Women and punishment in Abya Yala

Abstract

Capitalism, patriarchy and racism are three keys axes of the oppression of women and it is in the intersectional of these categories where the punitive control system is configured as one of the privileged spaces of symbolic and political dispute. Categories such as class, gender and race mutually intersectionate pushing the process of criminalization of women. This chapter analyses from a critical, feminist, decolonial and intersectional approach, the situation of women imprisonment in Abya Yala -Latin America-, focusing specifically on the reality of indigenous and foreign women. We examine the criminalization of these women, the variables that weave their discrimination and the reasons for the increasing number of women prisoners in that region during last decades. The feminization of poverty, the economic crisis and the community-peasant way of life or the policies called “war on drugs”, undertaken by the USA from prohibitionist and punitive perspectives, converge in the process of differential criminalization between sexes. Moreover, this process is strongly accentuated against indigenous women, who, crossed by the borders of the colonial states of Latin America, are considered foreigners of the territories where they live and have lived since the time of their ancestors.