Paper short abstract:

In this communication we will address the situation of women within the Catalan Penitentiary System from an anthropological and gender perspective. Also, we will discuss about penitentiary system as a power structure and social control, as a branch of a larger power system, the State.

Paper long abstract:

In this communication we will address the situation of women within the Catalan Penitentiary System from an anthropological and gender perspective. My research seeks to contribute to knowledge about the gender inequalities present in the penitentiary field, and especially in Catalan prisons, while identifying the practices of the penitentiary regulations that generate and/or perpetuate gender inequalities. At a specific level, I propose to analyze the programs of the Rehabilitation Model of Catalan prisons in terms of gender. This more specific analysis is integrated into a broader one on the penitentiary system as a power structure and social control tool also from the gender variable. At the same time, the prison system is considered as a power structure in itself, and at the same time also, as a branch of a larger power system, the State.

Historically, prisons have been designed by men, to incarcerate other men. In this way, women, being the minority population, have had to adapt by always receiving residual care that does not fully take into account and respond to their specific needs (Yagüe, 2007).

The contribution is relevant, as it focuses on a population made invisible in prison policies, unknown by a large part of the population and little studied at the level of qualitative social research, in the case of Catalonia, given that most of the literature it is located in the framework of Criminology.