Responsibilizing Rehabilitation : A Critical Investigation of Correctional Programming for Federally Sentenced Women

Abstract

This research offers a critical and comprehensive understanding of the current state of prison programming for federally sentenced women in Canada. Its purpose is to map how women prisoners are assessed and processed in terms of their mental health needs and risks and the correctional programs they are required to participate in as part of their correctional rehabilitation plan. By mobilizing a feminist governmentality theoretical lens, the research examines the gendered, neoliberal, and psy management of women prisoners as it occurs through correctional programming interventions and the discourses that underpin the programs in which the women are required to participate. Methodologically, this research draws on over 11,000 pages of documents from the Correctional Service of Canada, which were obtained through a federal Access to Information and Privacy request, as well as eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated, federally sentenced women. I argue that women's experiences of marginalization and criminalization flow from structural factors that are variously impacted by their intersecting identities and which are subsumed beneath discourses of responsibilization and risk management within the programming documents and largely ignored as a result of the security-focused and risk-centred carceral logics that govern prison life and management.

The analysis revealed that programming documents - including facilitator manuals, staff training guides, participant workbooks, policy guidelines, and administrative documents - discursively constitute women as emotionally out of control, motivated primarily by their relationships, and as cognitively flawed. Through discourses of empowerment and care, and by way of self-monitoring strategies and improved self-esteem, women prisoners are tasked with managing their own mental health needs and risks and choosing a path of prescribed rehabilitation. Placing the onus of change squarely on the individual prisoner effectively sets aside the structural factors and contexts that lie at the root of women's criminalization, which women cannot simply "choose" to change. Despite the Correctional Service of Canada's appearance of women-centredness and gender responsivity, women are subject to control, coercion, and intense responsibilization efforts in and through correctional programming initiatives.