Chapter 9: Gendered Pathways to Prison: Women’s Routes to Death Row in the Philippines

This chapter delves into the experiences and social worlds of women previously sentenced to capital punishment and now imprisoned in the Philippines. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, the pathways of 27 women previously on death row are presented. Narratives reveal multiple constraints stemming from gendered familial, relational, and economic responsibilities, vulnerability to gendered control and violence, poverty or financial precarity. These gendered inequities were compounded by structural barriers in the context of a low-income, postcolonial nation with entrenched corruption. The women’s stories reveal four pathways to criminalization: (1) responding to violence; (2) economic precarity; (3) drug abuse; and (4) guilt by association and corrupted justice. The research reported in this chapter enriches feminist criminological knowledge on gendered pathways to criminalization by adding the voices of women in the Philippines to a now growing body of Southeast Asian scholarship. In line with previous studies, findings reveal the ways in which women come into conflict with the law because of choices made within constrained social circumstances.