Violence in women's prisons and institutional responses. Systematic literature review

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Gender-Sensitive Policies in Prison Systems (I)

Abstract

Prison violence is a complex phenomenon with highly negative effects on inmates and their families, as well as on prison staff and society as a whole (Trajtenberg and Sanchez, 2019). Most work on prison violence focuses on male population, and analysis in women's prisons are less common (Thomson et al., 2019; Medina, 2022). However, some studies have exposed high levels of interpersonal violence among women prisoners (Espinoza, 2022), revealing trajectories of victimization and violence that are replicated in confinement contexts (Messina & Calhoun, 2021). This paper is part of a research project which aims to understand the phenomenon of violence in women's prisons at the global and Latin American level, one of its main focuses being to analyse the responses of the state to this violence, taking as a reference the theoretical framework provided by Feminist Criminology. To this end, a systematic review of the specialised literature produced over the last 12 years in English, Spanish and Portuguese has been carried out, following the PRISMA method (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). This work has made it possible to identify predictors of violent behaviour and its forms of manifestation, but above all the incidence of penitentiary institutions in the expression and/or mitigation of violence, as well as the interventions that have been proposed to reduce this phenomenon.

Authors

• Olga Espinoza, Universidad de Chile

• Moira Gutiérrez, Universidad de Chile

• Paula Medina, Universidad Central de Chile