Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare Quotes

“While there has indeed been an increase in coercive state practices over the past several decades relative to much of the twentieth century, when viewed as part of the long history of capitalism, the carceral excesses of neoliberalism have much in common with the dispossession of the peasantry from the land in England and, globally, the ‘Bloody legislation’ used to terrorize those who violated newly established norms of private property, the criminalization of women who contravened historically specific norms of chastity and femininity, and the violent disciplining of different segments of the population deemed insufficiently ‘rational’ to respond to the market-based incentives that are so often assumed to be the key disciplinary mechanisms underpinning capitalist society”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Securing the institutional foundations for capitalist markets, it turns out, is not something that can be done purely through trade and financial agreements but relies upon the coercive arm of the state, which takes the form of wars, land grabs and other neo-colonial ventures, the militarization of borders, the criminalization of protest and dissent, and the policing and punishment of domestic populations, among others.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Using a feminist historical materialist perspective that views production as being inherently interconnected with social reproduction allows us to see that the move toward increasingly harsh legal and policing practices under neoliberalism is a function of shifting relations of power, production and social reproduction. In foregrounding gender relations, this perspective further provides the tools needed to identify and analyze the gendered nature of precariousness and the feminization of criminality under neoliberalism. Rather than simply managing those classed, racialized and gendered individuals that have been rendered insecure by neoliberalism, as it has throughout the history of capitalism, the law works together with welfare to create these differences and divisions.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Penal-welfare paternalism tended to view criminal women as ‘weak’, ‘scared’ and ‘vulnerable’, and the fact that the vast majority of criminalized women have a past history of victimization was used to decouple agency from criminality. However, under neoliberalism, new discourses of personal responsibility and empowerment have worked to “accentuate individual choice and downplay the social structures and relationships in which female offenders are embedded” (Haney 2004: 345). The results have included the growing standardization of sentencing and parole laws, the replacement of the ‘feminine’ characteristics of penal systems with ‘masculine’ get-tough principles, the architectural convergence of men’s and
women’s prisons, the proliferation of risk assessments and forms of classification
that are inherently based on the experience of white men and a growing fear of violent women and bad girls.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Intricately connected to the restructuring of relations of production, neoliberalism has also entailed the restructuring of social reproduction in ways that have rendered it increasingly insecure for particular sectors of the population. In the US, Canada and the UK, the move from welfare to ‘workfare’ states is particularly relevant, though other cutbacks to government services, the hollowing out of public housing, the restructuring of pension plans in ways that render them increasingly dependent on global financial markets and the imposition of austerity measures (especially in Europe) post-2008 are all key moves that have contributed to the ‘reprivatization of social reproduction’. The latter refers to the ways in which the decline in social forms of provisioning in most OECD countries over the past several decades has resulted in an increase in the amount of work done by families, particularly by women, and/or the private sector.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“While incarceration has always had a class-based and racial dimension, during the neoliberal era, class and racial inequalities in prison admission have increased considerably.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Incarceration rates clearly evidence the shift away from the more consensual and rehabilitative norms associated with the Keynesian era toward much more draconian legal, policing and penal practices. This is not related to a growth in crime per se but rather reflects a series of institutional changes in the law and policing practices, which include the following: the creation of new crimes and the increasing use of imprisonment as a form of punishment; the lengthening of sentences; the standardization of sentencing and the elimination of juridical discretion; and the rise of new policing practices targeting minor ‘disorderly’ behaviour. The point in highlighting these shifts, and the ideologies that underpin them, is to stress that it is not crime per se that has changed. Instead, particular sectors of the population have been criminalized and treated more harshly under neoliberalism.