The weaponisation of ‘trauma-informed’ discourse in prison policy: An abolition feminist critique

Abstract

Taking an abolition feminist standpoint, this article develops a critique of the absorption of the language of ‘trauma-informed practice’ into gendered penal policy. We use Carol Bacchi's methodology for post-structural policy analysis, which centres around the question, ‘what is the problem represented to be?’, and apply it to an Australian correctional policy document designed to inform practice in the Victorian women's prison system: Strengthening Connections. We find that the policy constructs criminalised women's trauma as an individual psychological pathology that causes ‘criminal offending’ and makes them vulnerable to further harm. In effect, the prison is framed as both necessary for the protection of the community and for the protection of criminalised women themselves. We argue that these discursive distortions sanitise the structural violence of the prison and revalorise the carceral state under the guises of rehabilitation and therapy. Our contribution highlights broader implications and challenges for criminological research that engages attempts to ‘soften’ carceral conditions without reckoning with their capacity to entrench gendered carceralism.

Keywords

abolition feminism carceral feminism trauma informed practice therapeutic prisons gender-responsive reform

Introduction

In this paper, we focus on the discursive construction of criminalised women as traumatised subjects, and the prison as a necessary and appropriate site for their ‘care’ and therapy. We argue that the construction of trauma as an individual pathology divorced from structural and state violence is an increasingly prominent feature of gender-responsive reform logics. The consequence of this conception of ‘the problem’ is the weaponisation of trauma, by positioning it as a criminogenic risk. Trauma thus becomes a justification for deepening and strengthening carceral control, while the prison is legitimised and recentred via discursive imaginaries of therapy, rehabilitation, and care. While the abject failures of gender-responsive reform initiatives to alleviate the underlying problems of mass criminalisation and the structural violence of the prison are now widely recognised (Russell and Carlton, 2013; Carlton and Russell, 2018a; 2018b; Heiner and Tyson, 2017; Shaylor, 2008; Whalley and Hackett, 2017), the same is yet to be established for the adoption of trauma-informed programs in penal contexts. At present, there is limited literature documenting the specific ways that contemporary trauma-informed programs rework, extend, or restrain gendered forms of punishment (Vaswani and Paul, 2019; Petrillo, 2021; Bevan, 2022). The discursive analysis developed in this paper highlights the need for new critical, empirical research that qualitatively investigates the operationalisation of these principles in prison settings and women's experiences of them.

The idea that women ‘offend’ because they are traumatised has come about through a confluence of forces and factors, including longstanding gendered ideologies of penal governance, ‘new’ penalities centred on ‘risk’ management, and the cooption of feminist arguments that attempt to highlight the paradoxical cruelty of punishing victim-survivors through criminalising them (Bevan, 2022; Kubiak 2017; Pollack 2007, 2013; Hannah-Moffat, 2000; Richie, 2012). To combat this, we advocate an abolition feminist position that recognises that gender justice will not be realised without the incorporation of abolition praxis (Davis et al. 2022; Bierria et al., 2022). Abolition feminists contend that imprisonment, by its very nature, is structured by the vectors of oppression and control that reproduce gendered violence in the first place (Davis, 2003; Harris, 2011; McCulloch and George, 2009). From this perspective, gender-responsive reform initiatives serve only to legitimise and extend the life of the prison, and in turn, gender and racial inequality.

Taking an abolition feminist standpoint (Davis et al., 2022; Carlton and Russell, 2018b; Bierria et al., 2022), we critique the absorption of the language of trauma-informed practice into gendered penal policy by conducting a close analysis of the Strengthening Connections policy document named above. We draw upon Carol Bacchi's (2009; Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016) methodology for post-structural policy analysis to explore the discursive techniques of ‘problematisation’; or by asking: ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ Using this method, we demonstrate how this policy positions criminalised women's trauma as the problem to be managed—through penal systems—by conceptualising it as an individual psychological pathology that causes various kinds of criminal offending. From this perspective, trauma makes women dangerous while simultaneously rendering them vulnerable to further harm. Thus, the prison is framed through these discourses as both necessary for the protection of the community and criminalised women themselves. The effect of such discursive framing is that imprisonment is naturalised as a response to both women's ‘dangerousness’ and their ‘vulnerability’, rather than a result of sustained punitive lawmaking and abandonment by the state. Once in prison, criminalised women are cast as responsible for their own healing, even as the institutionalised violence of incarceration is obfuscated. Such distortions obscure the ‘structural violence of the prison’ (Armstrong, 2020) and revalorise the carceral state under the guises of rehabilitation and therapy.

