Experience of the COVID-19 pandemic for women deprived of liberty in Bahia

Abstract This is a qualitative, exploratory, descriptive, and documentary research, based on the Theory of Social Representations (TRS), to understand and describe the experience of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 from the perspective of women deprived of liberty in Bahia. The public was doubly affected by social isolation during the pandemic and had little left in its restricted access network. This scenario sparked interest in answering the following questions: What was it like to experience the COVID-19 pandemic within a prison environment? What are the impacts of imprisonment in times of COVID-19 on the health of women incarcerated in Bahia? These questions were answered in the documentary and field research, whose data were collected in the Inspection Report of the Public Defender’s Office of the State of Bahia and in the semi-structured interviews, which took place individually with twenty (20) women deprived of liberty in a penal complex in Bahia. The results of the research pointed to the tightening of social isolation, bringing serious health problems both mentally and physically as consequences.