Sandra Babcock, Nathalie Greenfield and Kathryn Adamson

This article presents a comprehensive study of 48 persons sentenced to death between 1990 and 2023 who presented as women at the time of their trials. Our research is the first of its kind to conduct a holistic and intersectional analysis of the factors driving women’s death sentences. It reveals commonalities across women’s cases, delving into their experiences of motherhood, gender-based violence and prior involvement with the criminal legal system. We also explore the nature of the women’s crimes of conviction, including the role of male co-defendants and the State’s use of aggravating factors. Finally, we reveal for the first time the extent to which capital prosecutions are dominated by men—including judges, elected District Attorneys, defense attorneys, and juror forepersons—and explain why gender matters in determining who lives and who dies.

We present our data against the backdrop of prevalent theories that seek to explain both the rarity of women’s executions and the reasons why certain women are singled out for the harshest punishment provided by law. We explain why those frameworks are inadequate to understand the role that systemic gender bias plays in women’s capital prosecutions. We conclude by arguing for more nuanced research that embraces the complexities in women’s capital cases and accounts for the presence of systemic and intersectional discrimination.

Cardozo Law Review, Forthcoming (Written April, 2024}.

By Dorina Damsa

The Nordics have employed discourses of gender equality and women’s rights and a welfare-oriented approach to punishment as integral parts of inclusive welfare states and their ‘goodness’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with non-citizen women at Vestre Prison in Denmark, this article suggests that the will to punish and banish prevails over the state’s commitment to women's rights and protection. Rather than being an inherent feature of incarceration, the pain experienced by non-citizen women in prison is a ‘political statement’(Bosworth, 2023). Employing precarisation, incarceration, and deportation to govern unwanted non-citizens and (re)produce the borders of membership, the Danish state also reproduces the conditions for gendered harm. Bordered penalty, this article concludes, is gendered.

Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2024;63:43–61

By Matt Tidmarsh

The number of women working in occupations that lay claim to professional status has increased markedly in recent decades, but the speed and extent of the ‘feminisation’ of the probation service in England and Wales render it unique. Such change has occurred against the backdrop of attempts to present the service in more ‘masculine’ terms, to increase punitiveness while maximising its efficiency. This article seeks to move explanations for feminisation beyond gender stereotypes about care work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 members of staff from across the probation estate, and with particular regard to the unification of services, it explores the demographic and cultural dynamics of feminisation. The article argues that the sustained (and ongoing) devaluation of probation's professional project, pay and working conditions have impacted retention and recruitment in such a way that has filtered into the gender composition of the service.

Leeds, UK: Probation Journal, 2023, 21p.

By Agenda Alliance

This briefing forms part of the Young Women’s Justice Project (YWJP), run in partnership by Agenda Alliance and the Alliance for Youth Justice (AYJ) and funded by Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales. This project has provided a national platform to make the case for gender-responsive support for girls and young women aged 17-25 in contact with the criminal justice system, exemplified by our report “We’ve Not Given Up” published in March 2022.1 This supplementary briefing, “A Call to Action: Responding to Young Women’s Needs”, provides actionable recommendations to deliver change for girls and young women either in contact with – or at-risk of contact with – the criminal justice system. We have expanded upon the rich evidence base of the YWJP by convening a stakeholder discussion with women’s centres, youth/ justice practitioners, specialist “by-and-for” services,2 and young women with lived experience of the justice system, further complemented by additional desk-based research and examples of good practice.3 This research outlines specific steps to develop age- and gender-responsive support for young women, and is intended as a vital resource for funders, commissioners, practitioners, service providers, and decisionmakers to inform their practice and build sector understanding of how existing issues can be addressed.  

London: Agenda Alliance 2023. 41p.