Women’s Imprisonment in England at the End of the Twentieth Century: Legitimacy, Realities and Utopias

Abstract

In 1991 the Woolf Inquiry reported to the British government on the underlying causes of the riots which had occurred at six prisons in England and Wales in 1990. Women’s prisons had been excluded from the terms of reference of the judicial inquiry, even though there had been a serious disturbance at the women’s section of Risley Remand Centre a few months earlier. Three years later, Elaine Player (1994) wrote about the implications of Woolf for women’s prisons. Disappointingly, this was primarily an exercise in administrative penology. Player not only failed to put the issues of women’s imprisonment in any theoretical context whatsoever, but also omitted to mention: the ‘gender-wise’ theorizing about women’s prisons engaged in by feminists over the past couple of decades (see Howe, 1994, for an up-to-date bibliography); and the ‘women-wise’ brand of penal politics doggedly fashioned by the radical campaigning group Women in Prison since its founding by women ex-prisoners in 1983.