On the eve of the 2020 US presidential election I find myself talking to Kelsey, a young woman from rural Wisconsin. Kelsey is a pseudonym and our conversation is taking place under the proviso that I keep her identity confidential. Kelsey was one of the many formerly incarcerated students from Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College, based in Sawyer County, who responded to a call out to aid me with my research. As a former prisoner myself, I was keen to learn more about the iniquities experienced by other Black, Indigenous, Women of Color in the criminal justice system whose stories are often marginalized.

Despite the late timing and the fact that she has only had a short time to decompress following a busy day at work, Kelsey is bright, funny and engaging. Had I not been to prison myself, I would immediately have been taken aback from the moment she turned on her camera during our Zoom call. She is the very antithesis of what you expect a former female prisoner to look and sound like. Both of us are painfully aware of the ‘façade’ that society expects female offenders to conform to: either mentally unstable, prone to anger or just plain needy. The last two habits are easy to pick up when you’re placed in an environment where you have to rely on guards for ordinary items that are treated as luxuries on the inside; this includes everything from sanitary towels, toilet roll to underarm deodorant. I can still remember the first time I met with my college mentor who guessed I would come under the plain needy heading by virtue of being a woman. Unlike male offenders, women who have been to prison are assumed to be emotionally damaged, if not at the start of their sentences then definitely by the time they have finished paying their debt to society. While this presumption makes it easy to win the sympathy vote, especially from the small number of organizations that specialize in helping female offenders cope with trauma, you’re often met with indifference by the same organizations if you present as being well adjusted and resist their attempts at infantilizing you. My college mentor, probably mistaking my happy-go-lucky attitude for a front, grew increasingly frustrated when I proved reluctant to share all that I could about my time inside despite me having left prison a good nine months before. Most female offenders that I know choose to keep quiet about their sentences because often they’re given very little opportunity to do anything more apart from playing up to the stereotype of the former prisoner made good.

Sentenced to under two years, Kelsey made the deliberate decision to treat going to prison as a ‘learning opportunity’, enrolling in in-prison courses such as parenting and criminal justice classes. If she’s aware that she’s the exception — according to a 2016 study the average rate of recidivism among former Wisconsin female inmates stands between 25 and 30 per cent — she doesn’t give it away. [i] While acknowledging that ‘there is a stigma’ against women who have been to prison which affects their ability to find suitable employment or even take out car insurance, when she walked past those prison gates for the final time, she told herself with absolute conviction: ‘I’ve been to prison. I’m done with it.’

Later that night when I’m in the middle of transcribing Kelsey’s interview, I can’t help myself from saying aloud ‘good for you’ every so often whenever I relisten to Kelsey discussing the obstacles she had to overcome to land a good job and resume her studies that, like myself, she accomplished in a relatively short space of time. Stories about incarcerated women of color are rare and when they are featured in the news usually it’s a semi-humorous account of a former prisoner who gets caught shoplifting hours after her release. Or a report of the violence being inflicted on incarcerated women. Before I had experienced prison myself, I remember reading a story of a newly arrived prisoner who had to be held down while officers sliced off her clothes because she refused to take them off herself. Apparently, the officers involved hadn’t bothered to explain why she couldn’t take the clothes she was wearing with her to the housing unit and responded with physical coercion when she resisted. The story made an impression on me for about five minutes before my attention was caught by the article underneath it. However, I probably wasn’t alone in reacting like this. The most powerful advocates for prison reform tend to be those who have been directly affected by it. It’s amazing how indifferent you can be to the suffering of others when they’re portrayed as being irredeemable or hopelessly tragic.

Whenever I tell people that the US has the highest female incarceration rate in the world I’m treated to mostly blank expressions. This is despite the fact that it is a trend that shows no signs of abating, with roughly 213,000 women incarcerated in jails while a further 1.2 million women are under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Unsurprisingly, women of color are disproportionately more likely to be imprisoned, with Black women representing the fastest-growing group of prisoners while Native prisoners are the largest group per capita. In Wisconsin alone the female Native population has more than doubled since 2000.

Inside, there were times when I felt as though I was literally being disappeared alongside thousands of other black and brown women, whenever I was told to put my books away because my prisoner status meant that my life was effectively over so why waste everyone’s time by attempting to improve myself. It wasn’t until I was released that I realized that American prisons are actively disappearing human beings, the main victims being women from low-income backgrounds or racially marginalized communities. This deliberate act of disappearing takes two forms: disenfranchisement and discrimination. Presently, one in every fifty Black women is ineligible to vote because of their criminal record. [ii] The data for Native and Hispanic women is unknown given the lack of research in this area despite their high rate of incarceration. However, the aggressive targeting of women of color by our criminal justice system also subjects them to legalized discrimination in employment, education, and housing. This ensures female offenders continue to have worse socioeconomic outcomes in comparison to their male counterparts. Women of color are disproportionately more likely to be single mothers, and households led by this group are more likely to be living in deep poverty: 48 per cent for Native women, 42 per cent for Hispanic women and 40 per cent for Black women. However, the discrimination these women will encounter once they’ve finished their sentences allows for the intergenerational transmission of poverty from them to their children, that will affect their access to adequate education, healthcare and even housing. I still remember that sensation of dread when I was applying to different colleges shortly following my release, wondering like Kelsey: ‘What happens if I declare?’ While some of these issues can be addressed before a woman is released, both Kelsey and I found we were on our own as soon as our sentences were served even though most female prisoners cite employment, education and life skills services as being their greatest area of need. In my case, I was told only the day before my release date that I’d be released homeless despite receiving assurances from the prison casework team during the last few months of my sentence that they would arrange for me to go into temporary accommodation. As a black or brown woman, these barriers are still felt years after you’ve served your time. One married student I spoke to, Liseli, who also attends Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College, told me that she ‘got denied twice this week for apartments’ due to her criminal history. This deliberate disappearing of women like me was one of the main reasons why I chose to reach out to former prisoners. To find out why, and exactly whose purpose it serves. My search took me back to the beginnings of the American penal system.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution may have abolished slavery in general terms but made an exception for prisoners who could be legally transformed into ‘slaves of the state’.[iii] This led to the rapid expansion of convict leasing, a system of forced penal labor in which the Southern states leased prisoners to commercial entities such as private railways and coal mines. This enabled the state to exert control over the physical bodies of formerly enslaved African American men, women and children whose free labor helped to rebuild the fledgling Southern economy. In the case of Alabama, the total revenue derived from convict leasing increased from 10 per cent in 1883 to 73 per cent by 1898. The traditional narrative contends that convict leasing disproportionately targeted Black men who were arrested for criminal acts such as vagrancy or violating the Black Codes that included ‘walking without a purpose’ or ‘walking at night’. However, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954), an African American civil rights activist and suffragette, once declared Black female prisoners to be the principal victims of the convict lease system.[iv] Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Black women continued to outnumber Black men in prison, 47.5 per cent to 29 per cent. [v] In states such as Virginia, Black women were classified as ‘field laborers with a productive capacity equivalent to that of men’, meaning they were just as likely to be arrested when seen out in public, and once sent to convict lease camps were made to dress in men’s clothes and perform manual labor, such as building railroads, digging ditches and growing cotton. No provision was made for the separation of men and women, which made women vulnerable to sexual abuse from the officers and male inmates. In the convict camps, where the manacled prisoners were housed, the ritual of publicly whipping half-naked Black women, who were made to stand in a sexualized stance with their heads placed between the overseer’s knees, prevailed.[vi] Any children born to them often found themselves trapped performing hard labor alongside their mothers. Those who refused to work, including children under the ages of ten, were punished, or in some cases beaten to death. [vii ] Death rates among leased convicts were ten times higher than the death rates of prisoners in non-lease states in part due to the inhumane conditions they were forced to work in, and the physical abuses inflicted on them by the authorities that necessitated the creation of secret graves to conceal the high body count. Women in the convict camps endured conditions that were harsher than those they had experienced under slavery, as the private companies had no ownership interest and prisoners could be replaced at low cost. [ viii] Despite public outrage that stemmed mainly from prominent female members of the African American community, convict leasing was defended on the grounds that it could bring about ‘the rehabilitation of an incarcerated person’, but rehabilitation was strictly reserved for those deemed capable of reform — white prisoners. [ix]

