Incarceration as welfare: Transgressive female sexuality and the workhouse in West Germany, 1950–1969

Abstract

Despite the rights and protections enshrined in its new constitution, the West German state confined beggars, alcoholics, convicted prostitutes and vagrants in workhouses on criminal sentences until 1969. Using administrative and inmate files, alongside local press coverage, this article turns to the largest remaining workhouse in West Germany, Brauweiler, between 1950 and 1969 and considers the internment of women arrested under the ‘correctional post-internment’ measure. It explores the gendered experiences of workhouse inmates, from the reasons for their internment to the reproduction of gendered boundaries during incarceration. Rather than providing an institutional history, it considers the micro-perspective of inmate experiences.