Prelims

Half Title Page

Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia

Endorsement Page

This exciting new collection reinvigorates prison studies and feminist criminology, by widening the analytical and geographical lens of both. It also offers a critical analysis of the reach and limits of international human rights law. Integrating activist voices with early career and more established scholars, these essays offer a sobering glimpse into the lived reality of prisons in Southeast Asia, while also mapping out possible routes for challenge. In so doing, it reminds us of the salience of gender in understanding incarceration and the urgent need for action.

Mary Bosworth, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford

As a criminologist and social activist, someone who toils to decolonize both criminal justice and criminology, it is always pleasing to encounter work that privileges the experiences of individuals and communities that are too often silenced within the “wall of noise” that surrounds crime control policy and practice throughout the world. Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia, edited by Andrew Jefferson and Samantha Jeffries, is one such book. The collection of essays included in the book cover an impressive range of issues facing cisgender women, transgender persons and sexual minorities, as they encounter criminal justice systems and practice in Southeast Asia. The breadth of issues covered, along with the expressed intent of the editors to give voice to “activist, critical and feminist theorizing and research on gender, intersectionality, criminalization and carceral experiences,” makes this contribution an invaluable resource for criminologists, social activists, jurists and policymakers working to enhance the efficacy of criminal justice policy and practice in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Juan Marcellus Tauri, The University of Waikato, and the Centre for Global Indigeniety

In this collection, Jefferson and Jeffries draw together a range of important, expert voices to shed light on gender-based experiences, gendered harms and human rights considerations in the contexts of criminal justice in Southeast Asia. It provides data, analyses, theorizations and experiences of populations that much of the Western world has ignored or overlooked. The chapters aim to juxtapose the personal against the structural in a way that is enlightening for both. In so doing, the book as a whole argues that for transformation to take place, researchers, reformers and activists should consider not just individual need but also the legal, political and cultural constraints and conventions that create structural and gendered inequalities in the first place. The book also reminds us that there are aspects of human experience that are universal, such as the desire for freedom, to be seen as we really are and to be valued for the life that we each breathe into the spaces and societies we occupy. Shifting criminology’s gaze toward such issues from a Southeast Asian perspective is a most welcome and much needed adjustment of perspective.

Deborah H. Drake, Senior Lecturer, Criminology, The Open University

Series Page

EMERALD STUDIES IN ACTIVIST CRIMINOLOGY

Series Editors:

Vicky Canning (University of Bristol), Greg Martin (University of Sydney) and Steve Tombs (The Open University)

Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology is a platform working to identify and address the harms of criminalization and expansive social controls. It draws together academics, activists, progressive policy-makers and practitioners to encourage cutting edge engagement on topics to effect positive social change.

The historical relationships between criminology and activism are contentious. Since criminology in its administrative forms can facilitate increases in state and cultural controls, and was formed within this nexus of social order, the discipline is often complicit in acting on behalf of states and state-corporate collaborators. Critical criminology and zemiology, by contrast, have nurtured conditions under which power and hierarchy can be more fully addressed from radical perspectives, specifically in challenging state-centric focuses on crimes of the powerless. It is from these positions that Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology encourages engagement with those working against negative impacts of crime controls on the lives of intersectionally disadvantaged groups in society.

Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology seeks to examine the history of both recent and more established justice campaigns and interventions. It extends across a range of pre-existing sub-fields of criminology that engage in questions of effecting progressive change through activism, such as feminist criminology, juvenile justice, migrant rights, corporate and state crime, green/environmental criminology, sentencing and wrongful conviction, prisons, corrections and abolitionism, and justice for victim/survivors of harm and crime. Campaigns and movements – defensive and progressive – around these issues define what we mean by “activist,” while we view “criminology” in its broadest, inter-disciplinary and social science inflected version.

Title Page

Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia

EDITED BY

ANDREW M. JEFFERSON

Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY), Denmark

SAMANTHA JEFFRIES

Griffith University, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Editorial matter and Selection © 2022 Andrew M. Jefferson and Samantha Jeffries Individual chapters © the respective Author/s Published by Emerald Publishing under an exclusive licence.

