Book review: Imprisoning our sisters: The new federal women's prisons in Canada, Stephanie Hayman. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006. 300 pp. (including index). $80.00 (cloth), $29.95 (pbk). ISBN 0773530789 (cloth), ISBN 0773530797 (pbk)
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| Published date | 01 October 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745070090040406 |
| Author | Sarah Turnbull |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
On a final note, The prison and the gallows provides a much neglected comparative
perspective on crime control, a contribution that will certainly provoke more questions
about the particular political processes, cultural distinctions and structural transformations
associated with the rise of mass incarceration in democratic societies. It also pushes forward
a refreshingly normative critique of the expanding role of state coercion in the USA.
References
Dumm, Thomas (1987) Democracy and punishment: Disciplinary origins of the United
States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Savelsberg, Joachim J. (1994) ‘Knowledge, domination, and criminal punishment’,
American Journal of Sociology 99(4): 911–43.
Simon, Jonathan (2007) Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed
American democracy and created a culture of fear. Oxford & New York: Oxford
University Press.
Vanessa Barker
Florida State University, USA
Imprisoning our sisters: The new federal women’s prisons in Canada, Stephanie Hayman.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. 300 pp. (including index). $80.00
(cloth), $29.95 (pbk). ISBN 0773530789 (cloth), ISBN 0773530797 (pbk).
The history of penal reform in many western countries is characterized by good inten-
tions leading to unintended consequences. For many scholars, this pattern reflects a
failure on the part of reformers to consider asymmetries of power and the ability of
the prison to co-opt and circumvent these ‘good intentions’ according to its own insti-
tutional logics (e.g. Rothman, 1980; Rafter, 1990; Hannah-Moffat, 2001). These
unintended consequences of penal reform are the focus of Stephanie Hayman’s well-
written and researched book Imprisoning our sisters. Beginning with the closure of the
notorious Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario, and ending with the creation of
five new prisons for federally sentenced women, the pages of this book trace an import-
ant contemporary instance of penal reform in Canada.
Hayman uses interview and archival material to document the creation of the Task
Force for Federally Sentenced Women and the production of its report, ‘Creating
choices’. As the book carefully details, the Task Force was created in 1988 in response
to deteriorating conditions at the Prison for Women, then Canada’s only federal prison
for women. Comprised of civil servants, feminist advocates from the Canadian Associ-
ation of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) and Aboriginal women representatives, the
Task Force aimed to close the Prison for Women and plan for the creation of five new
prisons for women. Imprisoning our sisters documents the difficulties and contradictions
associated with the composition of the Task Force and the attempts made to reform the
system of women’s corrections in Canada. The working of the Task Force involved much
compromise, debate and negotiations of power, influence and expertise. Ultimately,
Hayman argues that the Task Force failed in its attempt at penal reform because it could
not ‘repair what is fundamentally irreparable’ (p. 258). Despite the best of intentions,
prisons cannot ‘heal’ imprisoned women while punishing them.
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