The Imprisonment of Women

By Russell P. Dobash, R. Emerson Dobash and Sue Gutteridge

FROM CHAPTER 1; “The imprisonment of women in Britain and the United States today reflects the end product of a process that has its roots in early nineteenth-century British prisons. Confining women and men in prisons, asylums and workhouses was thought to be the best way of dealing with many of the problems that beset society including social unrest and crime. A prison was meant to be a world that would lead to physical discipline and moral transformation. From the very beginning, women in prison were treated differently from men, considered more morally depraved and corrupt and in need of special, closer forms of control and confinement. They became a pariah class, separate and distinct from the ideal, chaste and morally correct women of the Victorian era and this continues even today…”

Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1986. 271p.