When the convict system was finally eliminated in 1908, it was replaced by the chain gang, where a group of prisoners dressed in white and black striped uniforms were chained together and forced to perform manual labor such as breaking rocks or building railways. When we think of the chain gang, just as we do with convict leasing, we tend to visualize Black men who were portrayed in songs such as Sam Cooke’s Chain Gang as ‘working on the highways and byways’ until ‘the sun is goin’ down … moanin’ their lives away’. However, the painful sounds of women on the chain gang, who up until 1936 were made up entirely of women of color, could also be heard.[x] These women were shackled together and made to carry out back-breaking work in public that had the effect of making female deviancy synonymous with ethnic-minority women. On the rare occasion that white women were sent to convict lease camps or chain gangs (between 1908 and 1938 only four white women were sent to Georgia’s chain gangs in comparison with nearly 2000 Black women), they were given light work such as mending uniforms, or they were released early. They were spared from wearing irons that could weigh as much as nine pounds that not only meant falls could prove fatal, often injuring several women at once, but the irons caused some women to suffer from shackle sores, gangrene, and other infections. Despite their gender, punishments continued to be as brutal as those carried out under convict leasing.

Although the chain gang was generally disbanded in the mid-twentieth century, that did not stop the Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County from reintroducing it in 1995 to Estrella’s female prison before it was eventually disbanded once more nearly a decade later. The chain gang may have fallen out of vogue but heavy-handed methods continues to persist. Even when I was in prison, I would witness groups of male guards surrounding a sole female prisoner who had either answered back or refused to work. In no time at all she would then be jumped on by multiple men and pinned faced down to the ground while the female guards stood back and watched. Strip searches, though carried out by female guards, were common and often ordered by male guards intent on punishing and intimidating women who either offended them or refused their sexual advances.

The 1908 Parole Act may have allowed prisoners back then the possibility of escape, although under parole, female prisoners were often placed with white families and obligated to perform hard domestic labor. However in most cases the women learned they had swapped one prison for another, with the warden now a white housewife who had the power to send them back to prison for minor transgressions. In some ways, this practice of confining female prisoners of color to the fields or a white household was a reaction to the Great Migration that saw six million African Americans migrate from the rural and urban South to the urban North from 1916–1970. Fears of a labor shortage followed, particularly in relation to Black women, who were needed to perform domestic service, leading to disproportionate rates of arrest and imprisonment among women of color. [xi] Convict leasing, the chain gang and parole had the effect of permanently associating Black women and those from other ethnic groups with low pay, hard labor and degradation. This even applied when prisoners achieved positions of responsibility, such as Georgia’s Mattie Crawford, who was made ‘sole blacksmith of the farm’ having been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing her stepfather who was abusing her.[xii] Her status as a prisoner meant she would forever be stranded between ‘a free labor market that refused to admit her as a skilled worker’ and the prison labor system ‘that would only allow her to work in chains’.[xiii] When women of color attempted to stray beyond these boundaries either they were arrested and ‘made to construct and maintain the very same roads upon which they were policed’ or harassed until they either quit or were fired.[xiv] A case in point is the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of August 1897, when the white female workers objected to the hiring of twenty Black women despite ‘multiple failed attempts to hire white women for these jobs’.[xv] Despite the fact the Black workers would have been stationed in a separate corner of the factory far away from their white employees, the company’s owner had crossed racial lines by hiring Black women to carry out the same jobs as his white female employees. In the end, the Black workers were dismissed.

Throughout the evening when I was speaking to Kelsey, one thing we definitely agreed on was that prison was ‘definitely not rehabilitative’. Whether it was seeing women who threw tantrums being rewarded for their behavior or having to play the waiting game whenever we identified opportunities that we thought could help us to better ourselves, prison did not seem rehabilitative to us. In the end, Kelsey was only able to identify two prison programs that led to viable routes of employment: the cosmetology program and the construction program. Both ran for two years, but a woman needed to have been in prison for a minimum of two years before she could be placed on the waiting list; this meant prisoners with sentences of four years or less were ineligible to apply. In relation to the jobs women could do around the prison, there was a choice between ‘kitchen work and janitorial work’. Laundry, I’m told, was the highest paid at ’47 cents a day’ and geared towards the lifers who liked the routine.

This practice of restricting women to courses or employment that tie them to low-paid or unskilled labor extends way beyond Wisconsin. In Texas there are twenty-one job-certification programs available for male offenders that include technology and advanced industrial design. [xvi ] For women, there are only two programs: office administration and culinary arts. When I was in prison, I was given a stark choice between training to be a hairdresser or becoming a cleaner. Had I not achieved a high level of education prior to my imprisonment, my inability to handle a backcombing brush let alone a blow-dryer would probably have sent me on a downward spiral. Like most women, my background or my hopes for the future were not taken into consideration, and while we could in theory apply to undertake distance learning degrees in subjects such as Business and Accountancy, this very rarely happened. In my experience, women were only encouraged to take up learning activities that prepared them for jobs that were dull and repetitive, or in the case of the beauty industry, badly paid. While there were exceptions, opportunities that allowed for academic advancement that went beyond the basic level were usually handed out to white prisoners. Unfortunately, women of color are still presumed to be illiterate, slow learners or simply unworthy of teaching. I can still recall one episode when a judge who was brought into the prison to chair a disciplinary hearing, immediately began to spell out the name of the month in a long, drawn-out way designed to put me in my place when I asked when the next hearing would take place, despite him having witnessed me taking down detailed notes throughout our session. However, that barely compared to being asked by a visiting solicitor whether I was literate despite informing her that I was employed as a library orderly at the time. Even external employers that worked with the prison exercised different recruitment practices for female prisoners depending on the color of their skin. One semi-luxury hotel that has chains across the country had an unofficial policy of recruiting white female prisoners to work in their more upscale locations while consigning ethnic-minority women to their less exclusive urban centers that tended to have fewer vacancies. They defended their policy on the grounds that ethnic-minority women work better in diverse settings, refusing to even let them work in their more luxurious chain on a trial basis. I cannot help but think that prisons today replicate ‘the racial apartheid social structure’ of our early prisons, consigning women of color to perform jobs that no one else wants or denying them opportunities altogether.

