ICPA2025-PID109-Barbara Owen, Samantha Jeffries, and Chontit Chuenurah

Women-Centered Non-Custodial Measures: Developing Gender-Based Strategies of Least Intervention

Authors

Barbara Owen

Independent Researcher, Owen Research and Evaluation, United States

Barbara Owen is an international expert in the areas of women and imprisonment; improving operational practice in women’s prisons via research; and women’s prison culture. She has extensive experience in conducting mixed methods research, including participant observation, ethnographies, large-scale surveys, policy studies, and program evaluation. Internationally, her work involves implementing human rights protections in women’s prisons with the Thailand Institute of Justice, where she serves as a Senior Advisor.

A Professor Emerita of Criminology at California State University, Fresno, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 1984. Prior to returning to academia, Dr. Owen was a Senior Researcher with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Chontit Chuenurah

Director, Office of the Bangkok Rules and Treatment of Offenders, Thailand Institute of Justice, Thailand

Chontit Chuenurah is the Director of the Office for the Bangkok Rules and Treatment of Offenders at the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ). She has been involved in national, regional, and international advocacy related to promoting and protecting human rights in prison settings. As part of her work, she supervises several research projects focusing on women’s pathways to imprisonment and recidivism in Southeast Asia. She is the author/ co-author of articles and book chapters on these issues. Also, Chontit leads social reintegration projects through government, private sector and civil society collaborations. Chontit is specialised in topics related to prison reform, the treatment of offenders, and UN standards and norms with a strong focus on the gender aspect.

Dr Samantha Jeffries

Associate Professor , School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Australia

Samantha Jeffries is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on marginalised social statuses, criminalisation, victimisation and (in)justice. She has researched intimate partner violence; the sex industry; gender, Indigeneity and sentencing decisions. Over the last ten years, Samantha has been collaborating with the Thailand Institute of Justice undertaking studies on gendered pathways to criminalisation; human rights and women’s experiences of imprisonment, re-integration, and electronically monitored parole. She has co-authored a book on domestic violence (Romantic Terrorism: An Autoethnography of Domestic Violence, Victimization and Survival, with Sharon Hayes), and co-edited the book Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia (with Andrew M Jefferson). Samantha regularly conducts Bangkok Rules (The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders) training with criminal justice personnel in Southeast Asia for the Thailand Institute of Justice. She has been invited and subsequently provided expert advice to Australian governments and international organisations in the areas of gender, criminalisation, imprisonment and gender-based violence.

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