Women's Journeys Through the Contemporary Criminal Justice System

Implicit in the notion of citizenship is an assumption of symmetry of rights, responsibilities and duties between individuals and governments. This assumption is often in conflict with well-established empirical realities about the various ways in which social exclusion - in the shape of poverty, for instance - creates the conditions in which individuals are unable to fulfil their citizen obligations by, for instance, lawbreaking (Player, 2014).

In such contexts, it is also possible to argue that the conditions which generate such lawbreaking are themselves generated by governmental abrogation of its responsibilities towards ensuring a minimum standard of living for individuals. Since the global financial crash in 2007/8, the assumed symmetry of the relationship between the individual and government has been fundamentally challenged by the rise of austerity politics in England and Wales. This proposed study cuts to the heart of this dynamic by examining how women who commit crime in the early 21st century make sense of their lawbreaking in relation to their social, political and economic context.

Such a study was conducted nearly three decades ago. In Women, Crime and Poverty, Carlen (1988) examined the social, economic, ideological and political conditions of women who committed crime. Since the financial crash in 2007/08 and subsequent austerity period, the level of structural inequality facing women has amplified. Studies show that women coming from disadvantaged backgrounds will suffer gravely (Fawcett Society, 2012; Women's Resource Centre, 2013, Women's Aid 2015; Conley, 2012). Under austerity, women are confronted with the ongoing reality of housing inequality, child poverty, reduced welfare income, rent arrears and debt. What is more, the privatisation of key public services such as the National Probation Service in England and Wales (as well as the peripheral community services tied to it), has resulted in the dismantling of women's organisations set up to advocate on behalf of women in the criminal justice system (CJS) (House of Commons, 2016). The rate at which women are recalled to custody for breaching their community supervision order has peaked, so too has the scale of self-harm and suicide in women's prisons (Prison Reform Trust, 2016; Inquest, 2016). This is therefore a critical time to understand how women in the 21st make sense of their everyday lives and choices.

Transforming Rehabilitation policies have further cast doubt on the future provision for women in the CJS (Annison, 2015). Against this, new waves of feminism and notions of gender, particularly in relation to work and family have changed and the economic opportunities open to women in the 21st century are different to that of the latter years of the 20th century. There is arguably also a changed perception of women and how they are judged (in all senses of the word). This is therefore a critical time to understand how women in the 21st century make sense of their everyday economic and social lives in relation to their lawbreaking. Additionally, this study is capable of shedding light on how individuals make sense of the relationship between themselves and government when some of the 20th century assumptions and practices of welfare have been radically called into question.