Our contribution highlights broader implications and challenges for criminological research. Historically, and despite their ‘softer’ guise, gendered penal reform initiatives have contributed to hardened and more expansive forms of carceralism (Braz, 2006; Carlen and Tombs, 2006; Pollack, 2013; Carlton and Russell 2018a, 2018b; Shaylor, 2008). Resisting this trend requires criminological researchers to critically reflect upon the risks of becoming complicit in the harms enacted by the carceral state (Deslandes et al., 2022; Jarldorn, 2020; Kurti and Brown, 2023; Schept et al., 2014). In this context, the risk of complicity arises when criminologists reproduce the notion that the prison can be reimagined as a place of support, therapy or healing. By casting prisons as ‘penal welfare’ or ‘safety nets’ for marginalised women (Gruber et al., 2016; Musto 2019; Sufrin 2017), the legitimacy of the prison as an institution is reinforced and extended (Russell and Carlton, 2013; Schenwar and Law, 2020; Schept, 2013). Ultimately, these agendas, tied to state knowledge production and interests, only serve to perpetuate the structural harms and trauma generated by imprisonment and mitigate critical conversations about the need for abolitionist alternatives (Kim, 2018). In this paper, we therefore reiterate the call for the development of a critical carceral studies (Brown and Schept, 2017) that can ‘speak truth to power’ (Scraton, 2007) and support movements for dismantling and abolishing cages (Davis et al., 2022; Gilmore, 2007; Lewis, 2022; Carlton and Russell, 2018b).

The emergence of trauma-informed prisons and carceral legacies of gender-responsive reform

Gender-responsive practice has now evolved to encompass the introduction of trauma-informed approaches to the management and treatment of women in prison (Bevan 2022: 2). The notion of ‘trauma-informed practice’ has become a prominent focus of gender-responsive reform frameworks in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia (Bevan, 2022). These frameworks are premised on the assumption that ‘healthy prisons’ and therapeutic healing spaces can facilitate improved reintegration outcomes for criminalised women (Bartels et al., 2020; Jewkes et al., 2019; Kubiak et al., 2017; Sheehan and Trotter, 2017). A trauma-informed approach aims to ‘recognise, understand and minimise the potentially long-term effects of exposure to a traumatic event’ and then respond by putting this knowledge into practice (SAMHSA 2013 cited in Kubiak et al., 2017: 92). Examples of trauma-informed programs in prison include staff training to improve understandings of trauma and psychological support programs to assist women to manage the effects of trauma (Bevan, 2022; Kubiak et al., 2017; Petrillo, 2021; Sheehan and Trotter, 2017).

While this paper centres on discursive analysis, we acknowledge the preliminary and emerging studies on trauma-informed programs in prisons, which present mixed conclusions and critical implications. For example, Bevan's (2022) research on the operationalisation of TIP in the women's prison in Aotearoa/New Zealand highlights the risk that these programs may re-traumatise women and position them as responsible for their trauma. On the other hand, Petrillo's (2021) research on the small pilot ‘Healing Trauma’ program in English prisons found that participating women reported largely beneficial experiences. While Petrillo concedes that abolitionist feminist concerns about gender-responsive programs contributing to prison expansion are difficult to counter, she argues the reality is that women are in the system and they need support. Petrillo, therefore, emphasises the urgent need for improved conditions and programs to address the ‘gendered harms suffered by criminalised women in the here and now’ (Petrillo, 2021: 246). Others who take a more critical line, disagree.

In their research on the Scottish youth justice system, Vaswani and Paul (2019) question to what extent the operationalisation of trauma-informed practice is possible within penal institutions, given that unequal distribution of power defines these spaces and proffers punitive cultures. This analysis reflects the significant body of critical research on women's imprisonment that troubles the idea that prisons can be used as vehicles for therapeutic rehabilitation and women's empowerment (Carlen and Tombs, 2006; Hannah-Moffat, 2000; Pollack, 2009). Earlier iterations of gender-responsive penal reform frameworks have been comprehensively critiqued for contributing to the intensification of gendered and racialised forms of penal governance and surveillance across all components of the penal estate, including prison, transition, and post-release (Carlton and Segrave, 2016; Pollack, 2013). In large part, this intensification is attributed to the ways in which gender-responsive reform frameworks tend to draw from and reproduce conservative risk assessment frameworks, such as ‘Risk-Need-Responsivity’ (RNR), that conflate individual risk categories with markers of social and economic disadvantage, such as lack of stable housing, histories of victimisation or psycho-social disability (Hannah-Moffat, 2004; Pollack, 2013; Russell and Carlton, 2013). This conflation of structural inequality with individual risk has led to increased carceral state interventions, net-widening and criminalisation that disproportionately impact Indigenous women and women of colour (Moore et al., 2018; Russel et al., 2022).

While there is currently a lack of empirical literature on the impacts of trauma-informed prison programming focused on Australia, research on women's imprisonment in the state of Victoria is illuminating, given that gender-responsive penal policies have been in place there for decades (Russell and Carlton, 2013). As argued elsewhere (Russell and Carlton, 2013; Carlton and Russell, 2018b), these policy discourses do not align meaningfully or practically with women's experiences of incarceration in Victoria, including the evidence of gender and race discrimination, inhumane and degrading treatment, and vast increases in the numbers of women entering and returning to prison (Franich et al., 2021; Lachsz and Hurley, 2021; Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, 2021; Elizabeth Morgan House, 2021; Ombudsman Victoria, 2017; Russell et al., 2022; Trần and Spivakovsky, 2021). A recent Australian study based on interviews with service providers working with criminalised women highlighted many challenges they face working in both an under-resourced support system and a patriarchal prison system (Franich et al., 2021). Service providers noted the ongoing lack of systemic capacity to adequately respond to criminalised women's complex trauma histories and interconnected needs, making it exceedingly difficult to avoid re-incarceration (Franich et al., 2021; Russell et al., 2022). This reflects the known limitations of attempting to manage intersecting social disadvantages and the effects of gendered violence in carceral systems (Harris, 2011; Pollack, 2009; 2013; Richie, 2012).