Chapter 1, Introduction to Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia, and Chapter 11, Conclusion: Decentering Research and Practice Through Mutual Participation are Open Access with copyright assigned to respective chapter authors. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.

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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80117-287-5 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-286-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-288-2 (Epub)

Contents

List of Tables

About the Contributors

Chontit Chuenurah started her career at the Ministry of Justice of Thailand and took part in the Enhancing Life of Females Inmates Project, which was later developed into the drafting of the United Nations Rules on the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules). Her early career mainly focused on the issues related to crime prevention and criminal justice. Currently, she serves as the Manager for the Office of the Implementation of the Bangkok Rules and Treatment of Offenders Programme at the Thailand Institute of Justice. As part of her work, she supervises and leads several research projects, including Women Prisoners and the Implementation of the Bangkok Rules in the ASEAN Region, National Survey of Female Inmates in Thailand, and Pathways to Imprisonment of Female and Male Prisoners in Thailand. She also played an important role in developing and launching the first comprehensive regional training program on the “Management of Women Prisoners in the ASEAN Region” which was launched by the Thailand Institute of Justice in 2016. She graduated with a Master’s of Law from the University of Kent, and a Master’s degree, Science in Social Policy and Social Research, from the University of Southampton, the United Kingdom.

Billy Gorter is the Executive Director of This Life Cambodia. He is a passionate activist and advocate for change, bringing more than 20 years of experience tackling conservation, social and human rights and educational issues in Australia and Cambodia to his role as Executive Director of This Life Cambodia. He launched This Life in 2007 based on his founding principles of listening to, engaging with and advocating alongside communities. This development philosophy achieves high-impact outcomes and sets best practice for international development. He is a sought-after speaker and is passionately committed to addressing the rights of children through education, juvenile justice and advocacy.

Philip J. Gover is the Impact Learning & Effectiveness Lead at This Life Cambodia. He has a passion for sustainable development and social economics. Following three years of research and tutoring with Northumbria University Social Science Research Centre, he spent 12 years working as a Senior Public Health Manager with the United Kingdom Government & National Health Service. He has worked in developing countries in East Africa, Southeast Asia and various settings across Europe, supporting a variety of Social Enterprises, Charities and Housing Associations. He is a graduate of Durham University (BA Hons’ Community & Youth Studies), Durham University Business School (MA Enterprise Management) and the University of Northumbria (MPH, Public Health). He is a Fellow of both the Chartered Management Institute and Royal Society for Public Health.

Lucy Harry is a Doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Law, Centre of Criminology at Oxford University undertaking research on gender and the death penalty in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Malaysia. Before undertaking the Doctor of Philosophy, she completed the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Oxford University, graduating with Distinction. She is a Member of Oxford University’s Death Penalty Research Unit and is currently providing research assistance on several projects, including a study of foreign nationals at risk of the death penalty in Asia and the Middle East.

Andrew M. Jefferson, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at DIGNITY – Danish Institute against Torture where among other things he is a Principal Investigator on the project Legacies of Detention in Myanmar. He has been with DIGNITY for over two decades occupying academic positions at the cutting edge of theory/practice within what is a predominantly activist human rights organization. His work focuses on ethnographies of prisons and prison reform processes in the global south and has featured a range of collaborations with activist organizations engaged in torture prevention, human rights work, and prison reform. He co-convenes the Global Prisons Research Network. Aside from issues of prisons and comparative penality, interests include the relation between state and subject in transitional contexts, the hierarchization of human worth, and how to conceptualise human suffering under compromised circumstances. He is the author (with Liv Gaborit) of Human Rights in Prisons: Comparing Institutional Encounters in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and the Philippines.

