Women Between the House and the Prison: structural inequality and gender approach

• In Event: Las caras de la desigualdad: cinco casos latinoamericanos de la problemática regional

Abstract

The overlapping vulnerabilities of oppressed subjects can be explained through intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, Hill Collins 1986, 1998). Women in conflict with the criminal law suffer various levels of discrimination: their label as ‘delinquents’; their poverty; and their deprivation of liberty that prevents them from working (CELS, PPN and DGN, 2011).
The lack of adequate responses to these special situations by public housing policies in Argentina (Pautassi and Gamallo 2012, Raspall et al 2017, Center for Legal and Social Studies 2013) and, in the urban metropolitan area (Buenos Aires Sin Techo, VVAA 2010, Zapata 2017) leads many women to experience their freedom in very precarious conditions or even worse conditions than those of the prison itself. Due to the lack of options to receive an income and the disproportionate burden that caregiving activities have on the lives of women (Gordon 1990, Fraser, 1987), women are living in a perpetual cycle of precarity, forced to resort to practices that are precisely those that led to their imprisonment in the first place or violate the prohibition to leave the home.
Moreover, urban phenomena such as gentrification, renting conditions and inflation oppress poor ex-convict women in an aggravated manner. They are unempowered while navigating a market tailored to the interests of extractive capital (Falú 2015, Pérez 2015).
Our work will propose policies that a democratic an egalitarian State should implement to provide women in conflict with the penal system an adequate level of rights that allows them to rebuild their lives.

Authors

• Paula Sagel, University of Buenos Aires

• Ana C Piechestein, University of Buenos Aires/University of Jose C Paz