Emerging penality: Shifting ideologies, reconciliations and clashes

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in the only women's prison in Latvia, this article examines the impact of the ideological shift from socialism to neoliberalism on the way women's imprisonment operates. The aim is to provide a more nuanced understanding of how the transition from the Soviet regime to a market-led neoliberal economy has impacted women's imprisonment in the Global East, while challenging the neglect of this area by mainstream criminological scholarship. The ideological rupture introduced ‘governing through freedom’, which has currently resulted in a sophisticated amalgam of penal power fusing the Soviet legacy, which informs the ‘eastern soft power’, a rights-based approach and other western influences such as sentence planning based on inmate risks and needs. These developments have significantly transformed the power dynamics in a Latvia women's prison. On the one hand, these changes have improved staff–prisoner relationships and assisted the implementation of international rules for the treatment of prisoners while on the other, they have led to more complex, individualized and distant relationships between the women prisoners.