Gender-responsive prisons (also known as gender-responsive corrections or gender-responsive programming) are prison expansion programs that cater towards incarcerated female-identified prisoners. Contemporary gender-based prison programs are a response to the rapidly increasing number of women being incarcerated in the prison industrial complex, with the number of women in the United States Correctional System having increased by 700% between 1980 and 2014. Women on average receive 63% shorter sentences for crimes than men committing the same crime, and women are twice as likely to evade incarceration when convicted. Women are significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions altogether. Women are 15 times less likely to be incarcerated at all.
Contents
These programs vary in intent and implementation. The use of such programs centers upon the ideology that female offenders in the criminal justice system are unique from their male counterparts, in their general personal histories and in their pathways to crime, and therefore require gender-specific rehabilitative programs. Multi-dimensional programs oriented specifically towards the distinctly female behaviors are suggested for female offenders and are considered effective in curbing recidivism.
History
In the United States, authorities began housing women in correctional facilities separate from men in the 1870s. The first American female correctional facility with dedicated buildings and staff was the Mount Pleasant Female Prison in Ossining, New York; the facility had some operational dependence on nearby Sing Sing, a men's prison.
Unlike prisons designed for men in the United States, state prisons for women evolved in three waves. First, women prisoners were imprisoned alongside men in "general population," where they were subject to sexual attacks and daily forms of degradation. In an attempt to address these issues, women prisoners were removed from general population and housed separately, wherein they did not receive the same resources as men in prisons. In the third stage of development, women in prison were then housed completely separately in fortress-like prisons, where the goal of punishment was to indoctrinate women into traditional feminine roles.
Assessment
Two components to understanding the needs of female offenders are known as the pathways perspective and the gender-responsive perspective. This approach to gender-responsive treatment has been criticized by others in the field of criminology and prison reform, as it classifies female offenders as either victims of trauma, [physical and substance] abuse or mental illness; or as caretakers, mothers, and wives.
Gender-responsive prisons provide sociocultural and therapeutic interventions through treatment and skill building within the criminal justice system.
The pathways theory has been evaluated as the unique circumstances that women are involved with, differing from those related to male offenders because of their gender, race, and class that result in criminal activity. Although it has been reviewed as a series of generalizations and criticized for its dismissal of the complex and heterogeneous circumstances that influence female offenders, the pathways approach has been widely adopted in the field of criminology and prison reform.
It is hypothesized that a multi-dimensional program oriented towards female behaviors is crucial for rehabilitation and a general improvement of all criminal justice phases. As part of this hypothesis, there are six ‘guiding principles’ that are fundamental for effective gender-responsive services. They suggest that the mental health of women in prison systems is a crucial driving factor of gender-responsive prison programs.
A 2012 study was conducted to understand the experiences of a new cognitive skills program that compares and contrasts a gender-responsive approach with a gender-neutral approach. The study involved a focus group of males and females that measured cognitive skills such as impulsivity, decision-making, interpersonal problem-solving, and influence in others. It concluded that participants were most receptive to gender-specific programs and evaluated the quality of current intervention and rehabilitation programs and whether they catered to their needs.
Another study conducted in 2010 focuses on gender-responsive programs for the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) program in a women's correctional facility in Michigan. Data was gathered to determine how the program aids substance abusers can break their cycle with the rehabilitation program that utilizes philosophy catered to women in an effort to address the differences in perspective and process the emotional and mental information.
Opposition
Limitations to the current criminal justice system have set precedence to how marginalized individuals are criminalized and unable to receive proper treatment within the prisons and outside prison walls.
Intersectionality
While gender-responsive prisons are a response to accommodate the needs of female-identified bodies, there are critiques that the conversations and programs feature gender conformity and heteronormativity utilizing white supremacy, ableism, and xenophobia to support the carceral state. The importance of intersectionality in prison reform draws from the need to prioritize the existence of oppressed individuals rather than adapt the system to accommodate them.
Despite the inclusion of women in correctional facilities, there has been little focus on the impact of the carceral system intergenerationally through family and loved ones, particularly on women. The physical, emotional, and mental separation known as natal alienation of victims of the PIC can lead to social death of the individual. While the effect of incarceration on motherhood has been reconciled by the need and creation of gender-responsive programming, the study of the relationship of social death for gender-oppressed individuals is largely lacking in connection to gender-responsive prison and prison as a whole.
The impact of the criminalization of Black girls and women in society intersects with the functionality of the prison industrial complex and its relation with race and gender. This racialized criminality of Black girls and women complicates the rationale of gender-responsive programming in its lack of multifacetedness of identities. On an intersectional level of race and power, gender-oppressed individuals are largely marginalized by the dominantly male body of color narrative of the PIC.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a well-known scholar who coined the phrase intersectionality, states her findings on racialized gender violence and anti-Black racism in the carceral state in her 2012 article, From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration. The current framework of mass incarceration ignores the spatial fluidity of its own persistent nature and the industrialized commodification of marginalized people. Not only that, Crenshaw also explicates the lack of intersectional lens of the framing of incarceration in regards to racialized gender and gendered race in that the dominant frame is male-focused while the focus of gender-responsive approaches to address the needs of explicit gender differences often neglects the racialized realities of particular marginalized women.
Rehabilitation
Bloom suggests that certain crimes committed by women do not merit incarceration but instead should be ‘treated’ with psychological assistance and therapy.
Abolitionist approaches
Reformers suggest that the current criminal justice system does not prevent criminal activity and is therefore broken. However, abolitionists argue that the system is not "broken," but rather is working perfectly by its own logic of a system that is racist, classist, homophobic, etc.
Abolitionists are reframing the issue of gender-responsive programming with the argument that the reality of gender-responsive programming expands the carceral state by supporting violence, criminalization, and deportation. By reforming the criminal justice system, it is difficult to address the systemic issues such as poverty and inaccessibility to healthcare or education. Therefore, abolitionists assert using transformative justice to reimagine a world that does not support incarceration including surveillance, deportation and detention centers, criminalization, and violence.
Abolitionists critical of gender-responsive prisons specifically contend that the use of gender-responsive prison programs propagates the myth of individual rehabilitation, and that it takes what it, in essence, structural inequality and transforms it into a problem with a prison focused solution. Abolitionist Bree Carlton expands on her criticism of gender-responsive programs in her article "Pathways, Race and Gender Responsive Reform: Through an Abolitionist Lens". She takes a ‘four stage approach’ to addressing the problem of gender-responsive programs specifically in Victoria, Australia; these four stages include: addressing the significance of the adoption of the ‘pathways approach’ and its use of the rehabilitation defense of prisons, discussing the constructions of race and culture in gender responsive discourses, acknowledging the disproportionate number of Vietnamese women incarcerated in Victoria and the racialized implications of the ‘pathways approach,’ and finally a reflection on the issue of prison reform.