Gender, Feminism, and Carceral Policies in Portugal: Assessing Impacts and Challenges

In Portugal, the feminist perspectives on the criminal justice are relatively recent. The works of Teresa Beleza and of Manuela Ivone Cunha, in the 80s and 90s, opened a field that would produce a wide feminist-based academic work on the way the criminal justice system, and in particular the prison system, incorporates (or not) gender. These works, and those that followed in the first decades of the XXI century, focused mainly on the context of women’s imprisonment, evidencing gender-based obstacles in the trajectories of women serving sentences. They also evidenced practices of the prison system that could be harmful for women for not taking into account constraints linked to gender expectations, roles, and relations, despite the significant transformation throughout the years in the physical conditions of prisons that host women and often their children. In addition to studies on women’s imprisonment, some academic work has also been gender-sensitive in analysing the formulation of penal norms and all the procedural criminal justice. A concern to incorporate the LGBTQI+ population into academic work on gender and criminal justice has begun to emerge more recently, although there are still very few studies on this subject. The general aim of this chapter is to critically examine the entanglements between gender, feminism and carceral policies and practices. By analyzing laws and regulations, as well as interviews with inmates and with prison staff, we question the gendered constitution of the Portuguese prison system, as well as whether and to what extent feminist struggles, quite often under the heading of gender-equality policies, have cross-fertilized and impacted Portuguese carceral policies and practices. More broadly, we aim to reflect on how such encounter may have foster and reinforced emancipatory intents regarding to gender oppression, but also on how, at the same time, they might have been hampered, metamorphosed or even truncated them. The results are organized around three key dimensions: Gender (in)equalities, Sexual-gender diversity and LGBTQI+ people, and Parenthood, sexuality and reproductive rights, in prison.