The gap between best practices and reality: A systematic review on the interventions with incarcerated women

Female incarceration rates are rising worldwide. Evidence has suggested important distinctions between women and men who commit crimes, with women presenting significant vulnerabilities related to adverse and traumatic experiences. This highlights the importance of developing prison interventions that adequately respond to these specificities, namely gender-responsive, trauma-informed, and needs assessment-based (such as the risk-needs-responsivity model). This review aims to describe recent psychosocial interventions delivered to imprisoned women, including their treatment modalities, targets, and theoretical models, ultimately analyzing the degree to which the recommended principles guide them. In accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, our search yielded 66 articles across 5 databases. The results showed that most studies targeted a wide range of treatment targets aligned with gender specificities. However, this was not the case for program duration, format, and multimodality, which were rarely adapted to women’s gendered and trauma-related needs, mostly consisting of group-based interventions, many under 12 sessions, and addressing specific targets. Additionally, only 29 studies reported interventions that were gender-responsive, 18 trauma-informed, and 5 based on the risk-needs-responsivity model. These results show a gap between the reality of the interventions that are being delivered to female prisoners and the best practices recommended by scientific literature.
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work is funded with national funds from FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P., in the context of the R&D Unit: UID/04810/2025 – William James Center for Research.