Foreign national women arrested for drug trafficking: a dynamic socio-penal portrait

Women’s imprisonment in Portugal was marked in the first decade of this century by the increasing proportion of foreign nationals. This circumstance had implications not only in the official statistics of crime, contributing to a great preponderance of drug trafficking but also in the dynamics of women’s prisons and in the social discourses that associate immigration and crime. The present study is part of a research project on life trajectories of foreign national prisoners in Portugal, and it aims to analyze the social, demographic, criminal, and penal dimensions of female foreign nationals arrested in the country for drug trafficking. To this end, we collected and statistically analyzed data from 148 individual case files of foreign women prisoners. Results show the existence of at least two different scenarios of foreign national women arrested for drug trafficking in Portuguese prisons: On the one hand, women who come from European or South American countries, who did not live in Portugal, and who are held by international trafficking (drug couriers) and, on the other hand, women from African countries living in Portugal and arrested for drug trafficking practiced mainly in the country. These results allow us to deconstruct the idea that the high proportion of foreign national women in our prisons is unequivocally related to the phenomenon of immigration. Furthermore, results validate the importance of understanding, through qualitative research, these women’s pathways to imprisonment in a foreign country.