Therapeutic Community for Women Prisoners: Re-imagining Rehabilitation and the Loss of Liberty

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Elaine Player Elaine Genders

Therapeutic Community for Women Prisoners

Re-imagining Rehabilitation and the Loss of Liberty

Elaine Player, Elaine Genders

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
02 September 2025

Feminism & feminist theory; Gender studies: women; Sociology; Psychology; Criminal justice law

Based upon an extensive empirical study of a democratic therapeutic community for women serving long and medium sentences, this book explores the opportunities it provided for restorative rehabilitation. In so doing it identifies some of the interconnected ways in which these ambitions are undermined by pervasive, yet often tacit, assumptions that underly penal policies and practices.

Drawing on a wealth of data gathered from a study spanning a period of eighteen years at the only democratic therapeutic community for women prisoners in the UK, the book highlights how feminist criminology has revealed an invidious history of women’s treatment in prison, demonstrating how reformist and rehabilitative interventions have reproduced and exacerbated existing states of inequality and oppression. Consequently, the question explored in this book is whether a proportionate sentence that imposes a loss of liberty is inevitably destined to this fate or whether it can be constructed in ways that are progressive and transformative. By identifying and understanding some of the interconnected ways in which progressive efforts have typically been undermined, it opens a debate about the insinuation of certain, often unspoken, assumptions that underly penal policies and practices and the need for their deconstruction. It opens an axiomatic debate about how women imprisoned for serious offences might have that loss of liberty interpreted to facilitate a restorative, reparative and reintegrative process of rehabilitation, informed by principles of social justice.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, feminist studies, public policy, and human rights. It will also be of value to policymakers and practitioners in women’s prisons and psychologists and psychiatrists interested in therapeutic communities.

By: Elaine Player, Elaine Genders
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 750g
ISBN: 9781032948621
ISBN 10: 1032948620
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 02 September 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Elaine Player is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College, London. In addition to two co-authored monographs with Elaine Genders, she has published work on prisons, sentencing and injustices of the criminal process, frequently focusing on their impact on women. She is Chair of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. Elaine Genders is Reader in Criminology and Associate Professor of Law in the Faculty of Laws, UCL. She has researched and written in the fields of criminology, criminal justice and the interface between criminology and criminal law. She is co-author, with Elaine Player, of two books on imprisonment, Grendon: A Study of a Therapeutic Prison and Race Relations in Prison.

Reviews for Therapeutic Community for Women Prisoners: Re-imagining Rehabilitation and the Loss of Liberty

My fellow members of the Government’s recently announced Women’s Justice Board, whose primary function will be to address the distinct needs of female offenders, will find it an essential first step to acquire a copy of this new volume. Vera Baird, DBE KC It is not only a unique and very substantial study of a therapeutic community for long-term women prisoners, but also a platform upon which the authors have developed an important and timely disquisition about the relations between women offenders and the state, and, unusually and notably, the duty of care which the state owes to those who offend and those whom it punishes. Paul Rock, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics.