The elusiveness of change and unachievable ideals in the Canadian gender-sensitive penality

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Gender-Sensitive Policies in Prison Systems (I)

Abstract

Considerable hope and optimism about how women’s penal regimes could shift with new knowledge and strategies informed by feminist and Indigenous knowledges characterised mid-1990s Canadian penality. In the following decades, a logic of a gender-responsive penalty emerged alongside critical shifts in how law and penal policy understood the experiences of indigenous women, who remain disproportionately overrepresented in Canadian prisons, over classified and represent one of the fastest-growing admissions to prison. Feminist and indigenous knowledges informed a policy shift. Notwithstanding the intentions of policymakers and penal administrators little changed. Women continue to be too few to count. There remains a reluctance to shift deracialized gender-neutral risk logics that inform many aspects of penal governance and female prisons remain afterthoughts. This paper retrospectively reflects on the current state of women’s punishment and examines how feminist and indigenous knowledges are subsumed and resisted but prevailing penal logics. I consider how various prisons' emphasis on risk and security hamper efforts to meaningfully change penal regimes for women and in particular Indigenous women. Concepts of racial and gender neutrality are deeply embedded in penality as a pretext of fairness and equality, nonetheless, a responsive penality must grapple with difference.

Authors

• Kelly Hannah-Moffat, University of Toronto (Canada)

• Jihyun Kwon, University of Toronto (Canada)