Novecento’s female prisons: a centuries-old punitive routine

Abstract

This paper analyses in general terms the female imprisonment in Spain along the XX century, with the so-called «galera», about 1600, as a national prototype. The characteristics of this model, plainly distinguished from the male one, would be summed up in a special rigour of the imprisonment –as prefiguration of the massive use of penal punitive seclusion- and well as an extraordinary stress on moral and socio-sexual «correction» of the female offender, by means of Religious agents. The article describes that course, looking in more detail at the II Republic political reforms as well as the civil war and post-war period, with extremely high prison numbers -both of men and women- and the penal discourse of retributive and redemptive character, within the Catholicism militant tradition.