Gaining access to a number of penal colonies to interview prisoners, the authors show that much in the Russian prison system today is a direct inheritance from the Soviet period with the result that, despite wide-ranging the reforms since 1991, the Russian penal experience for women is still uniquely painful.

This edited book ​explores new and enduring themes in the gendered experience of incarceration across the world. Capturing global debates and research on women’s treatment, their coping and resistances in penal settings, the collection promotes a feminist agenda that is attuned to the inherently patriarchal and intersectionally oppressive structures of contemporary punishment. It seeks to map policies and campaigns around women’s criminalisation across the world and offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of women’s imprisonment experiences across the Global North and Global South. Each chapter focusses on a different geographic context and theme and aims to provide the intellectual groundwork for a critical, world-wide movement advocating for women’s decarceration. As a whole, the collection offers a robust empirical understanding of women’s punishment in non-western, Global South contexts and also revisits ongoing debates in feminist accounts of punishment in the Global North. In doing so, the collection examines hierarchical geopolitical relations between privileged and underprivileged nations, reflecting global inequalities and structural violence rooted in legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Overall, the edited collection shows how centering women’s peripheralized experiences can radically reshape our understanding of punishment and offers a new intellectual, methodological, and political means through which to think about gendered identity and imprisonment in the 21st Century.

Interrogating conceptual ideas around power, punishment and abandonment with specific reference to the experience of young women, this book examines the particular challenges that young women face within the criminal justice system, and traces their journeys in, out and beyond confinement.

A spatial view of punishment -- The urban model -- Small cities and mass incarceration -- Social services beyond the city : isolation and regional inequity -- Race and communities of pervasive incarceration -- Punishing places -- Beyond punishing places : a research and reform agenda -- Appendix : data and methodology.

Interrogating conceptual ideas around power, punishment and abandonment with specific reference to the experience of young women, this book examines the particular challenges that young women face within the criminal justice system, and traces their journeys in, out and beyond confinement.

Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, fourteen women have been put to death in the United States. The criminal justice system defines crimes committed by women in a particularly gendered context. Wretched Sisters is unique in its analysis of the legal and cultural circumstances that determine why a small number of women are sentenced to death and provides a detailed account of how these fourteen women came to be subjected to the ultimate punishment.