‘You Can’t Blame the System for It All, but Systemically, They’re Setting Them up to Fail’: The Criminal Justice System as a Barrier to Women’s Employment and Desistance

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the criminal justice system and related policies and practices can create gendered socio-structural constraints that limit women’s pathways toward employment, as well as their hopes or expectations of obtaining it. Through qualitative interviews with women with lived experience of the justice system, employers who hire people with convictions, and practitioners from justice-related charities and non-government organisations, we argue that the justice system undermines subjective changes in desistance (including agency, hope and employment-related aspirations), while failing to provide structural supports to make sustained employment a reality. We argue that government targets and funding priorities often overlook women’s gendered post-release experiences, creating a misalignment between policy objectives and women’s realities. The article offers recommendations for how policy and practice can engender and sustain employment-related hopes and aspirations so that more women, should they want to, can use employment as a ‘hook for change’.