Gender, health and imprisonment: focus on Roma women

Abstract

Spain has one of the highest imprisonment rates within Europe. Nevertheless, women are still a minority within the whole prison population, which shapes a blatant inequality situation in the penitentiary field. Imprisonment and detention spaces are designed for men, women just get what is left, secondary spaces in total institutions developed under manly parameters. But this situation gets worse when talking about incarcerated mothers who have children with them. As they are a specially minority collective (within a minority), there are no specific prisons for them. In Spain we just have two kinds of facilities for incarcerated mothers, four dedicated wings (Wad Ras in Barcelona, Alcalá de Guadaira in Seville, Valencia, and Aranjuez) and four external facilities (Fontcalent, Sevilla, Madrid, and Mallorca). This geographic spread complicates the maintenance of social relationships, which is a key point for the rehabilitation process. Also children are adversely affected by this situation. They are removed from their family environment to occupy a space in a particularly hostile total institution. In this sense, recent studies providing snapshots of mother prisons have highlighted the need to improve the conditions of mothers serving time in Spanish prisons, particularly programs addressing specific mother problems such as depression or anxiety. Here we report the characterization of imprisoned women’s issues, focusing on a specific ethnic group such as Roma women, and how the penitentiary institution addresses these situations. To get to the conclusions we used a mixed methodology. Regarding the theoretical perspective, a literature review on the topic has been developed. For the empirical part, an exploratory analysis was conducted by the author with incarcerated Roma women in two prisons in the south of Spain[1]. We show that in general terms mothers serving time experience specific problems due to their motherhood. Regarding this situation, the penitentiary institution is more focused on medicating them than addressing the problem with psychological support programs. The small group size of the sample doesn’t allow us to generalize the results so we need to take them as an exploratory analysis that gives us the stage to plan further research on this topic.

[1] Project I+D “Igualdad y Derecho Penal: el género y la nacionalidad como factores primarios de discriminación DER2010-19781”.