Older Women in the Criminal Justice System: Running Out of Time

Azrini Wahidin set out to raise awareness of this hitherto forgotten and neglected group by beginning an empirical investigation which eventually produced 35 semi-structured interviews with serving women prisoners aged 50 +. Wahidin's theoretically informed analysis of these interviews constitutes the major part of this timely, sensitive and disturbing book.

Older Women in the Criminal Justice System is as comprehensive in scope as its title implies. It covers older women's courtroom and prison experiences as well as the specific ways in which they are treated by prison personnel, prison health care professionals and other, younger prisoners. There are useful sections on the research methods employed, and some recommendations for much-needed policy changes if the Prison Service is to fulfil its duty of care to these very vulnerable and, in many cases, physically frail women. Best of all, however, there is Wahidin's easy and successful handling of the complex of methodological and theoretical tasks which she set herself... Despite the sadness, melancholy and anger which a treatise on time, loss and penal humanity must provoke, readers will, I think, be as grateful as I am that Azrini Wahidin has produced such a rich and satisfying text. It is a work that should certainly be read by students of criminology, gerontology and sociology, as well as by penal reformers and penal policymakers. Being the very readable and compelling study that it is, however, Older Women should also engage the interest of readers way beyond the confines of academia and criminal justice. Indeed, the universality of the book's major themes may well resonate most painfully with all those aging women (of whatever age and background) who glimpse, in the women prisoners' stories, some of the more unwelcome elements of their own socio-biographies.