Women in prison : where are we going?

Female imprisonment rates have dramatically increased over the last two decades at state, national and international levels. This paper reviews women's imprisonment in Australia and looks at sentence management and programs, highlighting the critical issues which impact daily on female inmates

Aberrance, agency and social constructions of women offenders

Traditionally offending women are framed through essentialist discourses of pathologisation and the family. Hence, good women are constructed as passive, compliant, vulnerable to victimisation, and nurturers. Offending women are constructed within criminal justice processes as disordered, physiologically and psychologically flawed. Censure or sympathy dispensed to women within the system is contingent on a number of key factors: the type of offence, the category of women involved, and the way in which women interact and negotiate the discourses used to construct their aberrance. The focus of this thesis is offending women and how they are socially constructed through legal and penal discourses within the court and the prison. However this thesis rejects the essentialist framework which positions women as passive recipients of an omnipotent patriarchal criminal justice system and thus having no agency. Nor is this thesis about creating a new entity to encompass all offending women. Instead an anti- essentialist approach is adopted that allows the body, power, and women's agency to be theorised. This approach provides a more complex and detailed account of women's aberrance that acknowledges the diverse range of women, their experiences and negotiations of criminal justice processes. The combination of real women's lived experiences and an alternative theoretical framework provides a very different perspective in which to understand female offending

Cracking the code : a checklist to complement CRAs for first year Justice students

It is well recognised in the literature on first year higher education that there is a need for Universities to provide further support and development in student learning skills and engagement. Assessment and feedback is an area with differing expectations and understandings among academics and students (e.g. AUSSE, CEQ). Consistency and explicitness in academic feedback is fundamental in assisting students in their transition to university education and learning. This poster captures the progress of an 18 month funded by the Faculty of Law Teaching and Learning Grant scheme (QUT). The project sought to develop and trial an assessment checklist/diagnostic tool to accompany Criteria Referenced Assessment sheets for students within the School of Justice, Law Faculty, Queensland University of Technology (QUT).The checklist was trialled across four units in the School of Justice (Law faculty) amongst an estimated cohort of over 600 students undertaking single and dual degrees

Inmate women as participants in education in Queensland correctional centres

This paper reports on research with women inmates undertaking prison education in two Queensland correctional facilities: Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre and Helena Jones Community Corrections Centre. Data collection spanned the period of relocation of Brisbane Women’s from Annerley to Wacol, from a traditional lock-and-key establishment to a keyless unit. This study investigated inmate women’s accounts of education using interview data and analysis of policy. While the study drew upon feminist criminology theory and conversation analysis to provide a theoretical dialogue for investigating prison education, this paper investigates more broadly five key themes. They are categorised as a culture of containment and surveillance, types of education, access to education, pedagogical issues and the role of support groups in education. Women’s prisons and their rituals have been constructed by men for men, sometimes with concessions made for women and criminal laws have been drawn with reference to the way that men define women and perpetuate the dependence of women on more powerful male others. The structural and interactional features of oral texts such as interviews were examined to understand the educational experiences of women inmates. The research found that women’s involvement in prison education is framed by a culture of containment and surveillance. In the keyless prison, heightened electronic security reported increases in internal body searches and routinized head counts were found to exacerbate the difficulties women inmates experience in prison education. This work recommends as a research policy imperative a longitudinal case study to investigate women inmates’ educational access and experiences

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics [Book review]

Book review of: Ron Iphofen & Martin Tolich, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics. London, England: SAGE, 2018. ISBN 9781526448705 (hbk); 584 pp