Feminist Perspectives on Women in Custody: Addressing Systemic Inequities

When we talk about prison reform, the conversation is usually framed around overcrowding, sentencing policy, or recidivism rates. Rarely does it center the specific, compounding disadvantages faced by women behind bars. Feminist scholars and advocates have long argued that incarcerated women are treated as an afterthought in a system built almost entirely around male bodies, male behaviors, and male needs. The result is a carceral structure that not only fails women – it actively deepens the social inequalities that contributed to their incarceration in the first place. Understanding feminist interventions in this space means taking a hard look at those structural gaps, the civil society organizations fighting to close them, and the alternative approaches that could transform how justice is delivered to women entirely.

A system built for men: structural failures in women’s custody 🔗

Prison infrastructure, policy, and programming in most countries were designed with male inmates as the default. Women were – and in many ways still are – simply placed into that framework with minimal adaptation. Research published in the OxJournal documents how this male-centric design leads to systemic violations of incarcerated women’s rights, including inadequate reproductive care, lack of protection from violence, and environments that suppress rather than support rehabilitation.

Feminist critiques go further than pointing out these gaps. They argue that the very logic of punitive incarceration is incompatible with the realities of women’s lives. A landmark article in the journal Affilia by Willison and O’Brien notes that over the past three decades, the number of incarcerated women in the United States has grown at a faster rate than that of men – a trend driven not by increases in violent crime but by punitive drug policies that disproportionately affect women from low-income and marginalized communities.

Maternal health and reproductive rights behind bars 🔗

One of the starkest examples of the system’s failure is the treatment of pregnant women and mothers in custody. Research from a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services national policy conference documents that many state prisons require pregnant women being transported to give birth to be shackled during labor – a practice that is not only traumatizing but poses direct physical risk. Strip searches following visits, which disproportionately re-traumatize women with histories of sexual abuse, are another well-documented concern.

The Prison Policy Initiative has compiled extensive evidence on how prisons fall far short of meeting the health needs of incarcerated people, with women facing particular gaps in reproductive and maternal care. These failures are not incidental – they reflect a deeper devaluing of women’s health within carceral institutions.

Socioeconomic vulnerability and gendered pathways to incarceration 🔗

Feminist criminology insists that we cannot understand why women end up in prison without examining the social conditions that bring them there. Policy research by Covington establishes clearly that most women in the criminal justice system are poor, undereducated, and disproportionately women of color – many of whom come from environments marked by domestic violence, substance abuse, and limited economic opportunity. These are not individual moral failures but the downstream effects of structural inequality.

This matters because prisons are then expected to address the consequences of these inequalities without addressing the inequalities themselves. The Urban Institute’s 2023 report on gender-responsive programming highlights that risk assessment tools currently used in prisons were designed for male populations and have not been validated for women – meaning women are frequently assigned to more restrictive custody levels than their actual behavior warrants. When the tools measuring women’s needs are built for someone else, the resulting care will always fall short.

The invisibility of incarcerated mothers 🔗

A significant proportion of incarcerated women are primary caregivers before their arrest. Separation from their children creates psychological distress that prisons are poorly equipped to address, and reentry is complicated by the need to simultaneously rebuild housing, employment, and custody arrangements. Covington’s national policy work identifies that the majority of women in the correctional system are mothers, and reunification with their children represents one of the central challenges of reentry – one that brings women into contact with multiple agencies that often have conflicting goals and values.

Feminist scholars argue that this complexity is not just a reentry problem – it is a sentencing problem, a prison design problem, and an institutional failure to recognize that punishing a mother does not happen in isolation. It punishes a family.

The role of civil society in driving accountability 🔗

Where institutions have failed, civil society organizations have stepped in – not just to provide services, but to challenge the structural conditions that make those services necessary in the first place. These organizations operate from an explicitly feminist framework, centering the voices of women with lived experience of incarceration and insisting that policy change must be accountable to those most affected.

The Women’s Prison Association (WPA), founded as the first organization in the United States dedicated to serving incarcerated women, operates from a gender-responsive, trauma-informed model. Its mission goes beyond service provision – it actively works to reform carceral system practices and policies, and collaborates with courts to keep women in their communities rather than sending them to prison. The WPA’s approach reflects a key feminist principle: that systemic change must be accompanied by immediate, practical support for individuals navigating an unjust system.

Globally, the Cyrus R. Vance Center’s Women in Prison Project brings together advocates from the Americas, Africa, and Asia to monitor conditions, share best practices, and pursue strategic litigation that holds states accountable under international law. The project has convened formerly incarcerated women as active participants – not just as subjects of advocacy but as leaders within it. This insistence on prisoner participation in shaping the policies that govern their lives is a cornerstone of feminist approaches to prison governance.

Centering lived experience in advocacy 🔗

Organizations like Essie Justice Group have taken an explicitly member-led approach, ensuring that decisions and strategies emerge directly from women who have experienced incarceration or the incarceration of a loved one. Their Healing to Advocacy model recognizes that the transition from personal trauma to political agency is itself a form of systemic transformation – and that any movement for prison reform that excludes the perspectives of incarcerated women will ultimately reproduce the same patterns of exclusion it seeks to dismantle.

The Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance in Texas similarly centers the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated women, documenting systemic medical neglect – from lack of menstrual supplies to traumatic pregnancy experiences – through research conducted in collaboration with academic institutions. This combination of grassroots organizing and rigorous documentation is exactly the kind of feminist intervention that bridges lived experience and policy change.

At the international level, UN Women’s work in the Asia-Pacific region has identified that women in conflict with the law remain almost entirely overlooked by development partners and NGOs – a finding that underscores how much work remains to be done even in spaces ostensibly committed to gender equality. UN Women has partnered with local organizations to train detention facility staff on the Bangkok Rules – the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners – as a framework for minimum standards in gender-responsive custody.

Beyond incarceration: community-based alternatives and feminist possibilities 🔗

Perhaps the most radical dimension of feminist interventions in this space is the insistence that incarceration itself – not just poorly run incarceration – is the wrong response to the social conditions that bring many women into conflict with the law. This is not simply a theoretical position. There is a growing evidence base for community-based alternatives that produce better outcomes for women, their families, and their communities.

What community-based alternatives actually look like 🔗

Alternatives to incarceration (ATIs) encompass a broad range of approaches: restorative justice programs, drug and specialty courts, supported housing, community supervision, diversion programs, and treatment services. However, feminist scholars are careful to distinguish between ATIs that genuinely serve women’s interests and those that simply extend coercive control outside prison walls. The Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights at Suffolk University has developed a checklist of core principles for evaluating ATIs, emphasizing that effective programs must provide secure housing, support family unification, offer culturally appropriate healthcare, and – critically – refrain from using threats of punishment to obtain compliance.

This last point is crucial. Many ATIs replicate the coercive logic of incarceration under a different name. A feminist approach insists that genuine alternatives must be voluntary, autonomy-preserving, and designed to address the root causes of women’s involvement in the criminal justice system – not simply to manage or monitor them more cheaply.

Restorative justice and its outcomes for women 🔗

Restorative justice (RJ) approaches frame criminal behavior as a violation of relationships rather than simply a violation of law, and prioritize repairing harm over administering punishment. Research compiled by the MOST Policy Initiative shows that following RJ programs, women and individuals over 30 were less likely to reoffend compared to men and younger participants – a finding that suggests restorative approaches may be especially well-suited to the circumstances of many incarcerated women.

The American Public Health Association’s policy analysis goes further, noting that existing restorative justice programs in California and New York have demonstrated that even in cases of serious violence, community-centered accountability approaches can center survivors, heal trauma, and build safer communities – while also addressing the structural roots of violence rather than simply responding to its symptoms.

Gender-responsive programming as a bridge 🔗

For women who are incarcerated, gender-responsive programming represents an interim feminist intervention – one that acknowledges the realities of the current system while pushing toward better practice within it. The Urban Institute’s analysis explains that such programming addresses trauma, mental health, substance use, and socioeconomic inequality in ways that gender-neutral approaches miss entirely. Relational theory, which underpins much of this work, holds that women’s experiences in the criminal justice system are more likely than men’s to be rooted in violence and exploitation – and that effective intervention must therefore work to rebuild connection, trust, and a sense of safety.

The Office of Justice Programs has documented that California’s over-reliance on incarceration – driven by mandatory sentencing and “tough on crime” policies – has had measurable detrimental effects on women, their children, and their communities. Its recommendations for reform emphasize keeping community corrections facilities small, trauma-sensitive, and genuinely gender-responsive. These are not just administrative preferences – they reflect a feminist understanding that scale, design, and philosophy all determine whether an institution heals or harms.

Feminist interventions in the carceral system are not simply calls for kinder prisons. They are a sustained challenge to the logic that punishment, isolation, and surveillance are appropriate responses to the social inequalities, trauma histories, and economic marginalization that shape so many women’s pathways into the criminal justice system. From maternal health failures inside prison walls to the grassroots organizing of formerly incarcerated women outside them, these interventions collectively demand that justice systems reckon with what they are actually doing – and whether it is working for anyone at all.

What do you think? If prison systems were redesigned from the ground up with women’s needs at the center, which structural change – in healthcare, sentencing, family policy, or something else entirely – would need to come first? And given that many feminist scholars argue incarceration often reproduces the very inequalities that led to it, is meaningful reform of the carceral system possible, or does genuine justice for women require something more fundamental?

References

1. https://www.oxjournal.org/prison-in-pink-the-struggles-of-female-incarceration/
2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0886109916658080
3. https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/private/pdf/75011/Covington.pdf
4. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/women_and_gender/
5. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2023-04/Gender-Responsive%20Programming%20in%20Womens%20Prisons.pdf
6. https://www.wpaonline.org/
7. https://www.vancecenter.org/initiatives/women-in-prison/
8. https://essiejusticegroup.org/mission/
9. https://www.lionessjiwa.org/
10. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/focus-areas/governance/womens-access-to-justice/supporting-grassroots-women
11. https://sites.suffolk.edu/wiproject/2022/05/23/alternatives/
12. https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/science-note/restorative-justice/
13. https://www.apha.org/policy-and-advocacy/public-health-policy-briefs/policy-database/2022/01/07/advancing-public-health-interventions-to-address-the-harms-of-the-carceral-system
14. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/reducing-incarceration-women-community-based-alternatives