Sacrosanct or Flawed: Risk, Accountability and Gender- Responsive Penal Politics

Abstract

This article argues that Canadian and many international discussions of gender responsive (GR) penality have substituted male normative criteria with a ‘female norm’ without much critical reflection on the implications of this development and its impact on women prisoners. GR penality is situated within a narrow politics of difference that posits an essentialist characterisation of women as relational, thereby resurrecting past debates about the politics of difference (Daly 1989; Heidensohn 1986; Pitch 1992; Hannah-Moffat 1995; Wheeler et al. 1989; Spader 2002). Using risk-need classification as a core example, it is argued that the ensuing correctional emphasis on women prisoners' relationships combines with broader concerns about risk, individual responsibility, and choice to produce new strategies of gendered governance that emphasise responsibility and diminish social structural contexts. Secondly, it is argued that the conceptualisation of GR punishment has not moved beyond the rhetoric of diversity; it does not integrate the work done by intersectionality scholars about how multiple oppressions operate simultaneously. Finally, it is argued that the ideal of GR is layered onto existing penal practices and how it can mask ongoing concerns about human rights, obscure the operational difficulties associated with the development of a gendered alternative to hegemonic models of correctional management, and minimise the criminogenic characteristics of penal contexts.