Abstract
Why are women the fastest growing segment of prison populations worldwide? In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, why are women, and particularly those from racialized, immigrant, and Indigenous communities, ending up in jail in historically unprecedented numbers? In this book, Adrienne Roberts deploys a feminist political economy perspective to argue that this imprisonment of women is an outcome of a gender politics that permeates the brutal police and punishment practices of neoliberal capitalism. Although written for an academic audience familiar with historical materialist perspectives, this book offers important insights and evidence for social workers and social work educators and researchers.
Roberts contends that coercive and violent state practices that produce and reproduce exploitative gender relations have been constitutive of capitalism from its beginnings. She takes readers on an historical journey, from the 16th-century English Poor Laws, Settlement Laws, and laws regulating bastardy and infanticide to present-day incarcerations, housing and labor regulation, and workfare legislation. Drawing on evidence of similar developments in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, she provides a meticulous and fascinating account that traces the conjoined histories of social welfare policies, penal systems, and economic developments.
Roberts locates patriarchal relations in their current form as an accomplishment of capitalism, tied to the ongoing search for profit through “primitive accumulation”. She focuses on these often-violent processes that move property from public to private ownership (e.g. legislation that results in the privatization of public services or lands) and/or remove wealth and land from many people to a wealthy few (as was the case in the post-2008 economic crisis foreclosures on subprime mortgages). Roberts argues that the law and social policies have been used as mechanisms to create the conditions necessary for this primitive accumulation. Further, she shows how these processes have undermined the power of women, shaped gender-based divisions of labor, institutionalized control of women’s bodies, and produced gender-based hierarchies.
This book forcefully and convincingly makes the argument that capitalism is much more than an economic system that produces class inequalities. It shows that capitalism continues to create and maintain intrinsic and unprecedented exploitative gender and race relations as part of the same process that consolidates wealth in the hands of elites. These relations are not merely a side effect of class politics but are fundamentally shaped by the law and social policies to produce the social hierarchies necessary to capital accumulation. Thus, the law and social policy are revealed as aspects of the capitalist order rather than as external buffers that moderate capitalism’s tendencies to produce inequality or as the tools of elites. As Roberts states, “manifestations of state power should be viewed not simply as repressive instruments of the ruling classes but as part of the social ontology of capitalism” (p. 5).
While Roberts shows a capable hand with the historical material, she is less adept with the contemporary empirical literature. She diverts her argument from her central focus on the three Anglo liberal democratic countries to pull in wide ranging evidence from around the globe to support her arguments. At the same time, she neglects important feminist empirical work on women from the three countries of her case study, fails to comment on the differences between jurisdictions, and, while mentioning resistance, leaves out analysis of the effects of battles waged by activists in each of these contexts. A discussion of these differences may have helped to provide more nuance in her concluding discussion on resistance and activism.
This absorbing, carefully researched book should be read by graduate students, researchers, and theorists who have interest in poverty, social assistance, social policy, policing, prisons, women’s issues, feminism, historical materialism, political economy, and neoliberalism. Its chapters offer excellent readings for graduate courses on social welfare policy or theories of social welfare. Further, due to the significance and originality of this analysis, it will be of intense interest for some social workers who are willing to wade through its dense theoretical material.