User:Sabrinalu10/sandbox

Editing Sabrina's sandbox! Gender-responsive prisons

Rehabilitation[edit source]

Gender-responsive treatment (GRT) calls for clinically trained workers to establish a women-focused program where the aim is to facilitate rehabilitation and prevent drug relapse. The Helping Women Recover program is organized in four modules: self module, relationship module, sexuality module, and spirituality module. Calhoun, Messina, Cartier, and Torres, members of Integrated Substance Abuse Programs (ISAP) in UCLA, discovered that incarcerated women expressed interest in learning the reasons for their drug use, specifically how their familial relationships and childhood traumas impacted their substance abuse.

Health[edit source]

Studies have shown that women tend to use drugs as a form of self-medication for depression and anxiety, which result from traumatic childhood and adolescent experiences. Saxena and Messina, Ph.D. scholars in the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs (ISAP) at UCLA, and Christine Grella, a professor for ISAP, argue that gender-responsive treatment's (GRT) multimodal approach allows for inclusivity in which the monolithic Therapeutic Community (TC) treatment lacks.

Reproductive Oppression[edit source]

Women are more likely than men to experience parental terminations, poverty, and substance addiction and supports the notion that incarcerated women value relationships, especially familial and parental bonds. Gender-responsive prisons advocate for gender-responsive treatment that allows for women to communicate relational issues, giving them the opportunity to mend broken relationships and decrease incidents of misconduct in prison.

Penal Politics[new subheading under Opposition]

Gender-responsive (GR) penal policies allow for gendered governance where gendered punishment dictates how women should behave, targeting and governing females through the penal structure. Furthermore, GR penal policies coerce women to adhere to parenting and motherhood ideals belonging to the normative, white middle-class values. GR penal codes are also argued to be punitive rather than rehabilitative; thus, a possible solution may include collaboration between state institutions as well as the local community.

Carceral Feminism

Contributions to Carceral feminism (to be merged in Wiki page):

Critiques of feminist analysis on traditional sexual scripts and rape myths claim that they fetishize female victimization and disempowerment while reinforcing gender stereotypes. Gurnham states that the sexual script is not exactly a blueprint for rape, but is a social construct that stereotypes males as coercive and dominant and females as submissive and passive. It also neglects the fact that both men and women find sex pleasurable. Sexual script and rape myth are used to analyze criminalization of men as coercive sex partners in heterosexual relations. Breaking down sexual script and rape myths make possible the eradication gendered criminalization, challenging carceral feminist perspectives of feminist criminology.

Although carceral feminism aims to produce and enact legislation for women to achieve social justice, Cruz argues that this form of feminism exclusively benefits middle and upper class white women, neglecting minority women. The exclusivity of this movement actually discriminates and marginalizes women, specifically those who were impoverished and abused. Carceral feminists favor policing and punishment because they believe incarceration deters criminal activity, which decreases violence against women. This resulted in the enactment of Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), which funded government surveillance programs. However, despite declining crime rates, rates of women’s incarceration increased by 81% from 1990 to 2000.

Feminist criminology is critiqued through the analysis of neoliberalism and its implementation of self-regulation. Self-regulation complements capitalism and destroys social welfare by bolstering surveillance institutions (military, police, and prisons) and eliminating government services (social, health, and education programs). Furthermore, arguments are made that women exhibit lawbreaking behavior as self-medicating, coping strategies. Carceral feminism lacks analysis of neoliberalism and its effect on the criminalization of women. The rise of capitalism and demise of welfare diminish social and economic statuses of marginalized women, making these females targets for criminalization. Findings revealed that women offenders oftentimes committed criminal acts to compensate for their histories of substance abuse, psychological disorders, and sexual and domestic violence.