FEMINIST RESEARCH NETWORK ON GENDER AND SOCIAL CONTROL POLICIES

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. 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. This is why we decided to expand the focus of our network to cover other coercive policies, such as policing or certain social services targeting particular groups of the population.

Social control policies are understood to be a 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 — social control policies. Following the scholarship that shows how we need to expand our understanding of the punitive and the penal, social control policies 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, social control policies should include, at least, the following areas:

• Criminal law and sentencing.
• Police 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, our approach to social control policies 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 study for feminist policy analysis– social control policies. In this first book, we will focus on prisons and immigration detention. 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 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 2025. 

The members of the group have participated in several conferences, such as the European Conference on Gender and Politics in July 2024, and plan to propose panels to future conferences as well as to seek significant research funding for a more systematic cross-national project based on the initial findings of the book.

PLEASE CONTACT ANA BALLESTEROS-PENA IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN GETTING INVOLVED WITH THIS NETWORK AT aballe05@ucm.es

GENDER EQUALITY BEHIND BARS: A COMPARATIVE POLICY APPROACH

Table of Contents

Forthcoming 2025, Palgrave/Macmillan

CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: How to analyze penality policies from comparative feminist policy analysis.

Ana Ballesteros-Pena, María Bustelo and Amy Mazur

PART I. PRISONS

Chapter Two. The Lessons of Misplaced Optimism: Gender, Indigeneity, and Prison Reform in Canada

Jihyun Kwon and Kelly Hannah-Moffatt

Chapter Three. Gender, Feminism, and Carceral Policies in Portugal: Assessing Impacts and Challenges

Raquel Matos, Mónica Soares, Catarina Ribeiro and Mariana Castro

Chapter Four. The imbrications of top-down and bottom-up perspectives: Penitentiary policies, Rehabilitation Programs and Gender in Peru

Lucia Bracco Bruce and Adriana Hildenbrand

Chapter Five. Progress and setbacks in the introduction of a gender perspective in prison policy in Uruguay

Ana Vigna, Cecilia Rocha-Carpiuc and Joaquín Cardeillac

Chapter Six. Thinking of Penal Reform: Divergent programs for mothers and pregnant women to avoid imprisonment: A policy direction for female prisoners in Zimbabwe.                

Rotina Mafume Musara

Chapter Seven. From mixed gender facilities to women’s only prisons in Denmark. Ideas and challenging realities in a diverse practice

 Charlotte Mathiassen.

PART II. IMMIGRATION DETENTION

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

Cristina Fernández-Bessa and Ana Ballesteros-Pena

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

Khursheed Wadia

Chapter Ten. The Gendered Slow Violence of Alternatives to Detention in Canada

Falak Mujtaba

Chapter Eleven. Immigration detention and gender in Poland

Monika Szulecka and Emilia Rekosz

CHAPTER TWELVE. Comparative Conclusions

Amy G. Mazur, Ana Ballesteros-Pena and María Bustelo.