Editorial: Foreign Women in Prison

Abstract

The imprisonment of women worldwide has always been a controversial issue. This is partly because women do not end up in prison as frequently as men and so discussions of prison populations most often focus on the experiences of male prisoners. Therefore, any attempt to focus attention on the experiences of female prisoners raises questions in the minds of most scholars as to whether the conditions of women in prison are harsh enough compared to male prisons and whether we should not be focusing on the more severe conditions in male prisons? However, the rate of increase of female prisoners far outstrips the rate of growth of male prisoners partly because of the relatively small number upon which the increases are calculated and partly because of increasing attempts by criminal justice officials to grant women equality with a vengeance. If we move beyond this numbers game and look at the incarceration of foreign women in prisons around the world, we could be in a position to consider the nature of prisons in general and the imprisonment of women in particular and question their relative essentialisms.