Beyond Litchfield: Examining The Role of Friendship in Women’s Narratives of Community Re-Entry

• In Event: 033 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Reentry and Recidivism

Abstract

Canada’s fastest growing incarcerated population is female offenders. While incarcerated, women experience damage to their existing social networks and lose significant personal relationships, making the transition to community settings difficult. In the absence of effective social support, many offenders face re-incarceration, as they are unable to transition into lives as law-abiding citizens. Community reintegration is not simply the absence of recidivism, but also the transition to a law-abiding conventional lifestyle, including the maintenance of existing and acquisition of new social ties that discourage future criminality. Given the multifaceted nature of community reintegration and the competing theoretical understandings of crime and recidivism, there is a need for additional research and theorizing regarding how former inmates transition and adjust to life outside of prison. Motivated by this gap in the literature, this research seeks to qualitatively assess the role of peer-to-peer relationships in the lived experience of community re-integration for women in Alberta, Canada by analyzing interviews conducted with formerly incarcerated women. The definition of friendship was operationalized to include shared life experience, physical and emotional availability during times of need, opportunities for ‘venting’, and the provision of supportive words. The women interviewed expressed low expectations of their friendships—largely attributable to their feelings of being undeserving of friendship. Friendships were found to exert a positive influence on community reintegration through access to material and emotional resources, as well as a negative influence because they did not meet all of the former offenders’ needs and in some cases encouraged continued criminality.

Author

• Kaitlyn Quinn, University of Toronto