Author meets Critics panel session

Women, Stigma and Desistance from Crime: Precarious Identities in the Transition to Adulthood.
Dr Gilly Sharpe, University of Sheffield (author)

Professor Rachel Condry, University of Oxford (critic)
Dr Robin Gålnander, Stockholm University (critic)
Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, University of Cambridge (critic)
Jess Southgate, Agenda Alliance (critic)

This book examines criminalised and marginalised young women’s trans-institutional experiences of stigma and devaluation in longitudinal perspective. Based on two waves of fieldwork with 36 young adult women who were criminalised as children during a highly punitive period in English youth justice and who came of age at the start of the global recession, the book illustrates how criminal stigma interacts with class-based condescension, welfare inaction and disciplinary punishment across education, welfare and penal institutions. Criminologists and scholars of penology have tended to focus on the effects of penal and youth/criminal justice institutions and practices largely in isolation from other structural, cultural and institutional arrangements. This has resulted in a narrow conceptualisation of (in)justice which fails to take adequately into account the breadth and duration of criminalised women’s experiences of stigmatisation and punishment. This book contends that the stigmatisation of criminalised young women must be understood in relation to a contemporary cultural and political economy that devalues working-class women and sustains the marginalisation and degradation of materially disadvantaged young people. Stigma is pervasive and institutionalised. It constitutes additional punishment, and it may harm and diminish women both before any involvement in lawbreaking and long after crime has been left behind.