Even when female prisoners are trained like Mattie Crawford to perform skilled work, they are still caught inside the trap of the prison-industrial complex. Nowadays, even training in making circuit boards or lingerie for luxury brand Victoria’s Secret does not earn a female offender equal rights to fair treatment. She is prized when her labor means ‘no strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits’ or ‘unemployment insurance’ and discarded once her chains are lifted and she demands to be treated like an ordinary employee.[xvii] It makes returning to prison look like the easy option. Currently, 66 per cent of women released from American jails are rearrested within three years. When women attempt to break the cycle of reoffending, they find the odds stacked against them. Some 93.3 per cent of these women are actively looking for work, however 75 per cent of employers have admitted to legally discriminating against them. Formerly incarcerated Black, Hispanic and White women have an unemployment rate of 40 per cent, 39.42 per cent and 23.20 per cent respectively, compared to 6.4, 6.9 and 4.3 per cent of Black, Hispanic and White women who have no criminal convictions. I am still unable to find data on how unemployment impacts on formerly incarcerated Native women. However, the unemployment rate for other former incarcerated women of color, who are often of prime working age, exceeds that of men from the same ethnic backgrounds. When formerly incarcerated women of color do find work, it is more likely to be part-time and with an income that pays way below the poverty line irrespective of prior experience or educational qualifications. [xviii] In the prison I went to, some women nearing the middle or end part of their sentences could work outside for companies that had existing relationships with the prison. Of course, they were paid significantly less than their never-been-to-prison colleagues and worked in industries staffed by poor immigrants or ethnic minorities that experienced very high turnovers. Very few of these women managed to secure permanent employment with these companies after their release and it was taken for granted that if we did find jobs, it would be for companies where we would have no bargaining power as we would be expected to be permanently grateful for being hired in the first place.

Most of the women I spoke to from Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College left prison feeling positive. Kelsey cited the education she’s receiving as keeping her on track: ‘Without education I would not be as stable nor as successful as I am today. Education has given me opportunities, especially when staying busy was essential.’ Even Liseli, who’s had difficulties finding a home to rent for her family, confided in me that she wouldn’t ‘change that prison time for the world. I used that time to learn, change, grow’. However, I’m painfully conscious that I and the women I spoke to are a minority within a minority. As women of color who have been to prison, the lives we’re living now should not be so positive, at least not according to the statistics. When I left prison there were many officers who believed I would end up right back where I started — in a cell. At the time of leaving I had no home and no identifiable employment prospects. While having a positive mindset helps, perhaps the fact that Kelsey, Liseli and I were all old enough to know who we were when we went to prison and what we were capable of, meant we paid no attention to the low expectations other people had of us.

However, sometimes when I walk around my local neighborhood and see groups of young girls, I wonder what life may have in store for them. Girls of color are becoming increasingly more vulnerable to criminalization. Black girls in the US are three and a half times more likely to be incarcerated than white girls, while Native girls are four times more likely to be incarcerated, and Latina girls 38 per cent more likely. Often these girls will be incarcerated for low-level offences such as truancy and running away. However, a criminal record even at a young age often locks them out of the labor market, making them more susceptible to falling into a life of crime and poverty as they grow older. Most of the young girls I spoke to in prison, who were barely eighteen, seemed resigned to living life on the margins once they finished their sentences. Locked out of learning anything that could prove useful to them on the outside and taunted by guards and even members of their family who told them no decent employer would ever hire them, it was hardly surprising that many of them fell under the influence of older prisoners and believed the only way they could make decent money would be through selling drugs or their bodies. Prison represented a decent recruiting field to many career criminals who took advantage of girls’ fears about their future, bragging openly about the luxury lifestyle a life of crime had netted them, though as Kelsey summed up perfectly, ‘Nobody knows who anybody is outside of the prison.’

When the Black Lives Matter protest erupted during the summer, like most people, I thought we were entering a new era of race relations, where society would be held accountable for the discrimination experienced by people of color, especially within the criminal justice system. However, the lack of testimony from women trapped in the prison-industrial complex whose sufferings continue to be ignored by society, has made me aware of the disregard we’ve always shown to incarcerated women of color who became the silent victims of the racial apartheid that emerged following the abolition of slavery. To embrace women of color in debates surrounding Black Men and mass incarceration does not dilute the issue but rather strengthens it. We cannot right the wrongs of a discriminatory criminal justice system and achieve racial equality if women continue to be left out of the conversation just as they have been for centuries.

References

[i] “Recidivism after Release from Prison,” State of Wisconsin: Department of Corrections, accessed 12 October 2020, https://doc.wi.gov/DataResearch/InteractiveDashboards/RecidivismAfterReleaseFromPrison.pdf

[ii] “Felony Disenfranchisement Rates for Women,” The Sentencing Project, accessed 2 November 2020, https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/fvr-women.pdf

[iii] LeFlouria, Talitha, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 8.

[iv] Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 134.

[v] Gross, Kali, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 29.

[vi] Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 92.

[vii ] Chimwaza, Melissa, “On Parchman Prison: Why Reform is Not an Option,” FEM, 3 March 2020, https://femmagazine.com/on-parchman-prison-why-reform-is-not-an-option/.

[viii] Delaney, Ruth, Subramanian, Ram, Shames, Alison and Turner, Nicholas. “ American History, Race, and Prison,” Vera Institute of Justice. Accessed 7 November 2020, https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-web-report/american-history-race-and-prison.

[ix] Ibid.,

[x] Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 4.

[xi] Delaney, Ruth, Subramanian, Ram, Shames, Alison and Turner, Nicholas. “ American History, Race, and Prison,” Vera Institute of Justice. Accessed 7 November 2020, https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-web-report/american-history-race-and-prison.

[xii] LeFlouria, Talitha, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 4.

[xiii] Ibid.,

[xiv] Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 35.

[xv] Ibid., 63.

[xvi] Harris, Adam. “Women in Prison Take Home Economics, While Men Take Carpentry,” The Atlantic, 30 April 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/04/the-continuing-disparity-in-womens-prison-education/559274/.

[xvii] Davis, Angela. “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” History Is A Weapon. Accessed Nov 4, 2020, https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisprison.html.

[ xviii] Couloute, Lucius and Kopf, Daniel. “Out of Prison & Out of Work: Unemployment among formerly incarcerated people,” Prison Policy Initiative, July 2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/outofwork.html.

Excluded: Gender and Jim Crow in The U.S. Criminal Justice System was originally published in Equality Includes You on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is 2018, and a young highly educated woman with an impressive CV is seeking work in London. She is bright, articulate and very keen to work. But her chances of success in job-hunting will surprise you. She has only a 4% chance of gaining employment and any job she does find is likely to place her well below the poverty line. [1] Why? Because she has a criminal record. If she were a man, and a white middle-class man at that, her chances would be much higher, at around 40%. She would be far more likely to gain financial stability for herself and any children she might have, be at far less risk of reoffending or becoming a victim of abuse, and far more valuable to the UK economy as she progressed in her career, paid into the tax system and ceased to contribute to the significant costs of the criminal justice system.

The woman in question defied the odds and gained employment soon after her release from prison as well as continuing her higher education on a degree course. On reading her subsequent memoir detailing her transition into the workplace, the governor of the prison she spent the majority of her sentence at declared ‘if true’, at once dismissing the idea that she could possibly have made a success of herself following incarceration. Who was this woman? It was me.

Society has always had a low opinion of women who offend. The incredulity of the prison governor is an example of a widely held attitude and one that is hardly surprising given that conversations concerning the impact of the criminal justice system on society have tended to focus on men. The experiences of women who offend have traditionally been ‘under-researched’ in part due to their smaller numbers, which has resulted in these women being ‘far from understood.’ [2] Most women caught up in the criminal justice system are wrongly stereotyped as drug users, sex workers, poor single mothers or uneducated women of colour, all of whom are assumed to suffer from an underlying mental health disorder that necessitates their removal from the labour market and mainstream society.

