Feminist Contributions to Studies on Women’s Imprisonment

Abstract

Despite representing less than 10% of the prison population, there is a significant increase in the number of women prisoners in Minas Gerais. While in 2003 we had 238 women arrested, by the end of 2013 we already accounted more than 2,805 women in custody in Minas’ chains, prisons and penitentiaries. However, the imprisonment of women and their participation in criminal acts are still recurrently analyzed from the perspective of exoticism, as if this link was ‘unnatural’ for female representatives, with explanations ranging from economism and morality, where the financial situation, loving partnership, exacerbated sexuality, lack of character and / or wickedness appear as the predominant explanation for women’s involvement in crime. As we go back in the history of punishments under the lens of feminist theories, we enter in a restricted and very traditional field of studies, emphasizing the importance of analyzing the women’s prisons from the prisoners’ experiences, seeking to understand and question the selectivity and control requirements that characterize our penal system, forging naturalization and covering sociohistorical processes that contribute to the capture of certain women and condemn them to deprivation of liberty.