Samantha Jeffries, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice/Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University. Her research focuses on marginalized social statuses, criminalization, victimization, and justice. She has conducted research on LGBTIQA+ domestic violence, the sex industry, problem-solving courts, sentencing, gender, and indigeneity. In focus more recently, has been the needs and experiences of domestic violence victims in the family law system and restorative justice processes. Since 2015, she has been collaborating with the Thailand Institute of Justice undertaking studies in Southeast Asia and Kenya on gendered pathways to criminalization, women’s experiences of imprisonment, as well as re-integration and human rights. She has co-authored a book on domestic violence (Romantic Terrorism: An Autoethnography of Domestic Violence, Victimization and Survival, with Sharon Hayes), published articles in high impact journals including Criminology and the British Journal of Criminology, and conducted training on the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules) with prison personnel in Thailand, Kenya and Indonesia for the Thailand Institute of Justice and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Myanmar Research Team. For reasons of safety and security, and given the circumstances in Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup, and with much regret, we are unable to reveal the names, affiliations, or any identifying information for this research team. We are deeply thankful for their contributions to this book, their unwavering dedication to the human rights of Myanmar’s people, and stand with them as they continue to fight for democratic freedom.

Barbara Owen, PhD, is an international expert in the areas of women and imprisonment; gender inequality within the criminal justice system; improving operational practice in women’s prisons; and women’s prison culture, with extensive experience in conducting, ethnographies, large-scale surveys, policy studies; and program evaluation. Internationally, her work involves implementing human rights protections in women’s prisons with the Thailand Institute of Justice. A Professor Emerita of Criminology at California State University, Fresno, she received her PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 1984. Before returning to academia, she was a Senior Researcher with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Her books include In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women’s Imprisonment (with James Wells and Joy Pollock), and In the Mix: Struggle and Survival in a Women’s Prison. Along with Barbara Bloom and Stephanie Covington, she has co-authored a major policy report, Gender-Responsive Strategies: Research, Practice, and Guiding Principles for Women Offenders (2003). More recent works include multiple projects relating to the context of sexual and other forms of safety in women’s prisons; an analysis of women’s recidivism; research and policy work on Realignment in California and co-authoring the policy report “Unlocking America.” Her work has been funded by local, state, and federal agencies. Her consulting experience includes several projects with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; on-going work with the National Institute of Corrections; extensive work with The Moss Group in providing research and policy review of operational practice in women’s facilities; developing architectural design in women’s jails; and evaluation efforts within local probation systems. She also serves on the Advisory Council of the Safe Alternatives to Segregation II initiative with the Vera Institute of Justice.

Min Jee Yamada Park joined the International Detention Coalition as the Asia-Pacific Programme Officer in 2019. Prior to that, she worked in the areas of detention monitoring, research, policy advocacy, and capacity building, particularly for government actors in Southeast Asia and Africa. Her previous role as a Policy and Research Coordinator with the Thailand Institute of Justice focused on advocating for the humane treatment of marginalized groups including migrants, stateless persons, and ethnic minorities in criminal detention, and promoting the implementation of the relevant international human rights standards into national laws and policies in Southeast Asia. She has also published and spoken at various international and regional platforms on the experiences and challenges of vulnerable groups deprived of liberty, particularly women and their accompanying children, based on her extensive field research in detention facilities in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Kenya. She received a Master of Arts in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Jutathorn Pravattiyagul earned a PhD in Criminology from Utrecht University and Hamburg University in 2018. She has a decade-long experience working as a researcher, ethnographer, university lecturer and consultant for international organizations, the private sector, and universities globally. Since 2016, she has served as an Associate Scholar at Harvard University Asia Center. Her professional specialization is on discrimination and race, gendered migration, and identity politics, reducing gender-based violence, transgenderism, transgender prisoners’ rights, policies-making and criminal justice in Thailand and Europe. She has also worked as a Consultant for United Nations Development Programme and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on transgender inmates and prisons management policies projects by creating Standard Operation Procedures and technical brief documents for states. Currently, she is lecturing in Anthropology Department at Copenhagen University with a special focus on post-colonial queer, gender stigma and sexuality from non-Western perspectives.

Prarthana Rao graduated with a Masters in Development Studies from The International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She currently works as Policy and Research Officer at the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ), an organization that aims at strengthening criminal justice reform and enhancing the rule of law through research, capacity building and policy advocacy. In her present role, she works extensively on improving gender sensitivity in the criminal justice system through the use of international human rights standards and norms. As a researcher, she has been involved in multiple projects on understanding women’s pathways to prison, their experiences of incarceration and their rehabilitation needs in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, and Kenya. As a capacity-building specialist, she has trained more than 100 senior correctional staff and prison officers from 11 countries on gender-sensitive prison management. Prior to TIJ, she worked at Leaders’ Quest, a social enterprise that helps companies balance profit with purpose, aiming to reduce the structural inequalities in society by focusing on empathetic leadership development.

