Too Few to Matter
Institutional Inertia in the Prisoning of Women in Québec and Canada
By Joane Martel
Les Presses de l'Université Laval, University of Laval Press
In 2010, Correctional Service Canada closed two decrepit prisons designated for men. Hoping to reduce prison overcrowding, the Québec government rented one of them—the Leclerc prison—and transferred approximately 250 male prisoners serving a provincial sentence. One year later, Québec closed its main provincial prison designated for women, and swiftly transferred the women to the Leclerc prison where men were housed. At Leclerc, women endured dehumanizing conditions condemned by scholars, advocacy groups, and the media as violations of basic human rights. Challenging living conditions enduring at the Leclerc prison suggest that women’s imprisonment is resisting significant change despite studies and governmental inquiries since the middle of the 19th century having documented the dire situation, and the specific needs of imprisoned women in Canada. This book proposes a critical rereading of women’s penal history in Canada and argues that policies and practices regarding women’s prisoning are path dependent and tend to follow a locked-in trajectory.
Joane Martel is a retired professor of Criminology at Université Laval. Her research interests focus on the critical study of criminal justice and the prison. She has published on assisted suicide, remorse, penal populism, the making of pre-disposition reports, and Internet addiction. On the prison, Joane Martel has published on the policing of carceral knowledge, aging, time and space in solitary confinement, hope, the ethics process in prison studies, Indigenous women’s prison trajectories and identities, and the correctional management of “Indigenous risk.”
