Women's Lived Experience of Incarceration in a Mixed-Gender Spanish Prison

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In 2021, the Spanish government launched an initiative that created a handful of mixed-gender modules in select prisons.  Most of the nearly 4,000 women who are incarcerated in Spain are housed in female-only institutions or female-only modules within male institutions. Mixed-gender modules offer an alternative to these gender-segregated binary systems. In these modules, incarcerated men and women eat, work, study, and engage in recreation together. At night, all residents sleep in single-person cells that include a toilet, shower and sink. While a similar mixed-gender model has been utilized on a small scale in Scandinavia, this arrangement has not been widely studied and women’s experiences in these settings, especially in the Spanish context, is not fully understood.

Dr. Smoyer received funding through the Fulbright US Scholar Program and the Spanish Fulbright Commission to conduct a community-engaged qualitative research project about women’s lived experience of incarceration in the the mixed gender module at Centro Penitenciario de Teixeiro (C.P. Teixeiro), located in the northwest region of Spain (Galicia).  This project, which will be conducted in Spring 2025, is a collaboration between faculty and students at Southern Connecticut State University’s Department of Social Work (SCSU, USA) and University of Alcalá de Henares’s Department of Nursing (UAH, Spain), and staff and incarcerated women at C.P. Teixeiro.