Criminologists advocating for ‘therapeutic’ and ‘trauma-informed’ prisons risk contributing to the business case for more investment in carceral solutions to social problems (Gilmore, 2007). For example, Jewkes et al. (2019) argue that some of the current limitations of trauma-informed practice in prisons can be resolved by avoiding ‘hostile architecture’ and ‘overt security paraphernalia’ in prison environments. They contend that a genuinely ‘woman-centred, trauma informed approach to health and emotional wellbeing in prisons must start with the processes of prison commissioning, planning and design’ (Jewkes et al., 2019: 2). They advocate for ‘innovations’ in prison design and architecture so that, essentially, new prisons do not resemble prisons. However, this approach sustains the logics of gendered carceralism, as the uptake and recycling of gender-responsive discourses into trauma-informed penal policy and design frameworks proffers the belief that—given the right adjustments—the prison can protect and support criminalised and victimised women, even as it controls and punishes them (Hannah-Moffat, 2000; Whalley and Hackett, 2017). In effect, carceral institutions are legitimised as panacea for dealing with the many complex drivers and effects of gendered violence (DesLandes et al., 2022; Richie, 2012). Abolition feminists argue instead that imprisonment is fundamentally violent, premised on surveillance, seclusion and punitive control, and thus an integral part of the carceral continuum of gendered violence (Carlton and Russell, 2018b; Davis, 2003; Davis et al., 2022; Harris, 2011).

Methodology

To critically interrogate the discourse of trauma-informed prisons, we adopt Carol Bacchi's analytic strategy for post-structural policy analysis, known as ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ (or the WPR approach) (Bacchi, 2009; Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016). This approach has been widely engaged in the discipline of public health (especially in the analysis of drug policy), but only recently drawn upon in criminological work that investigates strategies of penal governance (e.g., Laurie and Maglione, 2020).

The WPR approach challenges the idea that governments develop public policy to address already-existing problems that sit outside them. Instead, it contends that governmental policy in fact produces ‘problems’, which are represented in particular ways and thereby imply particular kinds of ‘solutions’ (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016). The WPR approach involves investigating this governmental activity of ‘problematisation’ (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016; Rose and Miller, 1992) by working backwards from the proposed solution to the production of ‘the problem’ itself. By deconstructing the assumptions that underpin policy proposals, situating them historically and politically, and excavating the silences that structure them, the WPR method highlights the political nature of policy discourse and its embeddedness in power relations. Far from neutral or benevolent, the ‘problem-solving’ frameworks of public policy can have far-reaching effects.

We use the WPR analytical tool to track the production and dissemination of the policy construction of ‘trauma-informed correctional practice’, critically interrogate its underlying assumptions, and theorise its implications using a feminist ‘abolitionist lens’ (Russell and Carlton, 2013). While the WPR tool can be applied to a range of texts—since it interprets policy in an ‘expansive sense’—we apply it to policy in its conventional form (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 18–19). In our analysis of the 2017 Corrections Victoria public policy document, Strengthening Connections, we deconstruct the logics and discourses that drive the solutions proposed to address increasing numbers of criminalised women entering Victorian prisons. Our analysis is guided by reflections upon a series of critical questions, as adapted from Bacchi and Goodwin (2016: 19–20; Bacchi, 2009): What's the problem represented to be in the specific policy? What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’? How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about? What forms of subjectification are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’? What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the problem be conceptualised differently? How and where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been and/or how can it be disrupted and replaced? These questions form the basis of our critical analysis of the Strengthening Connections policy to follow below. First, we introduce the policy by providing a brief outline for its stated purpose and our rationale for closely analysing it.

The strengthening connections policy

Strengthening Connections is a ‘gender responsive’ policy framework designed to guide practice in women's prisons in Victoria, Australia through the development of a model of ‘trauma-informed’ penal governance (State of Victoria, 2017: 2). The 36-page policy document was published in 2017 by Corrections Victoria, a ‘core business unit within the Department of Justice and Regulation’ (4). It builds directly upon Corrections’ previous policy, Better Pathways (Department of Justice Victoria, 2005), which failed to realise its primary goal of reducing women's imprisonment through gender-responsive programming (Russell and Carlton, 2013; Carlton and Russell, 2018b). Despite this failure, Strengthening Connections heralds its predecessor's achievement of ‘a gender sensitive response’ to criminalised and imprisoned women and adapts its framework for gender-responsive incarceration based upon recognition of women's unique ‘offending pathways’ (State of Victoria, 2017: 2). While Strenthening Connections was published 6 years ago, it remains the current policy framework for the women's prison system in Victoria, Australia, and the discourses encapsulated in this document reverberate elsewhere in public debates about gendered criminalisation.

