A Democratic Therapeutic Community for Women Prisoners: Re-imagining Rehabilitation and the Loss of Liberty

• In Event: Healing and Resilience Behind Bars

Abstract

Most research and policy debates on women’s imprisonment in the UK and other western democracies, have rightly emphasised the need to divert women from short sentences, but relatively little attention has been paid to the needs of women serving medium and long sentences for serious offences. Feminist criminology has revealed an invidious history of women’s treatment in prison, demonstrating how reformist and rehabilitative interventions have reproduced and exacerbated existing states of inequality and oppression. The question explored in the proposed paper is whether a proportionate sentence that imposes a loss of liberty is inevitably destined to this fate, or whether it can be reconstructed to address the needs of women in ways that are progressive and transformative.
Drawing on data gathered from an extensive study of the only democratic therapeutic community (DTC) for women prisoners in the UK, this paper explores the opportunities it provided for reparative and restorative rehabilitation. But it also identifies some of the interconnected ways in which these ambitions are undermined by pervasive, yet often tacit, assumptions that underly penal policies and practices. The research is to be published as a monograph by Routledge in 2025.

Authors

• Elaine Player, King's College, London

• Elaine Genders, Law Faculty, University College London