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Women’s imprisonment, social control and the carceral state – an interdisciplinary study of the experiences of detention

Project description

Prison experiences for women and how institutional control spills out into everyday life

There are far more men than women convicted and serving time in prison. This is probably the reason most studies show that many women receive less favourable treatment compared to male prisoners. The EU-funded WISCA project will investigate this trend. As we do not know as much about how women experience issues like legitimacy, punishment and control, this project is looking into how these spread out from the prison into life after release. WISCA will address gaps in relation to the experiences of women prisoners to expose the dynamics of the penal state by using both qualitative and quantitative methods in Germany.

Objective

Women’s imprisonment, social control and the carceral state – an interdisciplinary study of the experiences of detention

Prison research in Germany is largely of a quantitative nature and overwhelmingly based on male prisoners who make up the vast majority of the prison estate. The fact that women are far fewer in number can pose a variety of challenges for prison administrations, often resulting in less favourable treatment as compared to imprisoned men. WISCA responds to the Council of Europe’s call for more research and gender-sensitive monitoring which is attuned to the potential compounding of problems women face in prison. Prison research is mainly based on generalisations from mainstream male prisoners (Howe 1994; Loeber et al 2007) and women have remained largely absent from studies into key penological issues such as legitimacy and order (Bosworth 1996; Liebling 2009). Female prisoners are particularly interesting, however, precisely because many reform agendas are trialled on this relatively small and seemingly more manageable group (Kubiak et al. 2017). While attention has been directed towards the Nordic countries in search for penal reform ideas (Pratt & Eriksson 2015), central European countries have been overlooked despite low imprisonment rates; and little is known about prisoners’ experiences in Germany due to a lack of qualitative research. Further, carceral geography as a newly emerging discipline has so far seen no German data, so this project will provide an expansion of carceral geography and qualitative criminology into the German-speaking interdisciplinary field. Using mainly qualitative research methods with some quantitative elements, WISCA will address these gaps in scholarship by focussing on the experiences of female prisoners in order to expose the dynamics of the penal state, the texture of imprisonment as lived and experienced, and wider networks of social control beyond release.

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2020

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITAT TRIER
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 121 393,57
Address
UNIVERSITATSRING 15
54296 TRIER
Germany

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Region
Rheinland-Pfalz Trier Trier, Kreisfreie Stadt
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 121 393,58
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