Worth how much it weights: what leads pregnant women to prison?

Abstract

The exponential growth in the number of incarcerated women in Brazil did not change the invisibility context
in which they live. Faced with this silence, and realizing that is against the feminine and their body that the criminal justice system seems to express its most perverse acting, the project Mulheres pelas Mulheres aimed to give voice and visibility to those women. From a series of interviews – with the imprisoned women and with the women visiting prisoners at the penitentiaries of Piraquara-PR – it was possible to draw a profile of the incarcerated women in Paraná. However, it was surprising the significant number of pregnant women and with babies within the system. Thus, based on a feminist epistemology, it was possible to notice, by the narratives and the information about the visit, the visitor’s inspection and the prison circumstances of certain women, a pattern, a series of repeated stories. Pregnant women that, in the visitors’ queues, receive substantial offers of money in exchange for a service, which success would have already been agreed with the in charge of the inspection. Suddenly, however, they become, for the criminal justice system, drug dealers. Women-drug-dealers who bring in their womb the paradoxical contradiction of being women-pregnant-drug dealer, subverting the gender order and the naturally established roles, representing what, symbolically, it is not allowed to admit: that a criminal could be, also, a mother.