The second sentence: South Asian Muslim women and the criminal justice system in the UK

Despite a growing recognition of the need to address the experiences of minoritised and racialised groups in prison, research on South Asian Muslim women remains scarce. This thesis addresses this gap by exploring the layers of criminalisation and Othering experienced by South Asian Muslim women in the criminal justice system. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews, this thesis directly engages with South Asian Muslim women with a lived experience of this system and criminal justice practitioners. These conversations highlighted how the criminalisation and Othering faced by South Asian Muslim women in wider society adversely and disproportionately affect their interactions with the criminal justice system. This thesis adopts the term “second sentence” to describe these challenges. Importantly, although this concept was originally coined to explain the marginalisation and isolation experienced by South Asian Muslim women after their release from prison, this thesis shows that the “second sentence” is, in fact, an all-pervasive force with a much earlier conception: it exists before, during and after these women are sent to prison. Specifically, the women in this research experience a compounded form of criminalisation marked by the racialisation of Islam and the connotations of Muslimness as innately deviant. This research challenges normative discourses of incarceration by considering the historical context of crime and deviance at the intersections of race, gender and faith. Importantly, the dehumanising racist, patriarchal and Islamophobic logic inherent within the prison systems are shown to perpetuate colonial cultures of silence and notions of purity which disproportionately affect South Asian Muslim women. This thesis therefore encourages the reader to critically engage with, and challenge, discourses that harm Muslims and frame them as innately deviant and suspicious: only then can a vision and practice of justice that is reflective of the contextual truths and histories of those inside prison emerge.