Agenda

Empowering women for gender equity

ISSN: 1013-0950 (Print) 2158-978X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ragn20

Women and imprisonment in Africa: Reflections

on the past and future
Lou Haysom
To cite this article: Lou Haysom (2015) Women and imprisonment in Africa: Reflections on the
past and future, Agenda, 29:4, 1-2
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2015.1127606

Published online: 06 Feb 2016.

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Date: 01 April 2016, At: 00:48

his issue of Agenda focuses on a neglected population of

women around which there is not only the silence of
social disapproval, but also neglect by governments and
the criminal justice and penal systems. In addressing the
social exclusion of this group of women and the lack of social attention and research about incarcerated women in Africa, we
give weight to the production of feminist research and the excavation of womens prison
experience as well as prison narratives, as important for bringing to light the day-to-day
experience of women prisoners, and the legitimation of prison as an underexplored area of
womens experience and of their human rights. Prisons as socially constructed sites of sanctioned social punishment, isolation and deprivation, situate inmates as the custodial responsibility of the state as a penalty for the crimes they have committed or are alleged to have
committed. However, prisons in Africa have also become sites where malnutrition, disease,
violence, torture and degradation have been reported all too often with little or no focus on
the gender-specic consequences of prisoner rights abuses for women.

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Womens specic pathways to prison, their treatment by the criminal justice system and the courts
are implicated in womens vulnerability within prisons and research is needed to address offending womens progression through the system. This applies at the level of vulnerability to criminalisation and also to where historic gender, race and class injustices are embedded in the different
stages of womens journey to prison, as well as within prisons. The situating of women and imprisonment within a gender-sensitive framework has also become a rights based concern because of
the failure by prison authorities to distinguish the different needs of men and women prisoners.
Prisons are largely masculine institutions in most countries, not only in Africa, but in the world,
as the writers in this issue highlight.
This issue explores womens prison identities and narratives as well as the importance of
gender-sensitive frameworks in addressing incarcerated womens rights and the need for
non-custodial measures for women to be implemented where appropriate. The issue marks
ve years since the adoption of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules) by the United
Nations in 2010, introducing for the rst time ground rules that countries have been urged
to adopt to provide a gender-sensitive human rights framework for the treatment of women
prisoners as well as non-custodial measures for women offenders. The guest editors of the
issue Lillian Artz and Britta Rotmann elaborate in the introduction to this issue the signicance
of the Bangkok Rules in providing an approach that has foregrounded both gender and justice
in the regulation of the treatment of women in prison. The Rules highlight that women have
been hidden and ignored as a population within the penal system partly as a consequence
of their being a very small proportion of the overall prison population in all countries of the
world. Where data has been disaggregated, countries proles of crime have tended to indicate that a signicant proportion of women offenders have committed minor offences and
pose no harm to society. Further, womens criminogenic environments are often found to intersect with poverty, exposure to gender violence and abuse as well as laws which have
entrenched their social inequality.
The Rules provide a framework for gender bias and injustices to be formally addressed by governments, notably requiring research to lay the ground for policy, and gender disaggregation of
women in confrontation with the police, courts and criminal justice systems. One of the most
Agenda 106/29.4 2015
ISSN 1013-0950 print/ISSN 2158-978X online
2015 L. Haysom
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2015.1127606

pp. 12

ED
EDITORIAL

Women and imprisonment in Africa: Reections on the past

and future

important strengths of the Rules is that they hold that women should not be held in prison for
minor crimes, giving particular recognition to their reproductive roles as mothers.

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It is not difcult to recall that race, class and gender were complicit in putting several generations of African mothers, daughters and wives behind bars under colonial and apartheid
laws. The Bangkok Rules, by emphasising that many women should not be held in prison at
all, particularly women who are detained when they cannot pay nes, afford bail or as a consequence of gender-blind laws and gender, race and class discrimination, bring restorative justice
closer to realisation. The separation of women from their families in prison, as the sole breadwinners and carers, may have a higher social cost than holding them in prison. Appropriate noncustodial measures have the potential to achieve the rehabilitation of women offenders as well
as provide the psychosocial forms of support that they often need.to receive.
The issue includes a diverse range of research on women and imprisonment in Africa that give
expression to gendered prison discourses on the following broad themes: the treatment of
women in police cells, remand centres, prisons and other correctional centres; the health of
women in African prisons; uniquely African stories of girls/women incarcerated in Africa;
the promise and challenge of rehabilitation and reintegration after imprisonment; the detention of women during periods of civil unrest and armed conict; womens pathways to
prison and womens sexuality in prisons.
It is hoped that this special issue contributes to debate and to bringing attention to the need for
research and social and feminist activism to redress the neglect of women incarcerated in
Africas prisons. The Bangkok Rules set out a gender-sensitive treatment framework and
womens prison rights need to be progressively recognised and implemented by State
Parties. For prisons to be places where new beginnings and rehabilitation are possible for
women, they need to be the responsibility of the whole society, not solely of correction.
Agenda is grateful to the guest editors Lillian Artz and Britta Rotmann for bringing their knowledge and understanding to the issue.
Lou Haysom
Consulting Editor

AGENDA 106/29.4 2015