Paloma Gómez Sánchez
Criminal and penitentiary law lawyer
BA in Law and Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM)
Historically, prison has occupied a marginal position in political agendas and public debate. This marginality becomes even more pronounced in the case of women deprived of liberty. The situation of incarcerated women has remained structurally invisible, rarely addressed by governmental institutions, the legal system, or academic research. Within criminological studies, their experiences have often been sidelined, treated as statistical anomalies or interpreted through androcentric frameworks that fail to recognize the specific features of female punishment. Yet the history of women’s incarceration reveals that it has long functioned as an anomaly within the dominant punitive model — one that clearly exposes how the penal system reproduces and reinforces gender roles and sexist logics in the administration of justice.
Women’s prisons, within the framework of a heteropatriarchal system, have historically been marked by regimes characterized by strict discipline, domesticity, and moralization. These mechanisms aim to punish women for a double transgression: not only the violation of criminal law (criminal deviance), but also the breach of social norms regulating femininity (social deviance).
From a historical perspective, it is noteworthy that the Foucauldian account of punishment —focused on the shift in the eighteenth century from physical punishment to disciplinary surveillance— falls short when applied to the case of women. For them, deprivation of liberty had already been a long-standing practice under the Ancien Régime, and its primary instruments —discipline and control— did not represent a substantial shift. A similar critique applies to the political economy perspective on punishment, which links the emergence of prisons to the rise of capitalist production models, yet again fails to address the specific conditions of female incarceration.
Female imprisonment, in fact, has historically been structured around three fundamental axes:
— First, discipline, understood as the imposition of rigid routines and behavioral control, carefully monitored by authorities historically linked to the Catholic Church. This therefore implied the surveillance of both the soul and the body.
— Second, moralization, clearly tied to the association between crime and sin, in both its religious and socio-sexual dimensions. In this regard, the presence of religious orders in women’s prisons has been a nearly constant feature throughout the history of female incarceration.
— Lastly, the consolidation of the domesticity model that emerged with modernity, which entailed the gendered division of spheres: the public sphere as the domain of waged labor, and the private sphere as the space of family and the home. Both formal and informal mechanisms of control operated—within and beyond prison walls—to reinforce this division.
Although some formal changes have occurred, many of these historical elements persist today. The weight of moralization remains visible through the ongoing presence of religious organizations, rehabilitation activities that reinforce domestic ideals, and a disciplinary regime often harsher than that applied to men, despite the lower levels of violence and disruption in women’s prisons. Moreover, new forms of control—such as medicalization—continue to operate over women’s bodies and behavior through paternalistic and moralizing logics.
The penal system is androcentric. It was built by and for a male, national, and heterosexual subject. Crime itself has been conceptualized with men in mind— viewed as autonomous and fully responsible for their actions—whereas women’s offences have often been interpreted as induced by others or as evidence of personal weakness. This weakness is frequently tied to moralistic-religious conceptions of sin. Thus, the penal subject is predominantly male, and laws, punishments, and penal infrastructures are all designed with this default in mind.
Nonetheless, the presence of women in the penal system, though still marginal, is steadily increasing. In Europe, women make up less than 10% of the prison population. Criminology has long pointed to a “penal paradox” regarding the incarceration of women: international prison statistics show a sustained rise in female imprisonment, despite a lack of evidence that women are committing more or more serious crimes. The “World Female Imprisonment List” reports a roughly 50% global increase in the number of incarcerated women over the past 15 years, with no corresponding rise in the severity of their offences. Since 2000, the female prison population has grown by 53%, compared to 20% for men.
Women’s experiences of incarceration differ from men’s in important ways. Women in prison are more likely to have experienced sexual and psychological abuse, both in childhood and adulthood, as well as gender-based violence. They show higher rates of substance abuse and are disproportionately imprisoned for drug-related offences.
Reports on women’s prisons in the EU highlight systemic disadvantages: poorer and fewer facilities, greater geographic isolation from family networks, fewer opportunities for education and employment, more frequent medicalization, higher levels of anxiety and depression, and significantly lower wages for prison labor. Architectural conditions are often worse, and the small size of women’s units makes it difficult to apply classification systems—such as separating young from adult inmates, remand from sentenced, or first-time from repeat offenders— systems that are prioritized in male prisons.
