A Subject out of Reach? a Feminist Gaze on the Language in Correctional Treatment Program for Women in the Swedish Penitentiary Bureaucracy

Sweden’s punitive turn expressed in a rapid expansion of the prison system is now said to be sensitive to its previous gender blindness and currently treating all offenders on equal terms. Hence, women’s part of the Swedish prison population increases as women’s involvement in gang related crimes has attract a media attention alerting the police on female offenders. Still, women continue to constitute the ‘deviant other’ when engaging in crime as men was never really in focus as a gendered category when incarcerated. Given that most women are detained in prisons designed for men, a feminist gaze on Goffman’s theorizing on total institutions reveals prisons as spaces in which society’s contradictions about gendered expectations for female offenders become amplified. This is especially true when scrutinizing the language embedded in correctional treatment programs (CTP) in female prisons. Framed within a neoliberal logic, the programs require prison officials to adhere to a masculine coded ‘manual fidelity’ as they are guided by fixed administrative principles designed to operate in a purported gender-neutral bureaucracy.

Considering language as social practices organizing gendered relations, the focus of this paper is the rhetorical resources female prison officials working with women use to negotiate or alter, what they perceive as conflicting objectives posed by CTP. Based on interviews with correctional staff at two women’s prisons in Sweden, the findings suggest staff perceiving their work at the bottom of the gendered justice hierarchy. The CTP was criticized for its administrative insensitivity, silencing inmate’s own narrative as well as fostering of masculinity even though the staff worked in gendered segregated prisons. However, to counteract these malpractices, more administrative instruments were requested. The staff’s reliance on the CPT they simultaneously criticized, is analyzed as an expression of an inherent but expressionless patriarchal routine rendering both inmates and staff ‘speechless’.