The time I spent in prison and in the community where I was placed temporarily under the supervision of the criminal justice system, I was discouraged on multiple occasions from returning to higher education and advised only to apply for jobs that I was overqualified for such as cleaning or temp work, even though I would have placed myself in a financially vulnerable position. On two separate occasions I was even threatened by my probation officer with being recalled (returned to prison) for attempting to reschedule the time of our probation session so that it would not conflict with my university lectures. These meetings often consisted of my probation officer quizzing me as to when I would be having children, as most people who work in the justice system are conditioned to expect women who offend to have children extremely early even if they are without a career. My experiences were far from unique but unlike a lot of women in my position I resisted having my life chances suppressed, an attitude that made it possible for me to find a good job soon after I left prison, which enabled me turn my life around. Most women are not so lucky. Education shapes outcomes and if you are uneducated prior to coming into contact with the criminal justice system you are unlikely to become educated by the time you’ve served your sentence as the criminal justice system is designed to magnify every existing inequality in our society, from gender and education inequality, to institutional racism and poverty. Most women caught up in the criminal justice system live at the intersection of all of these challenges, however on release they are still three times more likely than men to have poorer employment outcomes, even though on average women serve shorter sentences, often for non-violent offences, and only 8% of women who leave prison will re-enter the labour market in their lifetime.

Today it is recognised that women should have equal access to education, employment and housing in order to benefit global society. However, in the UK pervasive gender inequality still exists, affecting white working-class and ethnic-minority women disproportionately. These women are excluded from the formal economy, despite being of prime working age. When these vulnerable women find themselves within the criminal justice system, they and their children then become further entrenched in a cycle of intergenerational poverty and reoffending. 93.3% of these women are actively looking for work however 75% of employers have admitted to legally discriminating against them. Today, these women’s rate of unemployment is 43.6% for black women and 23.2% for white women in comparison to 35.2% of black men and 18.4% for white men in similar circumstances. For those that are fortunate to secure employment they will see the gender pay gap increase from 17.3% to 33.2%. Their exclusion from the economy leaves these women vulnerable not only to economic dependency but also gender-based abuse. Yet research has shown that globally, domestic and intimate partner violence entails much higher economic costs than homicides or civil wars.

Many of these women have also lost their right to vote, the majority of them are statistically more likely to head single-parent households, with nearly half of these households living in poverty, and their status as ‘women who offend’ means that they and their potential contributions to the economy are deemed to be of little or no value. This is despite 9% of female adults aged under 53 in the UK holding a criminal record against a backdrop of the multi-billion-pound cost to the economy in terms of criminal justice.

Misogycon is based on research that I conducted during my undergraduate degree, which was in part funded by the Arts Council England. By citing examples from the world’s biggest economies such as the UK, that houses the largest female prison in Europe, and the US, that holds the world’s record for the highest female incarceration rate, I explore the misogyny aimed at women in the criminal justice system, that I’ve termed misogycon. Misogycon reinforces entrenched gender norms about women being victims that has led to their exclusion from the economy. Their exclusion is proving to be a major cause of socioeconomic instability translating into increased rates of reoffending, long-term unemployment, illness, disability, gender-based abuse and early death. (Research shows that violence against women is highest in asymmetrical households where women are either estranged from the labour market or financially vulnerable.)

The book will provide a brief historical overview of the earliest prisons where women were said to wash, cook and clean, mostly for the male staff or in some cases, male inmates. This highlights how little the situation has changed since then. Our gendered criminal justice system has allowed an inaccurate narrative of female offenders to emerge that shapes the education and employment opportunities these women are provided with both in prison and the community that forces them into tired gender roles and renders them undesirable in the labour market, confining them to the informal economy that is characterised by low pay, casual hours and a largely unskilled female workforce.

Misogycon takes on renewed significance in the aftermath of the global Black Lives Matter protests that have stressed the importance of the need for diversity in all levels of society. In response to these protests, chief executives have begun prioritising diversity and inclusion over shareholder value, with 67% of senior business leaders claiming that they are actively looking to hire candidates from more diverse backgrounds, even those candidates who have lower educational attainment. However, it is notable that none of these discussions have focused on women who offend — the forgotten female underclass even though 71% of business leaders claim that achieving gender parity within their organisation is a top priority. COVID-19 has impacted disproportionately on the lowest paid and lowest skilled members in our society, with former female offenders being the worst hit, even though the increase in available workers in the labour market is not increasing the range of skills that businesses need to help them to respond and recover from this crisis. While businesses have expressed a willingness to retrain/reskill candidates to bridge skills gap challenges, 65% of emerging roles across industries such as STEM and financial services are still being taken up by men. Achieving gender parity is notoriously difficult given that female offenders across the world are locked out of mainstream education because of discrimination, while the education provided in women’s prisons ties them permanently to unskilled labour, that has resulted in these women’s looser attachment to the economy. A gender gap still exists in the vast majority of companies even though closing the gender gap would add $28 trillion to the global economy, demonstrating that when women from all backgrounds are empowered, this has a direct bearing on the prosperity of companies and societies.

The evidence is resounding that employing former female offenders leads to economic growth and lower levels of gender-based violence and child poverty. It can also promote social justice, gender parity and racial equality. The question now is whether we can afford not to invest in female offenders. In our current socioeconomic climate, investing in women who offend can be a difficult decision for governments to make due to anti-offender rhetoric and a sceptical public. However, creating a shared future is impossible unless every member of society is made to feel included. For women who offend to be represented across the whole of the economy we need to change the narrative on female offenders that affects the opportunities they are provided with.

The book will look at the legal and practical barriers in place that prevent employers from recruiting more women with a criminal past, such as the criminal records regime that sets out how long an offender must wait after a caution, conviction or prison sentence is spent and no longer needs to be disclosed on a job application. For example, someone who is handed down a custodial/non-custodial sentence of less than four years must wait an additional seven years once their sentence expires for their criminal record to become spent, and until that time they can be legally discriminated against not just in employment, but also in the areas of housing and education. The criminal record regime impacts on women disproportionately, as they are 21% more likely than men to work in health and social care and 14% and 12% more likely to work in either the wholesale and retail trade and education, with these sectors all being subject to an enhanced disclosure. I will explore what measures businesses are or should be taking to train their staff concerning unconscious/conscious bias against women who offend and what schools, social workers and prison caseworkers could be doing to change the narrative and prevent young women from falling into an unhappy trajectory.

There is a widespread belief that female offenders’ monthly cycles have an adverse effect on their moods/emotions therefore making them unsuitable for studying more robust subjects, a mindset that is not even tolerated in most schools and workplaces. However, the assumption that women have gendered pathways into crime, ignoring the millions of women who offend for economic reasons, means the criminal justice system has adopted a ‘woman-centred approach’ to education and employment in order to provide women with gendered pathways out of crime. However, these pathways restrict female offenders to participating in artistic activities or a basic curriculum even though British society has moved to a knowledge-based economy and jobs requiring unskilled workers are gradually being phased out.

In terms of the solutions, the book will lay out strategies for change within the criminal justice system, that will include a shift in how we perceive women who offend, and a change in the leniency afforded to women to align with that of men, that appears to put men off claiming the ‘victim’ status. I will advocate showing prison management, regulators and governments the benefits of not suppressing women, but creating a ‘prison to future skills pathway’, that will involve providing women in prison and the community with the skills/training needed to apply for jobs in the high-growth sectors of the future such as STEM in order to build gender parity. We must also consider adopting a clean slate policy that will enable offenders to have their criminal records sealed from employers and removed from online sources once they’ve paid their debt to society and a judge is convinced they are rehabilitated.