Paradoxically, despite posing a lower security risk, the proportion of women classified under first-degree (isolation) regimes is similar to that of men. This suggests that criteria for institutional maladaptation are applied more subjectively in women’s cases, often punishing a lack of compliance rather than actual legal infractions.
Another crucial factor is the caregiving role traditionally assigned to women. Incarceration not only disrupts their life trajectories, but has particularly harmful effects on those who depend on them. Imprisonment is experienced not only as spatial confinement but as a rupture in relational and affective ties. The incarceration of a mother has deeper and more damaging effects on children than that of a father, due to the maternal nature of caregiving in most societies.
This partly explains why many women are more likely to accept precarious alternatives to incarceration. Prison disproportionately disrupts already fragile family structures, especially among the large number of young, single mothers who make up the female prison population in Spain.
This dynamic is also relevant in discussions on the link between sex work and crime. In Spain, only 8% of incarcerated women were involved in sex work at the time of arrest. There is no direct correlation between prostitution and criminal behavior; in many cases, sex work serves as a strategy to avoid committing crimes.
It is clear that incarcerated women face a double punishment: the loss of liberty and rights, but also subjection to a penal system designed around male experiences, one that renders female trajectories invisible. In response, various criminological studies have sought to rethink how women are punished, aiming to incorporate a gender perspective into state justice systems.
Some studies have shown that holistic approaches and/or inter-agency intervention programmes—designed to comprehensively address the multiple needs of sentenced women—are significantly more effective in reducing recidivism. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are the so-called “one-stop shop centres” or women’s centres implemented in the United Kingdom. These centres function as safe and supportive spaces for women, where they receive individualised care and their social, emotional, and material needs are addressed in a coordinated manner.
It has been observed, for example, that issues such as housing insecurity or barriers to labour market access are key factors in preventing reoffending among women. Whereas men seem to respond better to interventions focused directly on criminal behaviour, women require support that combines emotional and practical assistance, alongside cognitive-behavioural programmes. Furthermore, it is essential that available services be located geographically close to the women’s home environments, in order to minimise the disruption of their emotional and community ties.
It is also essential that both alternative-to-custody programmes and therapeutic activities offered within prison settings do not reproduce sexist or stereotypical content. It is common for activities aimed at women to focus on domestic tasks, which reinforces their redomestication. In contrast, the most effective programmes are those that facilitate access to paid employment upon release, or promote greater autonomy through training in non-gendered vocations. In this regard, it is crucial to avoid offering only work-related activities that perpetuate traditional gender roles.
Empirical evidence shows that interventions with women are most effective in non-mixed environments. Most incarcerated women have experienced trauma, often perpetrated by men in intimate settings. In early stages, peer support is essential. Women also respond better to supervision by other women, especially when authority figures take a non-disciplinary, respectful approach. Given their past experiences of oppression, building relationships based on mutual respect is crucial. Women tend to learn better in cooperative, non-competitive settings, and authoritarian styles of management can be counterproductive. It is therefore vital that staff working in such spaces receive training in gender-sensitive approaches, equipping them to accompany women from a restorative rather than punitive logic.
The specificities of female incarceration may, paradoxically, serve as an advantage when it comes to implementing alternatives to imprisonment. While such strategies are often seen as utopian within male prisons—where overcrowding and high levels of conflict make them difficult to apply—the context of women’s prisons offers more favourable conditions. The smaller size of the female prison population allows for more individualised attention, and the low incidence of violent incidents or disruptive behaviour reduces the risks associated with more flexible management models.
These differences open the door to the development of more humane prison systems, focused on effective reintegration, even at the cost of partially relaxing the strict security standards that characterise traditional prison regimes. Far from representing a threat, this approach may in fact prove to be the most effective tool for reducing recidivism and mitigating the stigma attached to incarceration.
In this sense, rethinking female punishment is not only a step toward improving the living conditions of incarcerated women—it can also serve as a starting point for challenging the punitive system as a whole. Transforming the way we punish women may lead us towards a deeper redefinition of our notions of punishment, justice, and social reintegration.