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Women Prisoners and South Africa

NCJ Number
174540
Journal
Prison Journal Volume: 78 Issue: 3 Dated: September 1998 Pages: 330-343
Author(s)
J A Gibbons
Date Published
1998
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This article describes the lives of women in prison in Durban and Cape Town, South Africa, in 1995 and 1997.
Abstract
The article covers a wide range of topics: educational and employment opportunities, child care and maintenance of family ties, clothes, languages as colonial signifiers, work within the prison, spirituality, personal relations, and a brief overview of the new South African Constitution. The typical female inmate in South Africa in the late 1990s has been incarcerated for housebreaking/stealing/shoplifting. The Afrikaner-speaking woman has an edge over her non-Afrikaner-speaking sister, continuing the discourse of the past of racial and cultural hegemony. However, no women are offered the variety of job skill or educational training that is offered in male institutions. The article concludes that the ambitions of the country's new Constitution remain a far cry from the social and economic realities for the vast majority of its imprisoned women. Notes, references