Abstract:
This article addresses the education of women in prison in relation to an emerging area of research and policy concern: vocational training. Using interviews with women prisoners in Victoria, it investigates why inmate women participate in education programs, what education programs the women would like to see implemented and what barriers exist in terms of women's participation in education. Demonstrating the disparity between stated government aims for inmate women's education and training and the motivations of the women themselves, the authors argue that prisoner education for women ought to be conceptualized in relation to a range of factors and not merely conceived of as a path to employment.
Between 1991 and 1999, the number of women incarcerated in Australia almost doubled (Cameron, 2001; Carlen, 1999; Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women, 2003). In spite of this, as several scholars have noted, the circumstances and needs of women prisoners tend to be invisible to both researchers and society (Cook and Davies, 1999; Girshick, 1999; Grimwade, 1999; Torre et al, 2001). This is because they are vastly outnumbered by men in prison populations and because female criminality is often associated in the public mind with gender role transgression and 'double deviance'. As Farrell (1998) notes, female offending, especially by mothers, challenges normative constructions of femininity. She suggests that incarceration attracts scorn rather than support from the community and from the prison system, where women arc typically perceived as more difficult inmates than men (Fine et al., 2001).