Women's Incarceration in Germany: Social control in and beyond the prison

• In Event: PWG - Revisiting ‘the pains of imprisonment’

Abstract

As is the case in many jurisdictions, prison research in Germany is largely of a quantitative nature and overwhelmingly
based on male prisoners who make up the vast majority of the prison estate. The fact that women are far fewer in number can pose a variety of challenges for prison administrations, often resulting in less favourable treatment as compared to imprisoned men
(Council of Europe 2018). Prisoners in women’s prisons are interesting, however, because many reform agendas are trialled on this relatively small and seemingly more manageable group (Kubiak et al 2017). While attention has been directed towards the Nordic countries in search for penal reform ideas (Pratt & Eriksson 2013, Pratt 2020), central European countries largely have been overlooked despite low imprisonment rates. This paper introduces first findings from the WISCA project that combine women’s experiences of life in prison and the return to the community in Germany. The research looks into how the return into the community is navigated and how tight the penal grip remains after release, providing insights into women’s life in prison and post-release through a lens of punitiveness, social control and carceral geography

Author

• Anna Schliehe, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg