Critical feminist criminology seemed to be at a crossroads.

Laureen Snider (1994 ) questioned the feminist practice of relying on the criminal justice system and its ethic of punishment. Elizabeth Comack (1999) pointed out that feminist crim inology still remained on the margins of the discipline and had constructed a na rrow image of women as victims of male violence, simplifying the role of violenc e in women's lives. As well, critical race scholars (Rice 1990) saw white femini st criminologists as engaged in ethnocentric thinking and called for a much broa der conceptual framework to examine the interrelationship of race, class, and ge nder in historical context. This fracturing of critical feminist criminology was taking place in a particula r socio-political context of emerging "free market fundamentalism" (Fraser 2005: 5) that was to have ruinous effects on the lives of women. The unravelling of t he Keynesian welfare state under the sway of neo-liberalism was symbolized in th e "death of the social"--whereby the state was no longer responsible for the sec urity and safety of its citizens. In its place, a risk society emerged wherein t he homeless, the mentally ill, and the criminalized were no longer connected to conditions of oppression but, instead, were increasingly responsibilized and exp ected to make rational choices and to accept the consequences of those choices ( O'Malley 1992). Citizens of this risk society were not coercively controlled by the modernist state but were governed at a distance through practices of risk pr ofiling and self-regulation (Ericson and Haggerty 1997). It was unclear, however , how --or even if--risk theory would account for the specificity of gender in i ts analysis. As Wendy Chan and George Rigakos (2002) point out, governmentality theories assumed that risk was a new form of governance, and, therefore, the pre conditions of poverty, sexism, and racism that have historically positioned wome n at greater risk for victimization and exploitation were not linked to inequali ty; rather, discrimination was simply part of the classification schema (see Eri cson and Haggerty 1997). To be sure, feminist criminologists such as Kelly Hannah-Moffat (1999) and Barba ra Hudson (1998, 2002) have worked to engender the conceptualization of risk as a complex practice of power rooted in moral subjectivities, not just actuarial m ethods of measurement and prediction. For example, Hannah-Moffat (1999) asserts that the women-centred risk-assessment technologies designed by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) are a hybrid of subjective moralizing assessments and o bjective actuarial determinations. Hannah-Moffat's work reveals how the conflati on of risk and gender categories allows for subjective interpretation of women's needs as risks. In more recent work, looking at the decision-making process of the National Parole Board in cases of accelerated review for women seeking condi tional release, Hannah-Moffat (2004) argues against the overdetermined fixed or static risk subject that requires actuarial justice to minimize the risk of esca pe or recidivism. Rather, she contends, technologies of risk assessment are desi gned to be dynamic and inclusive only of those needs that can be met through int ervention or treatment. Hannah-Moffat asserts that such reformulation of risk al lows for a renaissance of rehabilitation to supposedly meet women's needs throug h cognitive behavioural therapies, rather than attending to needs for employment , education, and housing. The prisoner is a "transformative subject" who must ch ange her criminal thinking (Hannah-Moffat 2004: 29). Hannah-Moffat's (1999, 2004 ) research is a potent critique of the CSC's women-centred correctional model, i n particular its obfuscation of the feminization of poverty, systemic racism, an d patriarchal violence as legitimate risk factors.