The Australian state of Victoria is an ideal case study for exploring the discursive logics of this ascendent strategy of governance in women's prisons—and its relationship to material conditions of confinement—for two key reasons. First, Victoria was the first state in Australia to officially embed gender responsive justice principles into correctional policy in 2005, and since then, the number of people in women's prisons has doubled (Department of Justice & Community Safety, 2020). Second, as discussed further below, the renewed focus upon therapeutic models of corrections emerged at a time of increased scrutiny of the conditions and regimes in women's prisons, and the social inequalities and deprivations experienced by those who end up in them (Ombudsman Victoria, 2017). Indeed, as we have (2013) argued in an analysis of Better Pathways almost a decade ago, the failure of the gender-responsive justice framework lies in its commitment to reformist prison reform (Gilmore, 2007)—namely efforts to improve, strengthen and thereby legitimise the prison system—and in its ‘feminised’ repackaging of conservative risk management frameworks that not only prioritise securitisation, but recast social inequalities as individual pathologies. The convergence of these paradigms only yields more carceral control and expansion (Russell and Carlton, 2013). The potential for the intensification of these effects makes the updated version of gender-responsive penal discourse, distinguished by its novel adaptation of ‘trauma-informed’ rhetoric, worthy of close and critical examination.

Constructing the problem of trauma

Strengthening Connections constructs psychological trauma experienced by criminalised women as the central ‘problem’ to be addressed.¹ This problem emerges as a result of two larger trends: the continuing increase in ‘the number of women involved in the Victorian corrections system’ (State of Victoria, 2017: 2), and the evolving ‘needs’ of this criminalised population (1–2). Like Better Pathways that preceded it, Strengthening Connections aims to develop a framework for penal authorities to respond to the ‘distinctive’ and ‘unique’ needs (2) and ‘offending pathways’ (4) characteristic of the increasing numbers of women entering prison. Within the gender-responsive penal paradigm, gendered pathways are distinguished in large part by prevalence of ‘past victimisation and trauma’ (2). ‘For women offenders’, the policy explains, ‘these levels of victimisation and abuse contribute to their criminality and offending patterns and pathways’ (7). Trauma is constructed as a penal problem (rather than a health or social justice problem) because it is imagined as a central causal factor in women's criminality.

The purported connections between women's trauma and their dangerousness are elaborated through recourse to simplistic psychological constructs. For example, it is explained that, ‘the experience of trauma can make women more vulnerable to committing offences involving interpersonal aggression or violence through a reactive ‘fight’ response’ (8). To support this claim, the policy document cites statistics on criminalisation and sentencing:

Women's greater experience of trauma can link to offending behaviours such as assault, homicide, attempted homicide, defensive homicide or manslaughter. At 30^th June 2017, nearly 26 per cent of the most serious offences for sentenced women prisoners were made up of these offence categories (State of Victoria, 2017: 8).

While these sentencing trends are used to evidence the scale of the problem of dangerous traumatised subjects, these figures are, in reality, the product of a combination of political and social forces and trends. These include gendered and racialised police surveillance and charging practices (Russell et al., 2022), experiences of social entrapment produced by the nexus between state and interpersonal violence (Douglas et al., 2020; ICRR and Sisters Inside, 2021; Richie, 2012), and changes to bail and sentencing laws that are disproportionately impacting women and First Nations people (Russell et al., 2022; Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, 2020; Elizabeth Morgan House, 2020). By focusing on individual offending patterns and trauma-related pathologies these discourses distort the central role that reactionary, punitive changes to criminal law and policy are playing in the expansion of gendered carceralism (Kerr and Shackel, 2018; Russell et al., 2022). By obfuscating systemic drivers, the problem of growing rates of women's imprisonment is individualised, and discourses of trauma represent the prison as a therapeutic solution rather than a punitive one.

The Strengthening Connections document recognises that trauma is ‘a significant contributor to ongoing and persistent mental health problems’ (State of Victoria, 2017: 10). However, the idea that criminalised women's trauma would thereby be better treated or supported in the community mental health system is not entertained. Instead, the penal system is centred as having a vital role to play in managing risk, because the effects of trauma, as represented within Strengthening Connections, align closely with well-established gendered stereotypes of ‘criminal women’, such as excessive and inappropriate emotional expression and social inadequacy (Kerr and Shackel, 2018). According to the policy, trauma manifests through poor impulse control and, by implication, dangerousness:

People who have experienced trauma often remain in a state of heightened vigilance after the traumatic events have passed. Their neural pathways have become sensitised to threat, so they may perceive everyday situations as threats, leading to feelings such as anger, powerlessness or fear. There is also a limited capacity to calm themselves or regulate their emotions…This means that there is a high propensity to present as overly emotional, reactive and reflective during interactions with other people (State of Victoria, 2017: 8).

