Kavya Padmanabhan, a former PhD student at the Institute of Criminology, had her PhD approved on 21 February 2025. Her research, an ethnographic study titled ‘Bridging the Gap Between Punishment and Care’, discusses women’s centres in England and Wales, in relation to the penal and welfare systems.
Padmanabhan had previously completed a Masters degree in Criminal Justice Policy at the London School of Economics. It was here that she learned about the Criminology PhD at Cambridge, seeing it as an opportunity to focus on the field of criminology.
“My time at LSE helped me to cultivate the questions that I was really interested in exploring and situate them in an international framework,” she explains. “Having had so much interdisciplinary experience- looking at the criminal legal system, but through different lenses- this was just great to have that chance to explore the questions that I wanted to, within a particularly criminological frame.”
She chose to do her PhD research on women’s centres, their shortcomings, and how these reflect broader systemic issues. Women’s centres are third-sector institutions designed as an alternative to incarceration for women. They were created due to concerns this system was inadequate for many women’s needs. For example, as mothers are more likely to have custody over children, incarceration for women often leads to family separation. Many criminalised women are also themselves victims of sexual trauma or gendered violence, but the penal system often lacks adequate support systems. Women’s centres provide holistic support for criminalised women, including day-to-day support and navigating the criminal justice system.
Previous studies found that women’s centres were successful in helping convicted women access the necessary support. Yet there are also concerns that they reinforce systemic biases within the criminal justice system.
Padmanabhan used the Breddon Centre as her case study. She anonymised real name and location of this women’s centre, to ensure the privacy and safety of its inhabitants. For her research, she worked at this site over a period of 9 months as a quasi-caseworker. Her thesis used interviews with both clients and caseworkers at the Breddon Centre. She argues that this direct engagement was crucial in providing the insights of her PhD.
“I did a different kind of ethnography than the traditional kind, where you are a participant and you observe everything around you,” she explains. “I was part of the action myself. I was a case worker in the centre, and I took a lot of my findings from observing the scene around me, but also from interacting in it. So, I reflected on my own experiences and was able to use that as an additional source of data, which is which is a richer way to study and use ethnographic methods.”
Previous research had studied the relationship between women’s centres and the penal system. Padmanabhan’s PhD built on this existing research by studying how these institutions interacted with the welfare state, as well as their local communities.
“I was really interested in understanding how the penal and the welfare state interacted with and informed the experiences of the clients of the Breddon Centre, and also on a macro scale, the Breddon Centre itself,” she says. “So that was important for me- to be able to position it on two different levels.”
Padmanabhan’s PhD applied an intersectional approach to the issue of women’s centres, on the grounds that research into this field overlooked these institutions. It highlighted a lack of tailored support for women of colour, despite this demographic facing disproportionate rates of criminalisation. Moreover, it argued that this reflected broader issues with the state agencies it relied upon.
Padmanabhan commended many of the workers at the Breddon Centre, who cultivated strong relationships with their clients and provided essential support. Yet her research also highlighted a complex relationship with state agencies, sometimes to the detriment of the centre’s clients.
The Breddon Centre could be considered part of both the welfare and penal systems. Many of the caseworkers interviewed described moving their clients between agencies within them. This helped them understand their clients' experiences provide them with support from a broader network of state interventions.
However, this also led to antagonisms between the centre and these agencies. Several clients reported that the child welfare system was particularly punitive. Breddon Centre clients and workers did report more positive relationships with penal agencies, many of which cared for clients. But the role of this care was often unclear.
Based on the results, the paper argues that it is still possible to interpret women’s centres as part of the penal state. While this was often a better alternative to imprisonment, it also expanded the scope of penal ideologies into the third sector. This included the reinforcement of systemic biases.
“Women’s centres may have been devised through the single access perspective, where criminalised women are this one homogeneous group,” explains Padmanabhan, “when actually, there are many different, diverse experiences within the experience of criminalisation, informed by race, class, immigration status and so on, that often go unacknowledged.”
For her, the PhD course and the wider Institute of Criminology were excellent for connecting her with like-minded people. She found this to be beneficial during her research.
“It’s interesting to be able to think through my project, both within the framing I was particularly interested in, and through listening to other people doing their own projects,” she says. “I saw how questions can come together in different ways or different ways of looking at something can influence what your results are, and how interventions might be framed in the future.”
The results of her research changed Padmanabhan’s own opinions about the penal system, making her an advocate for prison abolition. This school of thought argues for alternative measures to incarceration, which it views as inadequate for addressing the causes of criminality. Her research going forward will investigate potential alternative measures, and the differences between abolition in the UK and USA.
Currently, she has a position as a lecturer in Sociology at Rice University. She describes this role as providing new challenges, particularly in how she communicates her ideas.
“People are generally on board with the fact that the criminal legal system isn't working in the way that it's meant to, but some aren’t on board with abolition,” she explains. “So, it’s also a question of how do we communicate these things? Maybe don’t use these triggering words for people. There's a huge conversation in Rice about doing this work without using the words diversity, equity and inclusivity. I also teach critical race theory in my classes, and most of my students have heard about it before and want to learn more. But [my PhD] has directly informed what I teach and how I teach it.”
Padmanabhan hopes that her PhD will inform future research into women’s centres, and the broader concept of intersectionality.