This edited book ​explores new and enduring themes in the gendered experience of incarceration across the world. Capturing global debates and research on women’s treatment, their coping and resistances in penal settings, the collection promotes a feminist agenda that is attuned to the inherently patriarchal and intersectionally oppressive structures of contemporary punishment. It seeks to map policies and campaigns around women’s criminalisation across the world and offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of women’s imprisonment experiences across the Global North and Global South. Each chapter focusses on a different geographic context and theme and aims to provide the intellectual groundwork for a critical, world-wide movement advocating for women’s decarceration. As a whole, the collection offers a robust empirical understanding of women’s punishment in non-western, Global South contexts and also revisits ongoing debates in feminist accounts of punishment in the Global North.

In doing so, the collection examines hierarchical geopolitical relations between privileged and underprivileged nations, reflecting global inequalities and structural violence rooted in legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Overall, the edited collection shows how centering women’s peripheralized experiences can radically reshape our understanding of punishment and offers a new intellectual, methodological, and political means through which to think about gendered identity and imprisonment in the 21st Century.