Abstract

CARLEN, Pat. The imprisonment of women and the reintegration industry . Anál. Social [online]. 2007, n.185, pp.1005-1019. ISSN 0003-2573.

This article addresses cultural and economic policies regarding the imprisonment of women and the reintegration industry, plus the discourse of rehabilitation in prison on which that industry is currently based. The writer uses four main arguments: (i) one of the main, but little explored, causes for the rapid growth in the female prison population is the exponential increase in the international reintegration industry; (ii) in spite of today's rhetoric of reintegration, the essence of prison is its logic of incarceration, which inevitably corrupts all efforts at prison reform; (iii) one of the reasons for the rapid growth in the female prison population is the underlying belief that prison today is a multifunctional instrument of social engineering which serves not only as punishment, but also as a means to make the causes of crime disappear; (iv) given that there are logical, sociological, ideological, political and cultural reasons for why the idea of social reintegration through prison is an impossibility, we should challenge the contradictory statements which consistently see a punishment role as well as a rehabilitation role for prison.

Keywords : prison; women; reintegration; rehabilitation.

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