The book will also address white privilege and the invisible war on society’s most vulnerable women to discuss how and why the criminal justice system penalises white working-class women and black, indigenous, women of colour in order to place them at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy. Moreover, I will explore the betrayal of female offenders by the second-wave feminist movement. By reinforcing stereotypes, the movement has in fact helped to cement the unique gender inequality experienced by non-white middle-class women that in some circumstances has led to the practice of ‘paying for the privilege of learning’ whereby female inmates have their pay docked if they exceed their assigned education hours. The book will also provide an international snapshot of the criminal justice system to demonstrate how misogycon affects women who offend all over the world.

Furthermore, the book will examine the high proportion of women with convictions in the part-time labour market and suggest that the inequalities we observe in this sphere are the result of their criminalisation. These same women are also at increased risk during economic crises. The book will draw on interviews with women impacted by the criminal justice system and the lessons learned from it, such as how these women defied the odds to become successful and launch their own businesses and what structural changes are needed to ensure more women can do the same.

At first glance the statistics would seem to support the narrative that women who offend are unsuitable for the labour market. The majority of women in prison claim to be victims of sexual abuse or mental health sufferers and very few secure employment on release. The situation is hardly much better for the 291,357 women who are given sentences to serve in the community each year, who are more likely than men to claim out-of-work benefits two years after their conviction. The unemployment rate for Black and Asian offenders two years after a caution, conviction or release from prison stands at 40% and 28%. The female reconviction rate is also worryingly high, standing at 58%, rising to over 70% for those given a sentence of less than twelve months to serve. It is no surprise that efforts to solve Britain’s offender crisis have repeatedly focused on men even though female offenders have the worst economic and social outcomes and the number of female convictions has continued to rise, a trend that has been consistent for the past decade.

In some ways the fate of women directly affected by the criminal justice system is pre-determined from the moment they are prosecuted. The criminal justice system is based on nineteenth century notions of criminality that held women who offend are not responsible for their behaviour as they lack agency, rewards women who claim ‘victimhood’ with leniency, and punishes women who fail to conform with harsher sentences. This practice has had the effect of placing female offenders into two distinct groups: those who claim to suffer from drug or alcohol addiction and those with deep-seated trauma that prevents them from ever being able to regain ‘control of their lives’. Both groups are permanently locked out of society once their sentences expire. This practice could also account for the discrepancy in the rate of mental health disorders between women in prison, of whom 70% claim to suffer from two or more mental health disorders in comparison to 19% of women in the general population, which may indicate the practice of exaggeration. While I am not suggesting that every female offender who claims ‘victimhood’ is lying, from my own personal experience very few adhered to the stereotype whereby their offending could be attributed to tragic personal circumstances. For example, I encountered many female offenders who had achieved a high level of education and had worked prior to their incarceration but admitted that their offending was due to economic factors such as low pay and poor career progression.

It is significant that in the UK where millions of women are trapped in low-paid employment, 28% of crimes committed by female offenders are financially motivated. Moreover, research on mothers in custody found that 38% attributed their reoffending to a need to support their children, suggesting that the trend in female reoffending could be reversed if women were provided with the necessary skills that would enable them to move into high-skilled and higher paid employment.

However, the criminal justice system’s treatment of women and the way in which some female offenders embrace the stereotypes for their own ends has had the effect of maintaining the current gendered status quo and dampening female offenders’ aspirations. For example, while male offenders are equally demonised in society they are still perceived as being of value to the economy perhaps because men who choose to claim ‘victimhood’ are less likely to be rewarded with leniency. In contrast, female offenders’ portrayal as tragic victims means that their potential contributions to the labour market are easily dismissed.

Employment has been proven to significantly reduce the odds of reoffending. Male prisoners are provided with learning opportunities such as radio production, coding and even access to degree-level courses, opportunities that can lead to viable routes of employment and have seen male prisoners more likely to have a job to go to on release. In contrast, in the UK, where prison officers in women’s adult and Youth Offender Institutions are overwhelmingly female, standing at 62.6% as of September 2019, this has not shielded female prison establishments from accusations that they are the harsh matriarch doing the patriarchy’s bidding. [3] Women’s prisons have never met ‘the need or demand for vocational and educational programme opportunities’ and this gender gap in access to education means that women who push to pursue a degree whilst incarcerated often end up failing. [4] Of the 388 women in prison who undertook a distance-learning degree from 2013 to 2018, 0% graduated with a good degree rate from 2013 to 2016 and in 2018. [5]

Moreover, the belief that all women who offend have been victims of male violence has led to the consensus that they can only thrive in female-concentrated occupations such as beauty and cleaning, even though these sectors are low-paid and insecure and it’s now widely accepted that supporting women to find jobs that pay above the poverty line is crucial for those whose offending is driven by abusive relationships/economic inequality. Across the world female offenders who are given the chance to re-enter the labour market are often pushed into undertaking unskilled or low-skilled jobs in sectors associated with low pay, casual hours and a high female workforce known as the five C’s: caring, cashiering, catering, cleaning and clerical work. The same jobs that are at the highest risk of being automated, creating a situation whereby these women’s eventual removal from the economy is all but assured. Furthermore, although all offenders face a prison penalty in employment, women tend to be more affected by their status as ‘women who offend’. The gap in the rate of unemployment between former female offenders and women with no criminal convictions is stark. The black former female offender unemployment rate is 43.6% compared to 6.4% of black women who have no criminal convictions, while for white female offenders it is 23.2% to 4.3%. In comparison, the black former male offender unemployment rate is 35.2% to 7.7%, while for white male offenders it is 18.4% to 4.3%. One reason why women fare so poorly is that the majority are convicted for theft or fraud offences, meaning they’re often seen by prospective employers as being ‘unsuitable for work handling property’, excluding them from a wide range of occupations/sectors. Moreover, the assumption that women who offend are products of chaotic lifestyles stemming from abuse and trauma diminishes further their employability attractiveness, and those women who are fortunate to find employment can typically expect to earn 40% less pay annually in comparison to non-offenders.

The data shows that when prospective job applicants have a criminal record, race and gender play a significant role in deciding who gets access to good jobs and liveable incomes. Black, indigenous, women of colour tend to fare worse in terms of the prison penalty as they are more likely to land insecure and low-paying jobs regardless of previous qualifications, which puts them well below the poverty line, even though black offenders tend to be more highly qualified than their white counterparts. A similar problem exists for women given sentences to serve in the community who are obligated to attend regular appointments with their assigned probation officer.

So much attention has been placed on the impact of the criminal justice system on men, that we have rarely considered how and why the criminal justice system penalises working-class and ethnic minority women.[6] It wasn’t that long ago that Black and Asian men and women were excluded from most types of employment in Britain, having been recruited to work only in particular industries such as the health service — in posts that were low paid and had little or no career prospects. Even in the US when organisations such as the Henry J Kaiser Company exhausted its pool of white male workers after WW2, they turned first to white women, and only then to men of colour before finally admitting some ethnic-minority women into their workforce as a last resort.[7]

Although race relations in Britain have come a long way since then, have we really changed our habits of creating a culture that places working-class and black, indigenous, women of colour at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy?

