Women in prison in Greece

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In Greece the first research on prisons was carried out in the late 1970s by Elias Daskalakis and associates on six male correctional facilities, and in 1986 on female correctional facilities by the Greek-American Jennifer Panagopoulos, whose PhD study on the female prison of Korydallos was published in English. Primary research on corrections is hard to carry out and requires very active participation by the authorities and the prisoners. Given the unwillingness of the Ministry of Justice to play a role in any kind of empirical study, in particular before 1990, the reluctance of the prison staff, a lack of cooperation and mutual support among academic research teams, along with the poor economic resources, the dearth of research in this field is understandable.

Only in the 1990s did research become more systematic, but the area continues to be unexplored, and the prison situation now is much more complicated and difficult than before (overcrowding, security, many foreigners with dissimilar social, cultural and criminal backgrounds, etc.). Apart from the aforementioned practical, financial, and bureaucratic attitudes toward social research, the low criminality of women has contributed to the limited interest in it. To my knowledge the following primary studies have been carried out on imprisoned women: in 1994-95 by Thanopoulou, Fronimou and Tsilimingaki (1997) for to-be-released and released women; in 1995 by Courakis, Milioni and associates; in 1994-95 by Panoussis and associates (2003); in 2003-04 by Karydis and associates (2005) on women who had committed homicide and were serving their sentence in prison or were on remand; in 2004 by Pitsela and associates (2010) about prison law enforcement in Greece; and in 2006 by Mitrossyli and Fronimou, about the marital and social profile. However, there are some publications that either present various theoretical concepts for the general explanation of female criminality, or they also use statistical data, including such from Greece, for the same reason.

The gender issue attracted academic and political interest at the end of 1990s with the infiow of immigrants from the former communist countries, in relation to prostitutes as victims of trafficking, and afterwards with the European and international discussion of domestic violence, child abuse and equality issues. Both resulted in some legal and empirical studies, mostly PhD dissertations and MA research. There are also a few studies concerning the presentation of women in the media and of female crime.