Reconceptualising Custody: Rights, Responsibilities and 'Imagined Communities' (Forthcoming)

Abstract

First paragraph: While there has been much reflection and concern with human rights in prison, the depiction of women’s prisons as something ‘other than’ punishment has often resulted in a concealment of the punitive basis of custody as applied to women (e.g. Carlen, 1983; 2008; Hannah-Moffat, 2001; Carlen and Tombs, 2006). In the penal context, the rights of prisoners (as underpinned by human rights priorities) are intended to mitigate the punitive practices of the state, yet they have become increasingly blurred by growing emphasis on ‘reintegration’ and ‘rehabilitation’. For Cohen (1985), the dispersal of control mechanisms from the prison into the community (integral to concepts of rehabilitative throughcare and reintegrative practices) not only blurs boundaries between these spaces but conceals the nature of this expansion of control. The ‘rehabilitative’ discourse that underpins women’s imprisonment makes it a paradox around which the nature of punishment and the significance of wider economic, social and cultural inequalities that drive punitive practices might usefully be considered.