Racial Inequalities and Family Imprisonment: The Intersectional and Compounded Social Harms for Pakistani Women

Abstract Scholarship on family member incarceration, and the gendered nature of this critical life event, has expanded rapidly in the last 20 years. Yet, in England and Wales, the experiences of racially minoritized women are unclear, despite stark racial disparities in the prison estate. Based on in-depth, qualitative interviews with British Pakistani women, this article makes a vital contribution to this lacuna in research. Using intersectionality as an analytical framework, it determines that these women’s experiences are underpinned by wider racial and ethnic inequalities in broader social contexts, discrimination within the criminal justice and prison systems, and their social positioning in socio-political, biographic and historic contexts, which converge to severely compound the social harm experienced by this population.