The policy curates gendered pathologies and concerns about emotional volatility, personality deficits and unpredictable, anti-social behaviour that result from histories of abuse. In short, these women are constructed as dangerous and ‘risky’ victims (Hannah-Moffat, 2004; Pollack, 2007; 2013), which positions surveillance and imprisonment as the most appropriate responses.

The fusion of trauma and risk paradigms

Gender-responsive approaches privilege individual agent or ‘pathways’-based understandings of crime and the RNR model provides a ‘foundation’ for ‘offender management’ within Strengthening Connections (State of Victoria, 2017: 2). The RNR framework suggests that an individual's ‘criminal offending’ can be explained by eight ‘evidence-based’ risk factors, ranging from ‘pro-criminal attitudes and thoughts’ to low levels of access to education and employment (Andrews and Bonta, 2010; Bonta and Andrews 2007). The RNR approach views inequalities and exclusions as individual ‘needs’ (e.g., for education or employment) and because they are regarded as ‘criminogenic’ (i.e., linked to offending pathways), they are therefore also constructed as ‘risks’ (commonly termed ‘dynamic risks’). In effect, any failure to provide support to address a social need can be rebranded a risk factor, which legitimises state governance intervention and control. Within the gender-responsive paradigm, the need to manage ‘the problem’ of dangerous criminality ultimately trumps concerns about structural and systemic patterns of victimisation and trauma. This is because inequality and victimisation are subsumed under the banner of managing individual ‘criminogenic’ risk factors. The role played by imprisonment in patterns of criminalisation and reimprisonment is therefore precluded from these models and policy responses because the focus rests squarely on individual need, risk and responsibility.

The policy contends that ‘gender’, can be ‘conceptual[ly] overl[aid]’ (23) onto the supposedly gender-neutral RNR model of penal governance (Andrews and Bonta, 2010; Bonta and Andrews, 2007). The ready applicability of the RNR framework to gender-responsive approaches is illustrated in Strengthening Connections by way of an essentialising and binary model of gender, using the ‘risk’ of ‘pro-criminal associates’ from the RNR model as an example (State of Victoria, 2017: 23). The policy explains that ‘for men it's peers and for women, it's linked to family, partners and close friends’ and that ‘family violence may make it harder to leave anti-social relational contexts’ (23). Rather than interrogating the social entrapment produced at the margins of state and interpersonal violence, the gender-responsive justice model posits gender-based violence as a contributor to women's ‘criminal offending’, which is understood ‘primarily as the result of poor emotional control, impaired thinking, and problematic decision-making’ (Bevan, 2022: 3; Player, 2017). All of which, in this case, arises from an individualised ‘illness-based’ conception of trauma that pathologises women's behaviours (Pollack, 2007; 2013), including their inability to extricate themselves from ‘bad’ relationships. In turn, they are framed as responsible for failing to exercise agency or being passively involved in offending. The solution to this problem, then, becomes targeted intervention into the thinking patterns and behaviours of the ‘offender’.

The underlying assumption in this problematisation is that criminogenic trauma is an individual psychological pathology that can be remedied through therapeutic strategies of empowerment and emotional regulation. Such ‘strength-based’ strategies, it is assumed, can be learned and developed in the prison, despite the fact that surveillance and spatio-temporal controls—designed to restrict and remove agency—are defining features of carceral spaces (Armstrong, 2020; Carlton, 2007; Davis, 2003). The following passage provides an example of the way that Strengthening Connections attempts to reproduce the imaginary of ‘prisons that empower’ (Hannah-Moffat, 2000):

As women offenders often come from backgrounds of abuse and complex, relational trauma, correctional services and programs need to empower women offenders. This includes building their capacity to act with authority and personal agency over their lives. Self-efficacy will involve reducing dependence and powerlessness and increasing self-belief in being able to act effectively and decisively, with authority and personal agency over their lives (State of Victoria, 2017: 19).

Strengthening Connections urges penal practitioners to ‘provide women with knowledge and skills on how to best manage their trauma symptoms and build skills to regulate thoughts and feelings (for example, mindfulness)’ (24). Here, trauma is restricted to the interior world of criminalised women and disconnected from the structural and relational experiences of imprisonment, which serve to reproduce and exacerbate trauma. In this version of ‘trauma-informed practice’, women are ‘responsibilised’ for redressing and managing their trauma. Rose (2000: 334) identified how the contemporary fusing of welfare and penal estates has created neoliberal governance structures that responsibilise criminalised subjects for undertaking the work of rehabilitation themselves. In this context, individual responsibility both trumps and obscures the relational, structural and systemic factors that in reality drive and magnify experiences of violence and victimisation. This individualising and responsibilising focus may not only undermine attempts to heal from trauma (Bevan, 2022), but also position criminalised women as responsible for any service delivery failures in the prison. Trauma is named as a reason for lack of engagement ‘with the services and programs offered to them’, which reduces ‘the ability of women offenders to benefit from services and programs’ in the prison (9). This narrative of responsibilisation produces a double bind for incarcerated subjects: rehabilitative ‘successes’ are credited to the prison and its staff, while any failures are attributed to criminalised women.

