Community Re-Entry

Uncertain Futures for Women Leaving Prison

Alison Pedlar, Susan Arai, Felice Yuen, Darla Fortune

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815384380
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351204453
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In their journeys to prison and community re-entry, women leaving prison tend to share overarching challenges connected to lives of poverty, trauma, and abuse. Community Re-Entry: Uncertain Futures for Women Leaving Prison provides a rare opportunity to hear directly from women who have spent time in a Canadian federal penitentiary. Based on more than a decade of engagement with women in prison, the authors gathered rich and personal information on women's lived experiences during incarceration and what they anticipated and hoped for on release. This book relates their narratives and the authors' critical analysis of their experiences both within and outside prison. By bridging relational and other critical theories (critical feminist, critical race, critical disability, and post-structural understandings) with lived experience, this volume sheds light on the challenges incarcerated women face as they seek to return to the community as valued and contributing citizens.

Community Re-Entry's unique perspective on women's post-imprisonment policy will appeal to academics, community-based advocates and activists, and undergraduate and postgraduate students studying criminology and social science courses on gender and crime, correctional policy, and qualitative research methods.

Chapter 1

Incarceration and Community Re-Entry for Women

Backdrop to a Decade of Research

In this book, which marks the culmination of five research studies, carried out over a 10-year period, employing a critical interpretivist approach, we explore issues faced by women in one of Canada’s federal prisons¹ as they planned for and began the process of community re-entry. Our primary concern in community re-entry is to identify the ways in which women can be supported to return to the community after incarceration so they may experience what it is to be valued members of society. Thus, in conducting the research on which this book is based, we wanted to understand the carceral experiences of women including release as well as their engagement with interventions and programs while in prison. Acknowledging the persistent systemic inequities experienced in prison and community in the context of everyday lives, we were particularly concerned with women’s access to the social determinants of health and their experiences in prison relative to the rehabilitation and reintegration mandate of the women’s offender sector of Correctional Service Canada (CSC). More recently, the practice of incarceration has adopted what are called protective factors, which in many ways parallel the social determinants of health, as a means to bring positive influences into the lives of people who have come into conflict with the law so that they may leave prison and safely re-enter community.

The seeds of our explorations were sown in a small study in 2002–2003 when we examined the role of support circles in women’s transition from prison to community. A support circle typically consisted of two to four community volunteers, who first got to know the woman while she was incarcerated and who followed and supported her on her community re-entry (Pedlar, 2005). Our initial study was followed in 2006 by an examination of the housing needs of women on release from prison (Arai, Pedlar, & Shaw, 2006). As part of that study, we held extensive conversational interviews with 69 women, using a social determinants of health framework (Pedlar, Arai, Yuen, & Fortune, 2008). Here the women talked about wide-ranging aspects of their lives, including their hopes and aspirations for re-entry to community, their life circumstances, and the formidable obstacles they faced. The third study comprised a doctoral dissertation of one of our team, Yuen, which involved a smaller sample of women from the housing-needs study. Yuen (2008) examined the issues faced specifically by Indigenous women,² who were part of what they identified as the Native Sisterhood in the prison. In 2011, another doctoral dissertation from one of our team, Fortune (2011), explored women’s experiences with and perceptions of social inclusion following community re-entry. In 2011–2012, our fifth study further explored the experiences of women and community volunteers who formed support circles (Arai & Fortune, 2013).

There has been a long-standing concern among those involved with the care and rehabilitation of federally sentenced women³ that the prison system more adequately address women’s needs. It is acknowledged that these needs are distinct from those of male prisoners, and over the last two decades the treatment of women in prison in Canada has been organized around gender-specific programming. The vast majority of women in prison have histories of trauma and abuse that have played a significant role in their being in prison. At the same time, an overriding criterion for release from prison is risk: risk to both the criminalized woman and to the safety of the community. As we discovered over the course of our research, risk and the way it is measured have become particularly significant factors in penal practices and in the release experience for women leaving prison. Rehabilitation, risk, and reintegration outcomes are essentially predetermined by an unwritten but standardized set of expectations with which a woman must comply if her incarceration and release are to be considered “successful.”

