2 research outputs found
Foreign national women arrested for drug trafficking: a dynamic socio-penal portrait
Women鈥檚 imprisonment in Portugal was marked in the first decade of this
century by the increasing proportion of foreign nationals. This circumstance had
implications not only in the official statistics of crime, contributing to a great preponderance
of drug trafficking but also in the dynamics of women鈥檚 prisons and in
the social discourses that associate immigration and crime. The present study is part
of a research project on life trajectories of foreign national prisoners in Portugal,
and it aims to analyze the social, demographic, criminal, and penal dimensions of
female foreign nationals arrested in the country for drug trafficking. To this end, we
collected and statistically analyzed data from 148 individual case files of foreign
women prisoners. Results show the existence of at least two different scenarios of
foreign national women arrested for drug trafficking in Portuguese prisons: on the
one hand, women who come from European or South American countries, who did
not live in Portugal, and who are held by international trafficking (drug couriers)
and, on the other hand, women from African countries living in Portugal and arrested
for drug trafficking practiced mainly in the country. These results allow us to deconstruct
the idea that the high proportion of foreign national women in our prisons is
unequivocally related to the phenomenon of immigration. Furthermore, results validate
the importance of understanding, through qualitative research, these women鈥檚
pathways to imprisonment in a foreign country.(undefined