Gender-responsive frameworks responsibilise individual women to make what amount to psychological changes in order to rehabilitate. This is elucidated in a criminological analysis of Better Pathways, which describes this ‘strength-based’ approach as emphasising:

Emotion management, helping women to build the skills to control impulsive behaviour and destructive emotions; of developing in women a pro-social identity, encouraging women to help and be positive towards others; and, of being in control of their daily life, motivating women to believe they can participate in mainstream society and can work to achieve their goals…The animating aim is to build social capital, helping women to find somewhere safe to live, to learn how to manage their money, to access education, and improve their employability (Sheehan and Trotter, 2017: 25).

This focus on individual agency over and above systemic issues obfuscates the complexity of intersecting barriers and challenges that people exiting prison face, including compliance-based models of surveillance driving post-release support; discrimination in employment, housing and health treatment; the crisis in housing affordability; inadequate social welfare payments; and the punitive treatment of illicit drug use (Carlton and Segrave, 2016). The individual pathology model of trauma and ‘strengths-based’ treatment strategies displace and exclude consideration of the role played by structural conditions of poverty, racism, ableism, and gender inequality in patterns of criminalisation, incarceration and cycles of reincarceration (Franich et al., 2021; Jarldorn, 2020; Russell and Carlton, 2013; Russell et al., 2022). Social contexts are minimised in favour of conformity with the dominant individual risk-based model. Any reference to structural conditions are deemed irrelevant or, even worse, an attempt to excuse or justify offending (Kilty, 2014).

The construction of trauma as a gendered ‘risk’ factor for ‘criminal offending’ reflects the entrenchment of the dominant paradigm of risk management and securitisation that has permeated nearly all aspects of the penal system over the past three decades (Hannah-Moffat, 2004; Pollack, 2009; 2013). By converging trauma with risk, criminalised women become ineligible for and further excluded from the socio-legal imaginary of ‘worthy victims’, for whom the criminal legal system supposedly offers protection, not punishment. Through labelling gender violence as an integral part of women's ‘offending pathways’ (State of Victoria, 2017: 21), Strengthening Connections produces a new gendered subject position: the dangerous, traumatised subject. The rightful place of this subject is in the prison, which is the traditional repository for unpredictable and threatening individuals seen as in need of incapacitation. However, the innovation of this recent model of gender-responsive justice is that it requires yet another reimagining of the prison to maintain its appropriateness and relevance for this new ‘cohort’ of prisoners. In this iteration of ‘kinder, gentler cages’ (Braz 2006), the prison becomes ‘trauma-informed’. This results in the obscuring and sanitisation of the ‘structural violence of the prison’ (Armstrong, 2020).

The Strengthening Connections policy argues that ‘correctional services and programs need to be holistic… and flexible in … offering services and programs that avoid re-traumatisation and provide healing pathways’ (State of Victoria, 2017: 19). It also urges consideration of ‘how the physical (prison) environment can provide maximum physical and psychological safety, for example, privacy considerations’ (24). While it is acknowledged that ‘some aspects of traditional service delivery can aggravate the impacts of trauma, particularly in custodial environments’ (9), the examples provided in the policy shield and obscure the prison's use of violence to maintain order and control through sanitised language. For example, strip searches (or ‘sexual assault by the state’ (McCulloch and George, 2009)) become ‘personal searches’ (9); invasive and unpredictable escalations in intimate surveillance are ‘cell searches’ or ‘personal care activities observed by others’ (9); and sudden forced transfers are referred to as ‘relocation from one place to another with minimal notice’ (9). The contradiction of calling for ‘trauma-sensitive operational policies and procedures’ (24) on the one hand, and the normalisation and protection of the need for these institutionally violent practices on the other, reinforces the policy's prioritisation of securitisation and its inability to recognise the trauma-producing effects of incarceration. The assumption reads that if dangerously unregulated trauma is constructed as the problem, trauma-informed prisons must be the solution.

Counter-discourses: the prison is trauma inducing

Critics have highlighted that historically gender-focused prison reform initiatives have coincided with new forms of carceral control, new investments in prison architecture and technology, and increased incarceration rates of women (Braz, 2006; Carlton and Russell, 2018a; 2018b). In the specific local context of Victoria, 15 years of so-called ‘gender-responsive’ penal policy has been accompanied by cycles of financial investment in women's imprisonment (termed ‘prison infrastructure’ in the list of policy ‘deliverables’ provided in Strengthening Connections (5)) and unprecedented numbers of First Nations and unsentenced prisoners (Russell et al., 2022). As noted above, these increases in incarceration have been propelled not by crime rates, but a series of punitive and restrictive changes to laws governing bail, sentencing, and parole in Victoria.