The UK has the most privatised prison system in Europe, with the privately run HMP Bronzefield currently the country’s largest women’s prison. The UK also happens to have one of the worst socioeconomic outcomes for female prison leavers, leading to sharp critiques of the Prison Industrial Complex. The term is used to describe the overlapping interests of government and the industries that use policing and imprisonment as solutions to social problems. Advocates of prison abolition have often said that ‘if you’re in the prison business… you don’t want reform.’[8] Some female offenders have noted that ‘the funny thing is that with all those education classes… they decide what they think is good for us… not once did they ever ask us.’

The marginalisation of female offenders is not just a UK problem, but a global one affecting developing nations and the top-performing economies such as Australia, India and Japan. The US, for example, has the highest female conviction rate in the world, with roughly 213,000 women incarcerated in jails while a further 1.2 million women are under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Gender parity has now begun to stall. Most affected women have committed minor drug offences or crimes of poverty/survival that can include cheque forgery and/or minor embezzlement. In 2004, 90% of the female prison population reported annual incomes of less than $10K and most had not completed high school, drawing parallels to the situation in the UK.[9] The criminalisation of young girls in the US has also continued to rise, with African American and Native American girls being more likely to be incarcerated for low level offences such as truancy or for running away, affecting their ability to participate in the labour market as they grow older. This mirrors the UK, where girls from all backgrounds will find that their criminal records along with reduced educational opportunities will hold them back in key periods in their working lives.

The American criminal justice system shares other patterns too. Most women who offend fall within the 25–44 age band, however, the unemployment rate for ex-offenders stands at 27.3% compared to 5.2% for non-offenders, higher than the total US unemployment rate during the Great Depression, with Black and Hispanic women bearing the full brunt of their ‘formerly incarcerated’ status. The Second-wave feminism movement may have begun in the US but ‘women in correctional institutions are not provided comparable services, educational programs, or facilities as male prisoners’.[10] This may account for why women are the fastest growing segment in the prison population, having grown by 834% over the last 40 years, and why 66% of women released from American jails are re-arrested within three years. In Texas, for example, there are 21 job-certification programmes available for male offenders that include construction, carpentry, technology and advanced industrial design. For women there exist only two programmes: office administration and culinary arts, sectors that are again associated with low pay and poor career progression.

The second-wave feminist movement paved the way for the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 in the UK, yet it helped to strengthen most female offenders’ marginalisation. Most organisations that assist female offenders to look for work are run by female empowerment groups, who have brought in the criminal justice system’s narrative of gender difference that presents women who offend as primarily troubled, unskilled and frightened of men.

The second-wave movement has also been criticised in the past for treating female offenders as one homogenous group and thereby stereotyping them. On some levels, feminism has continued to mirror ‘the racial apartheid social structure’ that characterised nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British society, meaning they are not concerned with seeking social equality for all women, but rather maintaining social equality for white middle-class women only and consigning less ‘deserving’ women to subordinate socioeconomic positions, locking these women into lives of crime and poverty.

Any society that creates discriminatory practices that essentially bar women’s entry to the labour market loses. From October to December 2019, the female employment rate in Britain was 72.4%, the highest since comparable records began in 1971, although it still lags behind men at 80.6%. However, 40% of women in employment were working part-time compared to 13% of men, even though black female workers were most likely to express a preference for full-time work.

Research indicates that women who work part-time in less qualified roles do not always do so because they have caring responsibilities. In fact, 44% of women in part-time work do not have any dependants. Ethnic minority women tend to be concentrated in part-time work and there has been a pattern of them being placed in jobs that they are overqualified for, with Black and Asian women taking jobs well below their qualification level. The overrepresentation of women of colour and working-class women among those who have been convicted or sentenced to prison could be influencing the inequalities we observe in the workplace although very few have put this forward as a reason to explain women’s employment patterns or the ethnic minority gap, with the number of ethnic minorities in employment standing at 62.8% compared to 75.6% of white people. This intersection of crime, race and gender in the workplace could explain why these two groups of women, working-class and ethnic minority women, are less likely to participate in and progress through the workplace as people in part-time work have the shortest employment histories, even though in the case of ethnic minorities they have qualifications that are on par or even superior to their white counterparts as employers may be more willing to stereotype them into doing the sort of jobs they think they should be doing.

However, if we accept the argument that a significant segment of ethnic minority women in part-time work have criminal records then empowering them to participate fully in the labour market makes sense as it has been estimated that if ethnic minorities were to be represented across the whole of the labour market it would benefit the UK economy by £24bn annually. Managing consultant firm McKinsey identified in 2015 that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians, while those that embraced gender diversity were 21% more likely to experience above-average profitability. This is particularly significant as the working age population coming from an ethnic background is expected to rise from 14% to 21% by 2051, with black women being particularly prevalent. By removing barriers from entry to board level we can create a more gender diverse workforce rather than one that maintains the status quo and pushes millions of women from underrepresented backgrounds onto the margins of society.

Recognising the marginalisation of female offenders is just one step in the process towards empowering women economically. In order to remove the obstacles that prevent their participation in the labour market we need to change the way we treat women who offend who are often encouraged to play to type that encourages those in authority to create policies that eschew female training/education programs that holds many women who offend back.

References

[1] All statistics given are accurate at the time of writing and taken from reputable sources.

[2] Martin MacEwen, Housing, Race and Law: The British Experience, (London: Routledge, 1990), 18.

[3] Ministry of Justice, Freedom of Information request (FOI), 200102002, 23 January 2020.

[4] “The Gender Divide: Tracking Women’s State Prison Growth” Prison Policy Initiative, last modified January 9,2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.html.

[5] The Open University, FOI, 28 May 2019.

[6] Ava DuVernay, “13th” October 2016, Netflix video, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80091741?tctx=0%2C0%2C%2C%2C%2C.

[7] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, (USA: Liveright, 2018), 159.

[8] Ava DuVernay. (2016), op.cit.,

[9] Ayelet Waldman et al, Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons, (London: Verso, 2017), 50.

[10] Adam Harris, “Women in Prison Take Home Economics, While Men Take Carpentry,” The Atlantic, last modified April 30, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/04/the-continuing-disparity-in-womens-prison-education/559274/.

Shortlisted for the National Press Awards (Reporting Diversity category) and the Amnesty Media Awards (Features category).

Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils

Halfway into a two-year prison sentence in Europe’s largest women’s prison, Her Majesty’s Prison Bronzefield, an officer approached me and asked me out of nowhere, ‘What’s three to the power of four?’ His face fell when I quickly answered, ‘81.’ ‘You know your maths,’ he said grudgingly before walking off. I soon learned that he enjoyed randomly quizzing the women in his care on their maths skills to try to prove to himself that he was cleverer than us by virtue of his non-prisoner status. He didn’t have much success.

When we think about female prisoners we usually tend to stereotype them as sex workers, drug users or uneducated women of colour. These labels make it easy for these women to be overlooked or patronised when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, especially if their offending behaviour is attributed to mental illness or a chaotic upbringing. Although women from disadvantaged or BAME backgrounds are disproportionately incarcerated, from my experience very few conformed to the perception that society has of women who offend. For example, incarcerated black people are, on average, better qualified than their white counterparts. However, because there is scant learning provision beyond National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) — and even then there is huge variation in the number of NVQs provided by any one prison — those with qualifications beyond this level struggle to access relevant courses.