In addition to the words of the women presented in our formal research findings, included in this book are our observations of the prison system and its impact on the women we came to know informally over the course of engaging with them while in prison and beyond. Community re-entry is not uncomplicated: on their return to community many women struggle not only with the stigma of their imprisonment but also with the process of healing from trauma and related intersectional experiences of past and present challenges associated with substance-dependence, mental health issues, disabilities, and poverty that may render inaccessible the things that determine one’s health upon community re-entry. While rehabilitation and reintegration are primary objectives of women’s corrections in Canada, the experiences of the women suggest the existence of persistent systemic barriers to rehabilitation and reintegration. Successful re-entry to the community becomes particularly challenging in the absence of a strong support system on release. Success is not just one thing, nor does it mean the same thing to everyone, and indeed the women we met saw success in differing ways. At the same time, societal expectation of successful re-entry is that the woman will fully reintegrate into society, obtain shelter and be employed, and not engage in the sorts of behaviors that led her to prison. When re-entry is considered unsuccessful, and if the woman breaks the conditions of release by using drugs or alcohol, for instance, she is likely to be taken back into custody. In such circumstances, the result can be revocation of parole without having committed a new offense, while, in the case of a different or new offense, the woman will face another sentence. Meanwhile, release from prison that is classified as “successful” is not necessarily regarded as such by the woman herself, who struggles with considerable challenges in making a life for herself in community.

The Institution of Women’s Imprisonment in Federal Corrections

Many researchers, scholars, and policy analysts have criticized the way society deals with women who have come into contact with the criminal justice system. Some of these criticisms date back to the early 20th century. The perception of women who came into conflict with the law was, and in many instances still is, embedded in the idea that they are “fallen women.” As Boritch (1997, pp. 5–6) notes, with stereotypical images and social construction of women’s roles, women “who violated the law or otherwise breached society’s expectations of appropriate female behaviour were commonly referred to as ‘fallen women’ with serious moral failings.”

Until the late 20th century all federally sentenced women in Canada, that is, those whose crimes carried a sentence of two years or more, were incarcerated in the Prison for Women in Kingston (P4W), a facility which was the subject of a protracted debate concerning its suitability as a prison for women. A series of reviews and commissions dating back to 1938 (Archambault, 1938; Chinnery Report, 1978; Clark Report, 1977) had recommended its closure. In the spring of 1994, the horror of life within the P4W became public after a male institutional emergency team was brought in to respond to eight women in segregation engaging in unruly behavior. The confrontation and ensuing strip-search of these women was recorded by CSC video, which was later aired on national TV on The Fifth Estate. The event horrified many Canadians. The report of a subsequent government commission headed by Madam Justice Louise Arbour of the Supreme Court of Canada reinforced the importance of finding an alternative approach for the incarceration of women. The report, published in 1996, further recommended women-centered programming in smaller, regional prison facilities designed to accommodate women (Arbour, 1996).

Six years before the Arbour report, in 1990, the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women had made similar recommendations following its investigations regarding the incarceration of women in Canada in the P4W. The authors of its report, Creating Choices, included representatives from community and government groups concerned with women’s issues, notably the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, CSC personnel, two women who had been incarcerated, and women from Indigenous communities. It took several years for Creating Choices to penetrate the system as the touchstone in relation to “best practices” for women who had come into conflict with the law. A major change in practice, beginning in 1995, resulted ultimately in the development of five smaller regional facilities for women, namely: Fraser Valley Institution for Women, British Columbia; Edmonton Institution for Women, Alberta; Grand Valley Institution for Women, Ontario; Joliette Institution for Women, Quebec; Nova Institution for Women, Nova Scotia; and one Aboriginal healing lodge (Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge), Saskatchewan. The P4W finally closed in 2000.

Creating Choices focused on five guiding principles: empowerment, meaningful and responsible choices, respect and dignity, supportive environment, and shared responsibility. The report describes empowerment as “a process through which women gain insight into their situation, identify their strengths, and are supported and challenged to take positive action to gain control of their lives” (CSC, 1994, p. 3). It further posits that, with appropriate information, resources, and understanding of the implications of their choices, women can make meaningful and responsible choices. Respect and dignity are seen to accrue from a reciprocal relationship and are most obvious when a person gains self-respect and is able to respond to others similarly. A supportive environment is seen as a prerequisite to accessible services, which, in turn, enable the generation of meaningful and responsible choices. Shared responsibility requires that all formal and informal services, including government, corrections, community, public, and private organizations, have some part to play in supporting women’s efforts to participate as contributing members of society (Dauvergne-Latimer, 1995).