In March 2021, three years after the publication of Strengthening Connections, the Victorian government announced plans for a massive prison expansion program, including AUD $188 million slated for the DPFC women's prison to fund the construction of 106 beds, new reception and multi-purpose buildings, and expanded legal and telecourt services (Victoria State Government 2021). This renewed investment in carceral infrastructure was purported to ‘support reforms to help our prisons avoid or minimise harm to female prisoners… to provide flexible prison capacity, deliver programs to break the cycle of reoffending and keep people out of prison’ (Victoria State Government, 2021). The program is part of a suite of ‘therapeutic’ penal reforms across courts services, youth justice centres and the adult corrections and parole system following high-profile recognition of the links between victimisation, vulnerability and reincarceration in the Royal Commissions into Family Violence and Mental Health (Armitage et al., 2022). The related ‘crime prevention’ reform blitz includes AUD $41.6 million in funding towards ‘wellbeing support’ for women on remand and an extension of disability support in DPFC women's prison. These initiatives suggest that the provision of therapeutic programs and ‘care’ in prisons aligns with—or is perhaps embedded within—prison spending projects that naturalise, rather than challenge, processes of gender and racial criminalisation. While our focus has been to critically analyse discourse, the material conditions and infrastructural inequalities of the carceral state cannot be ignored, and there is a need for more research examining the social impacts of the operationalisation of new penal reform programs.

Gender-responsive policy discourses continue to be instrumental in obfuscating the structural violence of the prison, including its ongoing role in the dispossession and punishment of First Nations people (Tauri, 2014). In Strengthening Connections, it is remarked that: ‘for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, the interpersonal experience of violence has a significant cultural overlay of intergenerational and collective trauma arising from colonisation, dispossession, racism and discrimination’ (State of Victoria, 2017: 9). In this framing, the prison is entirely removed from these violent structures and processes, and reimagined as ‘racially innocent’ (Murakawa, 2019; Whittaker, 2020). Advocacy by families and First Nations-led Dhadowja Foundation and other supporters following the deaths of Indigenous women who were held in custody while trauma-informed policies purportedly guide practice in Victoria's maximum-security women's prison, the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC), have exposed the structural racism and violence of imprisonment that gender-responsive policies deny and obfuscate. The tragic and preventable death of Gunditjmara, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wiradjiri and Yorta Yorta woman Veronica Nelson on 2 January 2022, who was found to have suffered ‘cruel and inhumane treatment’ at the hands of DPFC prison staff, provides a harrowing, illustrative case of the systemic neglect and violence that underwrites imprisonment for Indigenous women in the colony (McGregor, 2023: 149; McGlade and Tarrant, 2021).

The construction of the carceral state's innocence in Strengthening Connections extends to its role in reproducing sexual, gendered and ableist violence. Inconveniently for corrections authorities, the release of the updated gender responsive penal policy coincided with the publication of the damning findings of the Ombudsman Victoria's (2017) inspection of maximum-security women's prison, the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC), to determine its compliance with Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT), which Australia is yet to ratify (Lachsz and Hurley, 2021). The Ombudsman (2017) raised concerns about the ‘humiliating, degrading and undignified practice’ of routine strip searching before and after contact visits, ‘described by some women prisoners as a form of sexual assault’ (5). The OPCAT inspection ‘heard anecdotally of pregnant women who were traumatised by being handcuffed or shackled when attending medical appointments, or who had refused to attend appointments after learning they would be restrained’ (51). The Ombudsman reported on the conditions in the solitary confinement cells in the ‘Swan 2’ unit, describing them as ‘bleak’ and ‘restrictive’ (52). Women in Swan 2 are locked in the cells ‘for at least 22–23 h a day’ with ‘limited access’ to activities, fresh air, or ‘meaningful human interaction’ (52). The report further states ‘several women who had been held in Swan 2 described self-harming while in the unit because they felt it was the only way to get staff to engage with them’ and that ‘staff applied handcuffs to women who were incapacitated or unconscious after self-harming, and before medical assistance was provided’ (53). Unsurprisingly, the ‘clinical psychologist on the inspection team noted that conditions in Swan 2 were likely to re-traumatise women’ (53). Imprisoned peoples’ complaints are not limited to the 2017 Ombudsman investigation and are ongoing.

Attempts to rebrand women's prisons as ‘therapeutic’ and ‘trauma-informed’ remain juxtaposed to lived experiences of incarceration. For example, the formation of the Homes Not Prisons coalition in Melbourne in 2021 has been buoyed by the leadership of First Nations and criminalised women and trans and gender diverse (TGD) people who assert, with the authority of their own experience, that prisons are violent and harmful—they can never be ‘therapeutic’ (Homes Not Prisons, 2021: 4). From this abolition feminist perspective, prison compounds intergenerational cycles of violence and social disadvantage. As Homes Not Prisons spokesperson Karen Fletcher (2022) argues:

Prison traumatises women. It traumatises their kids, and it often sees children sent to foster or state care when they end up in contact with the juvenile system and then the adult system…Prison is essentially a system of violence that separates women from the community and it continues the trauma they suffer on the outside. It's not therapeutic.