Despite the negative perception of women in prison, when I was first remanded to HMP Bronzefield I was under the mistaken impression that I would receive fair treatment because I didn’t conform to the stereotype. Apart from coming from a BAME background I did not have any of the characteristics people associate with women in prison. I’ve never smoked a cigarette, let alone taken drugs, nor had I been pressured into committing crime by an abusive partner. Like most of the women I befriended on the wings, I was highly educated and had a solid work history. However, it was eye-opening to be met with scorn whenever we objected to being signed up for basic literacy classes. We didn’t realise that in prison, particularly in women’s prisons, there exists a glass ceiling that prevents the majority of us from studying courses that go beyond entry-level, making progression to higher education or skilled employment on release difficult.

I found that prison staff enjoyed looking down on all their charges, turning their noses up at the women unable or unwilling to break out of the cycle of re-incarceration. However, they reserved a special kind of contempt for women who didn’t quite fit the mould they expected of us. Perhaps they resented our privilege or thought we were less worthy of respect since they felt we were more deserving of our punishment. The modern, western criminal justice system, which originated in the 19th century, is predicated on gendered, Victorian-era notions of criminality, according to which women cannot be held responsible for the crimes they commit and must always be victims of circumstance. To this day, women who are perceived as victims lacking agency are treated more leniently than women who come across as forthright and assertive.

Like most people facing a custodial sentence I knew that if I wanted to do as little time as possible, I had to play the game and that meant presenting myself as a victim. While not every woman in prison who makes a claim for victimhood is lying, most of us were aware of the penalty that failing to claim victimhood would have on us when it came to sentencing. As I saw it I had two choices: either pretend to be ‘mad’, because unlike men, the judiciary still assumes that women who have committed a crime must have a mental illness, or else pretend to be ‘sad’, meaning your criminality gets blamed on abuse and unearthed trauma.

I chose to feign a mental illness and a few weeks before my sentence hearing I was seen by a defence-appointed forensic psychiatrist. The assessment lasted less than 45 minutes and very little time was spent on me talking about my mental health. Instead, the psychiatrist seemed fixated on finding out how I afforded my public school education. When the officer knocked on the door to remind us that we had fifteen minutes remaining he ran through a checklist of questions about which he performed very little analysis: questions like ‘Do you self-harm?’ and ‘Are you normally an impulsive sort of person?’ He diagnosed me with depression and a personality disorder: the same diagnosis shared by many of the women on my wing, most of whom admitted to playing the so-called ‘mad game’. Ironically, at HMP Bronzefield pretending to be ‘mad’ carried more honour than being genuinely ill, at least among some of the women on the wings. Women in prison who have mental health disorders such as depression or schizophrenia, or who are identified as being at risk of committing suicide are often criticised by both other women prisoners and prison staff for being weak. There have even been instances of vulnerable women being goaded by other prisoners to self-harm. At present, 70% of women in prison claim to suffer from two or more mental health disorders in comparison to 19% of women in the general population. The discrepancy in the rate of mental health disorder diagnosis between women in prison and the population at large may indicate the practice of exaggeration. though it also reflects the impact of life in prison on mental health, as well as the practice of incarcerating people with mental health issues as a result of a lack of mental health services.

You might wonder why you should care how women in prison are stereotyped. I admit that when I pretended to be ‘mad’, I hadn’t cared much either. However, once I was sentenced and began to make plans for the future: plans that included returning to university, finding a job and a permanent home (my relocation to mainland Europe having been put on a permanent hiatus), I discovered how the multiple dimensions of oppression (such as those based on gender, race, class, nationality and disability) often work in unison to keep women in prison in their place — that is, permanently shut off from mainstream society.

Not only does our gendered criminal justice system encourage female defendants to act in a particular way to receive leniency, it also has the effect of maintaining the current gendered status quo. In the 2006 Corston Report, a review of women in prison with particular vulnerabilities, the women interviewed, despite being acknowledged as ‘individuals’, came to symbolise all women caught up in the criminal justice system. They were all branded as drug and alcohol addicts and described as trauma-afflicted women ‘not in control of their lives.’ This perception reflects and reinforces the government’s overall approach to women who offend, which I have termed ‘misogycon’: a form of misogyny towards female offenders that reinforces entrenched gender norms about women being victims and pushes women into chronic underachievement.

Many of us soon discovered that the show of learned helplessness that we adopted exclusively for our trials became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the courts branded us ‘convicts’ it felt impossible to be treated as anything more than passive women, incapable of making decisions concerning the type of education or employment for which we believed ourselves suitable, or of making our own arrangements for accommodation post-release.

Nowhere is this systemic gender bias more felt than in the area of education. Men in prison are encouraged to pursue a degree or learn coding, courses that can lead to employment. In contrast, the widespread assumption that almost all women in prison have been victims of violence at the hands of men means we’re pushed to work in female dominated sectors, such as in cleaning or beauty. Jobs in these industries, however, tend to be poorly paid and insecure.

The gender gap in access to education also means women who request to study for a degree are often made to wait until they lose all hope. One woman I met inside was still nowhere close to starting a Business degree via the Open University despite being halfway through an eight-year sentence. For those who persist, their progress is hindered by a number of obstacles such as difficulty in accessing the library or a computer. While these obstacles are faced by men too, they at least are not told that ‘they are governed by hormones and a monthly cycle, which affects their moods and emotions’, as the Corston Report states. An excuse used by prison staff to explain why women in prison are unsuited to studying certain subjects. It’s no surprise that academic achievement in women’s prisons is particularly low. According to the Open University’s response to my Freedom of Information Act request, between 2013 and 2018, 388 women in prison studied for a degree via the Open University, however only 9% of them graduated with a 2:1 or higher. Despite significant barriers to learning in women’s prisons, poor academic performance is used as evidence of their unsuitability to study anything that isn’t associated with unskilled or semi-skilled employment.

These barriers are not just felt by women whilst they are in prison, but also post-release including those women given sentences to serve exclusively in the community, the majority of whom are obligated to report to probation on a regular basis. Shortly after I left prison, I enrolled at a Russell Group university. Although education has been proven to significantly reduce rates of reoffending, my probation officer repeatedly scheduled our appointments at the same time as my lectures, which meant that on one occasion I received an ‘unacceptable miss’ when I arrived late to my probation appointment (more than three can result in a person’s recall back to prison). My probation officer refused my requests to move our appointments and to make sure I realised just how fair she was being with me, told me that members of her team had been urging her to recall me (that is, return me to prison until the end of my sentence) as, in their opinion, I was demonstrating the wrong attitude.

In some ways, getting caught up in the criminal justice system was like a throwback to the underperforming state school I attended before I transferred to public school, hence the frequent comparisons drawn between schools and prisons. It was the familiar strain I and other girls in my class felt having to suppress our resentment as we clapped for the boys being handed out opportunities like mentorships with industry professionals and classes in ‘hard’ languages. The teachers justified their preferential treatment by claiming that working-class boys needed role models and extra attention. Meanwhile, as girls from low-income families it felt as though we’d already been written off. If we weren’t pregnant now then we soon would be, so why waste everybody’s time?

In prison, and across the criminal justice system at large, the same mentality exists. Women in prison are not expected to achieve great things no matter how many confidence-building exercises prisons put on encouraging us to feel ‘empowered’. This gender bias produces unequal outcomes and shapes women’s lives long after they have left prison, despite the fact that 28% of crimes committed by women are financially motivated compared to 20% of those committed by men. In 2017, approximately 297,304 women were convicted of an offence, the majority of whom fell within the 20 to 45 age band. Although only 2% were sent to prison, female prisoners were less likely than men to have a job to go to on release, 8.5% compared to 26.2% of men, even though women serve shorter sentences. In fact, only 8% of women who leave prison manage to re-enter the labour market in their lifetime.

