Abstract:
Abstract:
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a certain dissatisfaction becomes apparent
in the records of British concerned themselves with crime and its punishment in colonial
Kenya. Broadly speaking, there was a growing perception that there were serious
problems with the manner in which women entered the labor market and crime
associated with it and on the other hand, how the colonial state punished female
offenders. While some observers questioned whether imprisonment in colonial jails was
particularly punishing, others expressed alarm that such incarceration was actually
counterproductive: that instead of reforming and rehabilitating women criminals, British
prisons contributed to their further demoralizations. One is that the most basic
mechanism through which long-term female convicts were to be reformed were
vocational training and a comprehensive segregation: the isolation of the offender not
only from families, non-criminals and free society, but also from men, other female
criminals, the idle, the sick, and assorted other contaminating influences. These processes
were expected to transform convicted women into productive, orderly and modest
members of the laboring class. Such sentiments contributed to the philosophy of the
female prison in Kenya. This study, therefore, focuses its attention on the history of
Langata women prison, the only female corrective institution in Kenya.
Keywords: carceral, gender, imprisonment, theorizing, punishment
