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This study develops a critical account of contemporary debates on gender, punishment and community based upon qualitative research with fifty women prisoners carried out in the mid-1990s and a demographic profile of the women's prison population in autumn 1993 based upon previously un aggregated data from the Local Inmate Data System. The proposed move towards a community prison system triggered the study and prompted a critical investigation of women's experiences of community in terms of social and family networks, their responsibilities for others, and the impact of neighbourhood and material conditions before prison. The study develops an account of what happens to social networks during imprisonment and examines the way that social support both shapes and is shaped by the experience of imprisonment and the nature of custodial punishment. The study goes beyond the women's experience of punishment to explore the implications of gendered and universalist theories of punishment, engaging critically with essentialist notions of gender and with the development of postmodern penality, finally proposing that a critical modernist perspective holds greater potential both for reform and for establishing and maintaining a penality based upon first principles of punishment which are rooted in notions of citizenship.