-carceral spaces. Exploring the messy dynamics between care and the expansion of punitive logics, I question the potentiality of gender-responsive frameworks to produce radical transformations for the women they serve in the community and instead consider alternative models of care.

Author

• Kavya Padmanabhan, University of Cambridge