Race, imprisonment, and reintegration: Reflections of Black male ex-prisoners

Abstract

This thesis is intended to further the critical race theory goal of documenting the narratives of racially subjugated populations, particularly Blacks. It presents and critically engages with the subject of race and its relationship to imprisonment and reintegration by putting forward the stories of Black male ex-prisoners who have experienced a term of incarceration in a Canadian federal penitentiary. The author uses a critical race lens in order to examine the role of race in the lives of Black ex-prisoners. In addition, she puts forward a plea for academic and institutional discourses to place the experiential knowledge of these individuals at the forefront of criminological research. Critical criminology theories that emphasize the importance of ethnographic data and epistemological assumptions that have challenged Eurocentric scholarship, which overlooks the consequences of racial inequality, guide the author's findings. As such, the primary goal of this research is to provide an arena for Black male ex-prisoners to express their realities as a racialized group who have historically been excluded from Canadian academe.