For over 20 years, feminist and critical criminologists have brought to our attention the problems with the dominant approach to the treatment of women who come into conflict with the law (e.g., Adelberg & Currie, 1993; Balfour & Comack, 2014; Boritch, 1997; Chesney-Lind, 1989; Comack, 1996; Hannah-Moffat, 2001; Kilty, 2014; Moffat, 1991; Pollack, 2000). The concern initially focused on incarcerating women in prisons designed by men for men, particularly prior to the closing of the P4W, with programming that was inadequate and inappropriate. As we and others suggest, some of these criticisms also apply to the newer approach to treatment and rehabilitation of women in prison that followed from the policy shift contained in Creating Choices (1990).

Others have drawn our attention to the neo-liberal management of women’s corrections in Canada, which has brought us to this juncture in addressing the conditions that govern imprisonment and release (Hannah-Moffat, 2000; Maidment, 2006; Pollack, 2008). They also argue that the principal tenets of incarceration and release for a woman in the Canadian neo-liberal correctional system, as guided by Creating Choices, have proven counter-productive to women’s rehabilitation and reintegration. The two ideals included in Creating Choices of empowerment and shared responsibility have received particular attention. Hannah-Moffatt’s (2000) work, Prisons That Empower, has pointed to the contradictions that exist in imagining empowerment is feasible in a system in which “the Correctional Service of Canada has redefined and constructed empowerment and notions of shared responsibility so that they are compatible with its own independent strategy of penal government” (p. 518). Further, these two guiding principles have come to be regarded as particularly contentious: shared responsibility includes acceptance of the role of self in the committing of the crime that sent a woman to prison, and empowerment regards the woman as operating in an unfettered environment, able to exercise power and determination in abiding by the law or not, within the prison and beyond. In other words, women are required to take ownership of their behaviors and the choices that led them to prison, with little or no recognition of the systemic inequities and systems of power and violence related to race, class, gender, and disability bound up in their life circumstances. The assumption is that they had options, which they chose to ignore in committing their crime. While clearly a case can be made for all citizens to be conscientious and mindful in their actions and choices, and generally all can be expected to ascribe to such societal norms, the reality of the lives of many of the women we met suggests that circumstances are a lot more complicated than the language of principles, such as empowerment and shared responsibility, would suggest.

Release and the Reintegration Imperative

The shift to women-centered programming, as articulated within Creating Choices, accompanied the focus on rehabilitation and reintegration of the CSC. Correctional policy statements and directives reflect these considerations. For instance, Section 5b seeks to ensure “the provision of programs that contribute to the rehabilitation of offenders and to their successful reintegration into the community” (Corrections and Conditional Release Act, 1992, p. 4); and Section 76, “Programs for Offenders,” explains, “The Service shall provide a range of programs designed to address the needs of offenders and contribute to their successful reintegration into the community” (Corrections and Conditional Release Act, 1992, p. 23).

Indeed, Creating Choices and CSC overall are clear on their reintegration imperative. However, the question of what that reintegration would look like is not really examined. Reintegration may well mean imposing expectations of normative behavior that are not congruent with the rest of these women’s lives. This is the sort of concern embedded in Foucauldian critical analysis of systems of control in society, including prisons and mental health systems. The expectation may well be that those within the prison system must conform to some normative ideal that is meaningless to individuals from cultures and classes outside the dominant, White, Euro-centric, middle-class society. What does integration mean in this context? It may or may not mean reintegrating into a setting that the woman knew prior to incarceration. The messages around conditions of release can be confusing and present the woman with extremely difficult choices. Of course, depending on the circumstances of her incarceration, a woman’s conditions of release may preclude a return to an environment or associates that were considered influential in her pathway to crime. The majority of women we spoke with wanted to go back to the community they came from. At the same time, significant questions exist relative to the conditions a woman came from prior to incarceration: what does it mean for a woman to reintegrate into a community or system in which trauma, including abuse and gendered, racial, homophobic, class, and other forms of violence, occurred?

Crit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Conclusion
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Incarceration and Community Re-Entry for Women
• 2 Studying Community Re-Entry for Federally Sentenced Women
• 3 Defining Aspects of Everyday Life: Poverty, Trauma, and Substance-Dependence
• 4 The Downward Spiral of Prison Life
• 5 Finding Identity
• 6 Getting Out and Staying Out
• Index
• Backcover