Activists and advocates continue to cite concerns regarding the punitive use of solitary confinement and segregation in Dame Phyllis Frost Centre to manage women with acute mental health conditions. In a submission to parliament challenging the government's proposed women's prison upgrade based on ‘therapeutic grounds’, the Homes Not Prisons coalition state:

We have heard this before. In March 2019, the Premier announced the opening of the Rosewood Unit as part of a “Mental Health and Wellbeing precinct” for “women prisoners with complex needs…(including) intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities (and) acquired brain injuries…” at Dame Phyllis Frost women's prison. The unit included two “quiet rooms” for “therapeutic” solitary confinement (Premier of Victoria, 2019). The Homes Not Prisons coalition understands from people in the Dame Phyllis Frost women's prison that the two “quiet rooms” in the Rosewood Unit have proved unusable because women and TGD people held there cannot be heard from the outside (Homes Not Prisons, 2021: 19).

Lack of transparency in prisons can lead to abuses of power and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (Carlton, 2007; Lachsz and Hurley, 2021). Research in the United Kingdom (Moore et al., 2018) and Canada (Kilty, 2014) reinforces the immeasurable harms caused by administrative segregation and solitary confinement for women, especially those presenting with acute mental illness.

Conclusion

This paper has critically interrogated the logics of trauma-informed penal discourse as espoused in the latest iteration of gender-responsive correctional policy in Victoria, Australia, as illustrated in the Strengthening Corrections document (State of Victoria, 2017). Using Bacchi's strategy for post-structural policy analysis, we have demonstrated how trauma is constructed as an individual problem disconnected from its structural, social and institutional contexts, which renders women as simultaneously ‘risky’ and responsible for managing their own trauma. Through these discourses, the administrative violence of the prison is erased, as is the integral role played by the carceral state in the reproduction of settler colonialism. Meanwhile, the prison is reimagined as a place to deliver therapy, healing, and rehabilitation.

Viewed from within the evolving paradigm of gender-responsive penality, the gendered trauma that results from experiences of victimisation is a criminogenic factor. In penal policy, women are characterised as volatile, emotionally unstable, and prone to violence and offending (i.e., they are ‘risky’). Much like offending, trauma is an individual and psychological problem that shapes poor decision-making and anti-social patterns. It can thus be understood as a dynamic risk, or hybrid risk-need, and integrated into the dominant RNR correctional framework. This representation of the problem has important discursive effects, including the production of traumatised risky subjects and the fantasy of the healing prison (despite its overarching rationale of securitisation) replete with ‘strengths-based’ programs (despite these having potentially disempowering implications for women). This provides window dressing that legitimates continued investment in the prison for ‘holistic’ incapacitation. Meanwhile, the political drivers and social effects of carceral expansion are obscured.

Abolitionists have long recognised the importance of addressing and reducing the harms that people experience in prison (Davis and Rodriguez, 2000), and this has been pursued through strategies such as campaigning to end various forms of state violence, such as deaths in custody (Klippmark and Crawley, 2018; Whittaker, 2020), forced prison transfers (Carlton and Russell, 2018a) and routine strip searching (McCulloch and George, 2009). At the same time, abolitionists have shown how advocating for reforms that hinge upon significant investments in the prison estate, or that rely upon disguising or glossing over the structural violence of the prison, only consolidate and expand the power of the carceral state (Russell and Carlton, 2013; Schept, 2013; Schenwar and Law, 2020). Discourses of trauma-informed prisons extend longstanding attempts to relegitimise the prison as a ‘catchall solution’ to complex social problems (Gilmore, 2007), redirecting public resources away from community-based support systems like public housing and harm reduction initiatives. The shift toward ‘carceral humanism’ (Kilgore, 2014) has not helped to eliminate cages, as Davis et al. (2022: 71) argue, but rather ‘redraw them, and thus often make them less transparent, while also widening the boundaries of policing, punishment and surveillance’ (see also Schenwar and Law, 2020). These seemingly progressive forms of correctional ‘care’ instead facilitate carceral entrapment and effectively operate as a ‘conduit’ for women to gain access to social welfare and resources otherwise unavailable (Musto, 2019). In Australia there are numerous recent examples of the ways in which the rhetoric of ‘building communities’, ‘therapeutic care’ and ‘better prisons’ has been co-opted by state governments and private security companies to legitimise new prison construction projects in the face of increasing evidence and awareness of the failures of incarceration by its own measures (such as ‘reducing reoffending’) (see Bartels et al., 2020).² Abolitionists argue that these failures indicate prisons are working exactly as intended—to contain those excluded from (or surplus to) neoliberal capitalist market economies (Gilmore, 2007; Kurti and Brown, 2023; Roach, 2022).

Organised, grassroots movements that centre and amplify the voices and needs of women and gender diverse people with lived experience of imprisonment, and work to develop abolition feminist frameworks for understanding the nexus between state and interpersonal violence, can disrupt the circular logics and double-speak of trauma-informed incarceration, and dispel the myth of the healing prison. The lesson to be learned is that prisons, by their nature and function, cannot be reimagined as places of therapy or care, and attempts to do so risk complicity in the perpetuation of carceral control.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Bree Carlton

Notes

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