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“.. while there is some truth to the claims (..) that the prison plays an important function in containing the contradictions that have emerged in the contemporary phase of capitalist development, this should not be viewed simply as a response to growing social cleavages. Rather, as part of the gendered social ontology of capitalism, the law is itself constitutive of historically specific relations of production and social reproduction. Thus, the restructuring of the neoliberal state in ways that limit its ability to regulate the movement of capital across borders, on-going forms of primitive accumulation that enclose and police formerly public spaces and the criminalization and incarceration of particular sectors of the poor and working-class population are all manifestations of the neoliberal project”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“..insofar as the rise of increasingly harsh laws, invasive surveillance practices, and militant policing tactics and the concomitant spectacular rise in incarceration rates are part of the attempt of the state to contain the social insecurities generated by neoliberalism, these insecurities – and the policies that are intended to address them – are deeply gendered. While certain gender gaps have narrowed under neoliberalism, including the gender gap in employment, education and incarceration, this has been accompanied by the rise of particularly gendered (and racialized) forms of precariousness and disadvantage.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Through the reformatory movement then, the criminal justice system became a mechanism used to punish women who did not perform social reproductive labour according to the white, bourgeois ideal. This ideal was reinforced in the reformatories where women were taught to perform domestic tasks such as laundry and needlework. This training in domestic labour served a dual function. On the one hand, it trained working-class women in the ‘cult of domesticity’. On the other, it served to produce a labour force of domestic servants since women were often released from reformatories into bourgeois homes where they worked for below-average wages. In other words, both reflecting and reproducing the relations of the gendered capitalist labour market more broadly, while imprisoned men were performing industrial labour, women in the reformatories were being trained in domestic labour which they were expected to perform either for no wages in a patriarchal household or for low wages in the labour market.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Following the early to mid-nineteenth-century laissez-faire ideas that positioned ‘crime-as-choice’ were new ideas that led to a view of ‘crime-as-biology’. Within this perspective, poor women who deviated from dominant gender norms were seen to be likely to reproduce an inferior ‘race’ of poor people and criminals. Such concerns were at least partly responsible for the concerted attempt to criminalize the sexual independence and deviance of certain women. For instance, in Canadian cities, women who were found on the streets at night without a ‘respectable’ male escort were assumed to have ‘an immoral purpose’, and, if they could not offer a satisfactory reason for being there, they were apprehended as moral offenders. The Contagious Diseases Act of the 1860s also empowered the police in particular British and American port and garrison towns to pick up, register and medically examine women suspected of prostitution.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“The success of (mainly bourgeois and white) women in this area was of crucial importance to the later development of the welfare state in these countries, which were only firmly institutionalized after World War II. Insofar as many of these policies alleviated some of the risks and insecurities felt by working-class families, they also exhibited significant racial biases. To use the US as an example, it has been well noted that mothers’ pensions were not directed to relieve and generally did not support African-American and other women of colour – this, despite the racialized nature of poverty in America: in 1934 Los Angeles, Mexican Americans constituted 10 percent of the population but only 1 percent of welfare recipient (forcing thousands of Mexicans to return to Mexico) while in Atlanta, Georgia, the average amount of relief given to a white person was nearly 70 percent more than that given to a black person ($32.66 versus $19.29 per month)”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“... the Poor Laws institutionalized a distinction between the ‘impotent poor’, the ‘able-bodied poor’ and the ‘idle poor’. While the ‘impotent’ and ‘able-bodied poor’ were offered some means of either indoor or outdoor relief, the feared ‘idle poor’ were disciplined through a combination of physical punishment, incarceration in Houses of Correction or prisons, conscription into the military or navy, transportation to a penal colony, and/or other means.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“However, as we see in the writings of several liberal political economists, the main problem was not poverty per se, since poverty was actually believed to play a useful function in compelling certain groups of people to labour. Rather, the problem was that there was a constant threat of the poor falling into indigence, which, it was argued, encouraged immoral and criminal offences, thus rendering society less secure. The nineteenth-century institutions and discourses that governed poverty and criminality worked together to police the line between poverty and indigence and to preserve the former while eliminating the threat associated with the latter.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare