Resistance and compliance in women’s prisons: Towards a critique of legitimacy

This article explores how power is negotiated in women’s prisons. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in three penal establishments in England, the author analyses the ways by which women negotiate restrictions of imprisonment and the manner in which they attempt to resist institutional control. It is proposed that power is negotiated on a private, internalised level, as women often resist the institution simply by trying to maintain an image of control over their own lives. However, this image of themselves as active, reasoning agents is undermined by institutional constraints that encourage them to exhibit traditional, passive, feminine behaviour at the same time as they deny them their identities and responsibilities as mothers, wives, girlfriends, and sisters. The author concludes that women’s modes of resistance indicate that imprisonment is contested and embattled in ways reflecting broader, social norms of behaviour and identity, and thus, that the ‘legitimacy’ of imprisonment rests, at least in part, upon gender. I would like to thank Anthony Gerbino and Alison Liebling for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper which was presented in an earlier form at the Law and Society Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, July 10–13, 1996.     

ASSESSING THE PARENT–CHILD RELATIONSHIP IN PARENTING CAPACITY EVALUATIONS: CLINICAL APPLICATIONS OF ATTACHMENT RESEARCH

The lack of an articulated model of parenting competence and the limited use of empirically based assessment procedures is a weakness of current parenting capacity assessment protocols. The current article attempts to address this issue through the application of attachment theory and research in assessing one of the most critical components of parenting capacity assessments: the parent–child relationship. New empirically and attachment‐based assessment tools and procedures, well suited for the assessment of parental fitness, are presented, along with recommended practice guidelines to enhance the assessment of the parent–child relationship in cases of young, maltreated children (under 6 years of age).     

Mock Defendants' Procedural Justice Judgments of Alternative Trial Procedures in a Medical Malpractice Case

Mental health professionals were asked to imagine themselves in the role of defendant in a medical malpractice case. Each participant was told that their case could be tried according to standard adversary trial procedures or by an alternative procedure. The alternative procedures involved either varying the way that expert testimony would be developed or bifurcation of issues at trial. Participants rated the available alternative procedure relative to the ADVERS procedure in terms of preference, fairness, willingness to comply with trial outcomes, and other procedural justice dimensions. Results indicated a strong endorsement of potential alternatives to the standard adversarial trial process for resolving medical malpractice claims.     

Access to justice: a new approach using human rights standards

This article details a trial of a new approach to measuring access to justice that utilises human rights instruments as the reference point. It involves an examination of people's actual experience of the justice system using human rights standards as the benchmark. The research project selected the right to income security. The project trialled a range of methods gathering data about how people have been treated in the Australian social security system and how they would expect to be treated if there was a human right to social security in Australia. This data is assessed against the set of standards developed to measure the enjoyment of the right to social security. The trial suggests that without knowledge about human rights and legal rights, without the confidence to exercise those rights and without the capacity or capability to seek or find help it is unlikely that people will realise their rights and accordingly access to justice is placed in question. The research methodology has the potential to be a useful model to conduct further access to justice research.