Tristan Russell is a PhD student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University/Griffith Criminology Institute. Her PhD examines the intersection between age and gender, and utilizing prisoners’ voices, explores the experiences of older women incarcerated in Thailand. Before this, Tristan was a member of Griffith University’s prestigious Honours College, graduated with a Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice with distinction in 2018 and completed her Honours year in 2019. Her Honours dissertation focused on gendered pathways to prison in Thailand. She has a track record of published papers in the areas of gender, imprisonment trajectories, life during and post-incarceration, gender-based violence and restorative justice. She is also engaged in research projects on domestic violence and family law.

Diana Therese M. Veloso is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Studies Program Coordinator of the Behavioral Science Department at De La Salle University. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. She has conducted original research on the life histories and issues of women formerly on death row in the Philippines and the re-entry experiences and challenges of formerly incarcerated women in Chicago, Illinois. She served as the lead researcher in two studies on serious and organized crime threats in the Philippines, as commissioned by the National Law Enforcement Coordinating Committee-Subcommittee on Organized Crime. She was a consultant in a nationwide evaluation of the interventions and rehabilitation programs for children in conflict with the law in the Philippines. She has also conducted research on gender-based violence among internally displaced people in Zamboanga City and Marawi City, two conflict zones in the Southern Philippines. She was also involved in participatory action research projects with First Nations communities in Chicago, Illinois.

Acknowledgments

We owe a debt of gratitude to a range of institutions and people and would like to take this opportunity to register our appreciation. Together we thank the Series editors, Steve Tombs and Vicky Canning for their belief in the project and Katy Mathers and colleagues at Emerald for smooth processing. The project out of which this book grew (Legacies of Detention in Myanmar) is funded by a grant from the Consultative Research Committee of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and we are grateful to the Danida Fellowship Centre who administer the grant and particularly to Pernille Friis. We thank Sriprapha Petcharamesree of Mahidol University and the Southeast Asian Human Rights Network who planned the conference at which we would have presented these ideas were it not for the pandemic. We thank the contributors for putting your ideas and energies at our disposal and for your receptiveness to our input. And, of course, the book would not exist without the people who chose to engage with us (and the book’s contributors) during field research sharing experiences of injustice and suffering, oppression and resistance. You take us places we could never go alone, and we are deeply grateful.

Samantha would like to thank Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the Thailand Institute of Justice, in particular the Office for the Bangkok Rules and Treatment of Offenders (OBR) for enabling my research in Southeast Asia with travel funds, an institutional platform, and collaborative relationships through which to undertake joint projects. In particular, from the OBR team, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Chontit Chuenurah, Yodsawadi Thipphayamongkoludom, Salila Narataruksa, Ploypitcha Uerfue, Wasoontara Sapsaman, Prarthana Rao and Min Jee Yamada Park. Additionally, I would like to thank Barbara Owen and Kathleen Daly for their mentorship and William Wood for his steadfast support throughout my research journey in Southeast Asia.

Andrew would like to thank DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture (my research base for 20 years) and colleagues there for support, encouragement and tolerance. I single out Janne Tornsberg (for helping control the funds in such a friendly and professional fashion), Angelina Tarik Fattah (who is always able to find the literature I need) and members of the LoDiM team who sustained the project from its earliest days. Here I think of Irlin Osaland, Sarah Auener, Eva Zahia Nassar, Hannah Russell, Ergun Cakal, Liv Gaborit, and Tomas Max Martin. We gratefully acknowledge Hannah Russell and Tomas Martin’s editorial contribution to Chapter 5. On matters pertaining to feminism, patriarchy, entitlement and mutuality I thank Victoria Canning Brigitte Dragsted, Luisa Schneider, and Bethany Schmidt from whom I am learning much.

Our gratitude is deep and genuine. Our expression of it signals in no way responsibility for the content or tone of this book. For that, we take joint responsibility.