Women are also more likely to claim out-of-work benefits two years after their prison or community sentence as they struggle more than men to find employment. This is at least partially explained by the fact that the most common sectors for women to work in are in health and social care, the wholesale and retail trade, and education — sectors that are subject to an enhanced DBS check. However, gender and race-based stigma towards female offenders also plays a part and for those women who are fortunate to find employment once their sentences expire, they will see the gender pay gap widen from 17.3% to 33.2%. The prison penalty and glass ceiling in education and employment affects women disproportionately, contributing towards their growing exclusion from the economy at a time when the number of convictions of women has risen. Furthermore, the frequent denial of social and economic opportunities needed to allow women to flourish outside of prison and achieve financial independence also serves to maintain men’s historic power over women, which makes it far easier for women to fall back into a life of crime than to become self-sufficient.

However, if women’s prisons are as diverse as I say, made up of smart individuals who are shrewd enough to conform to trick the system so that the courts might treat them more leniently, why is it that 58% of women who leave prison are reconvicted within a year? Part of this has to do with the nature of prison itself that robs many women of their agency. In prison you are not allowed to do anything for yourself. Even something as simple as topping up your canteen account with your own credit card, applying for a course or paying a utility bill to ensure that you don’t fall into arrears must be done through a third party — assuming that you have someone on the outside who is prepared to do it. I can still remember the mouth of a senior officer dropping open when I asked for the number of my bank so that I could cancel a few direct debits. ‘You have bills?’ she asked, looking at me incredulously. At that point I decided to wait until I had enough telephone credit to call my friend so that she could provide me with the number herself.

Sadly, many of the women in prison who at first came across as extremely independent soon adopted the attitude that as they’re not allowed to do things for themselves, they should stop trying. It’s easy to become complacent when the message given by prisons is that they can help women overcome numerous challenges, from finding accommodation to securing employment and are advised that all they must do is be patient. However, such support is rarely forthcoming and, in the past, HMP Bronzefield has been criticised for releasing women homeless and providing them with sleeping bags in lieu of safe accommodation. In my case, I was told by my prison caseworker a day before my release that I would be released homeless, an outcome that was by no means unusual. Fortunately, I had already anticipated this and had made other plans that included writing letters to local councils to enquire about their accommodation provision for prison leavers. However, for those women who trust in the system it’s far easier to fall through the cracks once they realise a little too late that there is no such thing as a prison safety net.

Once you’ve been stripped of your personal agency, you’re made to realise what the criminal justice system means by a ‘reformed woman offender’. It is not a woman who believes her past does not define her future. Instead women are being conditioned to think that being ‘reformed’ goes hand in hand with knowing when to keep your mouth shut and accepting that you’re there to be exploited. This form of exploitation comes in two forms, the exploitation of female prison labour that has seen external employers such as the London College of Fashion employ women in prison to work on commercial orders, making garments for brands such as Anya Hindmarch, Fara Enterprises and Luna & Curious for less than £3 a day, which I learned as part of a Freedom of Information Request (FOI90701) to the University of the Arts London in July 2019. However, very few of these women are able to secure jobs in the fashion industry on release.

The second form of exploitation is sexual. Between 2002 and 2014, 11% of women reported sexual assault in prison, despite women making up only 5% of the prison population. In women’s prisons relationships between prisoners and officers are commonplace and it’s not unusual to hear of officers targeting women on release. For example, one friend I met inside informed me that an officer had tracked her down via social media soon after she was released in order to ‘check in’ on her.

If a woman is sexually assaulted in prison, she has no automatic right to speak to a police officer and is unable to telephone the police using the prison phone because 999 is blocked by security. Instead, the procedure you are supposed to follow if you wish to report a crime is to first disclose it to your wing officer or the head of security. If your allegations are taken seriously you are then referred to the police liaison officer. However, access to the police liaison officer is difficult and their co-operation cannot be guaranteed as they’re essentially investigating the conduct of their colleagues. Organisations such as the Independent Monitoring Board, which observes standards in British prisons, have told women directly that they don’t investigate sexual violence, while members of the chaplaincy have been known to close their ears as soon as a woman chooses to confide in them. These behaviours reflect society’s general treatment of women who are sexually assaulted, many of whom go unacknowledged or are dismissed as ‘asking for it.’

The hypersexualisation of women in prison not only makes them targets for officers but also to fellow inmates, who sometimes act as the middle-person by arranging an assignation between an officer and a prisoner in exchange for food or drugs. I witnessed a few women who were serving short sentences either engage in a quid pro quo relationship with an officer or else encouraged their friends to do so in exchange for items that are highly coveted inside prisons but could be purchased for less than £10 on the outside. Some of these women had degrees and established careers on the outside, but the message we were being sold was that a woman with a conviction has no future. This meant that many young women, some as young as eighteen, saw sex work as the only prospect for their future outside prison.

This exploitation even extends to the healthcare with which we’re provided. When I first went to prison I believed it was only the illegal drugs, such as spice that I would have to watch out for. That, thankfully, did not turn out to be an issue at all. However, I hadn’t counted on the conduct of the health care teams in women’s prisons that have become notorious for partaking in the unethical medical prescribing of psychotropic drugs (drugs that affects behaviour, mood, thoughts or perception) used to help people with mental illness, ranging from borderline personality disorder to anxiety and schizophrenia in order to create a ‘quiet prison’. A 2013 study discovered psychotropic prescribing was six times higher among women in prison than women in the general population, and eight times higher than men in prison. In nearly 35% of cases, doctors prescribed these drugs against current guidelines, including prescribing antipsychotic medicines for anger — an emotion that does not always indicate psychosis. The health risks of misprescribing include diabetes, weight gain, stroke, early mortality and addiction.

I wasn’t the only woman who could spot those who were being prescribed with heavy doses, judging by their blank facial expressions and the fact that they seemed to spend the entire day sleeping in their cells, only re-emerging to collect their round of medicine. The presence of such women became so ubiquitous that one woman who came to visit from a charity that supports people who are in or have been to prison joked that they looked like zombies and rolled her eyes all the way up in an attempt to imitate their behaviour. It was obvious to many women in prison that if you didn’t genuinely have mental health issues before you were incarcerated you would by the time you left.

I also suspect that prisons use individual’s prescriptions to discredit them if they complain about conditions there. In my experience it seemed that the health care team and your assigned prison caseworker often worked together to recommend certain drugs in order to address ‘challenging’ behaviour as minor as talking back to an officer or filing a complaint. I found it easy to say no to suggested medication, but it isn’t for everyone, and the practice of advocating for ‘drugs first’ and ‘talking therapies never’ persist even when a woman has left prison.

It’s no surprise that in this pervasive culture of fear, intimidation and low aspiration, there exists an alarming rate of suicide, with those aged twenty-five and under being most at risk. Moreover, although 80% of women are sent to prison for non-violent offences each year, not only have assaults against officers increased, which means that some women’s prisons, such as Cornton Vale in Scotland, are more violent than some men’s prisons, but at HMP Bronzefield in 2015 solitary confinement was used on more than 249 occasions in less than six months.

Prisons are made up of women from all parts of society. However, the treatment of women in prison and society’s reluctance to address the structural barriers that means we’re more likely than men to be pushed into low-skilled jobs or economic dependency is what is trapping so many of us into a vicious cycle of victimisation and criminal activity. The longer society continues to project their prejudices onto women who are in or who have experienced life in prison, the more this dictates our treatment both in prison and the community leading to our growing exclusion from mainstream society.