The Effects of Gender, Race, and Migration on the Overrepresentation of Roma and Racialized Women in Spain’s Criminal Legal System

• In Event: Gender, Crime and Justice Working Group Panel 12: Gender and Justice

Abstract

This paper analyzes the intersection between gender, race, migration, criminalization, and abolitionism in the Spanish context. In the forty years following the end of Spain’s dictatorship, the prison population quadrupled. After the implementation of the democratic Criminal Code in 1995, there has been approximately one Criminal Code reform per year, resulting in the creation of new offenses and the consequent escalation in incarceration rates. Paradoxically, Spain now has one of the highest incarceration rates in Europe (with prison sentences often twice the length of the European average), while at the same time being one of the countries with the lowest crime rates in Europe. As of December 2023, there were 4,000 incarcerated women in Spain, representing just over 7% of the prison population. Gender and race manifestly structure the construction of delinquency and criminality. Although the Roma population makes up only 1.4% of the total population of Spain, Roma women accounted for 25% of the prison population in 2005. Almost all of these women were imprisoned for crimes related to drug trafficking, an offense that increased significantly after the 1995 Criminal Code reform—pointing to a possible increase in the percentage of incarcerated Roma women. Drawing from penal abolition and decolonial feminist theories, as well as the analytical framework of border imperialism, this paper will focus on the overrepresentation of Roma and racialized women in the Spanish prison system, as well as the effects of this situation on their status as caregivers within their families and communities.

Authors

• Maéva Thibeault, University of Edinburgh

• Becky Ratero Greenberg, Utrecht University