In the Fall of 2019,  GEPPers Ana Ballesteros-Pena and María Bustelo at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and Amy Mazur decided to organize a group to study gender equality policies in confinement institutions, including prisons and immigration detention centers,  based on Ana and María’s work on gender equality efforts in Spanish prisons (2023) and Amy’s work on GEPP. Feminist penality policy should be understood as a broad policy sector comprising public initiatives that try to reduce gender inequality and discrimination within state actions involving penal and coercive components. While the GEPP approach was used as a touchstone, the project sought to take the first steps for studying the punitive and coercive power of the State from a feminist approach across the globe and not just in Western European countries. 

The group seeks to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue between feminist comparative policy analysis theories and concepts and other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, criminology and criminal law that have been analyzing penal and coercive policies from different angles. The constant mutation of the penal power of the state and the emerging and constantly growing punitive and coercive responses to social changes, economic recessions and global mobility justifies the inclusion and the need to see the penality field beyond traditional penal institutions, such as prisons. 

Penality policies are understood to be set of public interventions that use different legal mechanisms to control, detain, supervise and punish people and that, as a result, involve restrictions of rights, freedom and mobility. Although these policies have clear gender implications, the burgeoning research in comparative gender policy that has mapped and assessed the implementation and impact of a wide range of policies that explicitly promote gender rights and equality has paid little attention to feminist policies that involves coercive components of the state — feminist penality policy. Following the scholarship that shows how we need to expand our understanding of the punitive and the penal, the feminist penality policy sector should also be broadly conceptualized in order to incorporate the different subsectors that by nature or as result of changes and mutations deploy multiple forms of penal power.

More concretely, the feminist penality policy sector should include, at least, the following subsectors:

• Criminal law and sentencing.
• Policing policy.
• Prison policies, including all forms of serving sentences, such as community sanctions, open prisons, electronic monitoring, etc.
• Immigration detention and border control policies, including the changing forms of containment international mobility, such as hotspots, refugee camps, etc. and forms of supervising migrants in the community.
• Social and gender equality policies that, particularly, when affecting certain ethnic and racial groups, foreigners, etc, become coercive and punitive.

Additionally, adopting an intersectional lens, feminist penality takes into account the ways in which all of these subsectors generate multiple and particular oppressions to certain groups of women, such as different ethnic and racial groups, foreigners and sexual and gender minorities. 

This scenario leads us to the need to not only focus on adoption, but also on implementation and evaluation of the public policies.

The three co conveners organized several panels and secured a contract for an edited book with Palgrave/Macmillan (See Table of Contents below) on this new area of gender equality policy – feminist penality policy. With funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847635, the Complutense University of Madrid, the University of Toronto and the Washington State University, they brought together the book contributors at a two day workshop held in April 2023 in Madrid to  present and develop their chapters for the book, forthcoming in 2024. 

The members of the group, from Canada, Brazil, Peru, Portugal, Spain, the UK and the USA plan to propose several panels for the upcoming European Conference on Gender and Politics in July 2024 and to seek significant research funding for a more systematic cross-national project based on the initial findings of the book.

PLEASE CONTACT ANA BALLESTEROS IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN GETTING INVOLVED WITH THIS PROJECT AT abelle05@ucm.es

Gender and the Coercive State: Feminist Penality Policy Across the Globe

Table of Contents

Forthcoming 2023, Palgrave/Macmillan

Chapter One. Introduction: How to analyze feminist penality from comparative feminist policy analysis.

Ana Ballesteros-Pena and María Bustelo

PART I. Prisons

Chapter Two. The elusiveness of change and unachievable ideals in the Canadian gender-sensitive penality

Kelly Hannah-Moffatt

Chapter Three. Examining criminal justice from a feminist perspective: the case of the Portuguese prison system

Raquel Matos and Mónica Soares

Chapter Four. Gender Differences in Education Provided in U.S. Prisons: Court Precedent and Policy Developments

Natalie Velasco and Kallee McCullough

Chapter Five. Penal public policies, penitentiary treatment and gender in Peru 

Lucia Bracco Bruce 

Chapter Six. The exercise of citizenship of incarcerated women in the penitentiary units of the province of Buenos Aires, a new public policy for conflict management with a feminist approach?

Larisa Zerbino

PART II. Immigration Detention

Chapter Seven. Gender (in) equality in action in immigration enforcement in Spain: the twilight of immigration detention

Cristina Fernández-Bessa and Ana Ballesteros-Pena

Chapter Eight. ‘”It is like … a different country without human rights”: Women in Immigration detention in Britain’

Khursheed Wadia

Chapter Nine. Immigration detention and gender equality policies in Canada.

Falak Mujtaba

Chapter Ten. Comparative Conclusions

Amy G. Mazur