Women Leaving Prison

In their journeys to prison and community re-entry, women leaving prison tend to share overarching challenges connected to lives of poverty, trauma, and abuse. Community Re-Entry: Uncertain Futures for Women Leaving Prison provides a rare opportunity to hear directly from women who have spent time in a Canadian federal penitentiary. Based on more than a decade of engagement with women in prison, the authors gathered rich and personal information on women’s lived experiences during incarceration and what they anticipated and hoped for on release. This book relates their narratives and the authors’ critical analysis of their experiences both within and outside prison. By bridging relational and other critical theories (critical feminist, critical race, critical disability, and post-structural understandings) with lived experience, this volume sheds light on the challenges incarcerated women face as they seek to return to the community as valued and contributing citizens. Community Re-Entry’s unique perspective on women’s post-imprisonment policy will appeal to academics, community-based advocates and activists, and undergraduate and postgraduate students studying criminology and social science courses on gender and crime, correctional policy, and qualitative research methods.

Women Leaving Prison examines the oft-ignored experiences of female returning citizens, our returning sisters, who face numerous individual and systemic barriers as they return to life beyond bars. In the age of mass incarceration, with 700,000 inmates leaving prison each year, spiritual and religious support during reentry is a crucial component of prison ministry. Women Leaving Prison describes women’s pathways to prison, their spiritual and religious experiences inside, and then utilizes interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative research method, to uncover the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of returning sisters. The findings from the qualitative study then ground the book’s call for a revised prison ministry praxis, entitled Project Sister Connect, that details how churches, as well as concerned citizens and people of faith, can welcome and care for returning sisters. Project Sister Connect offers a model for facilitating female returning citizens’ successful reentry via communal and individual spiritual care and support and by working toward the eradication of structural injustices.

Women’s incarceration is on the rise globally and this has significant intergenerational, economic and humanitarian costs for communities across the world. While there have been efforts to implement reform, particularly in countries such as Canada, UK, US and Australia, the growing evidence suggests women’s prisons and the support structures surrounding them are in crisis. This collection of critical essays presents groundbreaking research on women’s post-imprisonment policy, practice and experiences. It is the first collection to offer international perspectives on gender, criminalisation, the effects of imprisonment and women-centred approaches to the short and long-term support of women exiting prison. It offers cutting-edge insights into contemporary policy developments and women’s experiences across the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and Northern Ireland. The collection makes two important contributions. First, it marks a departure from an instrumental and individual focus on ‘what works’ to reduce women’s offending and re-offending behaviour - a prevailing approach within competing collections focused on post-release issues. Second, it presents critical, original research with robust empirical foundations to revive feminist criminological engagement around gender, imprisonment, and most critically, post-release management, support and survival. The collection will appeal to academics and community-based advocates, activists, lawyers and practitioners engaged in advocacy and service provision for imprisoned women. It is also an important and unique analysis for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying criminological and social science courses particularly those related to gender and crime, imprisonment and correctional policy and qualitative research methods.

A critical perspective on the treatment of incarcerated women—and their children Inside and Out: Women, Prison, and Therapy challenges conventional thinking about the therapeutic issues facing female prisoners and their children. Therapists, counselors, scholars, and activists examine the injustices of the criminal justice system and the roles feminist therapists can play in deconstructing and demystifying the lives of women prisoners by becoming more involved in clinical work. Inside and Out: Women, Prison, and Therapy examines this growing problem from a feminist perspective, debunking stereotypes about women perpetrators with a thorough examination of gender-responsive treatment of women in a variety of settings. This unique book includes a macro analysis of gender and criminality; an assessment of violence and the abuse of women; parenting and the impact of incarceration on children; treatment approaches developed specifically for women prisoners; and an outline of what women need when leaving prison life. The book also examines crucial issues facing women prisoners, including sexual abuse and assault, substance abuse, mental and physical health concerns, human rights, violence, discrimination, and the unique problems of women prisoners of color. Topics addressed in Inside and Out: Women, Prison, and Therapy include: designing and delivering gender-responsive programs for women developing therapeutic measures to correct and normalize marginalized women mistreatment of women prisoners in the United States domestic violence and its connection to criminalization counseling sexually abused women motherhood, crime, and prison the effects of incarceration on children and families women, addiction, and incarceration using drama therapy with incarcerated women feminist support groups transitioning after release from prison and much more Inside and Out: Women, Prison, and Therapy is a vital professional resource for therapists and counselors who work with female prisoners and their families.

From the Governor General’s Award winning author of Forms of Devotion, Our Lady of the Lost and Found and By the Book “Never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer.” For almost six turbulent years, award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen was involved with a prison inmate serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. The relationship surprised no one more than her. How do you fall in love with a man with a violent past? How do you date someone who is in prison? This Is Not My Life is the story of the romance between Diane and Shane—how they met and fell in love, how they navigated passes and parole and the obstacles facing a long-term prisoner attempting to return to society, and how, eventually, things fell apart. While no relationship takes place in a vacuum, this is never more true than when that relationship is with a federal inmate. In this candid, often wry, sometimes disturbing memoir, Schoemperlen takes us inside this complex and difficult relationship as she journeys through the prison system with Shane. Not only did this relationship enlarge her capacity for both empathy and compassion, but it also forced her to more deeply examine herself.

Winner of the 2018 National Council on Crime & Delinquency’s Media for a Just Society Awards Winner of the 2017 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice “Valuable . . . [like Michelle] Alexander's The New Jim Crow.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Susan Burton is a national treasure . . . her life story is testimony to the human capacity for resilience and recovery . . . [Becoming Ms. Burton is] a stunning memoir.” —Nicholas Kristof, in The New York Times Winner of the prestigious NAACP Image Award, a uniquely American story of trauma, incarceration, and "the breathtaking resilience of the human spirit" (Michelle Alexander) Widely hailed as a stunning memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton is the remarkable life story of the renowned activist Susan Burton. In this "stirring and moving tour-de-force" (John Legend), Susan Burton movingly recounts her own journey through the criminal justice system and her transformation into a life of advocacy. After a childhood of immense pain, poverty, and abuse in Los Angeles, the tragic loss of her son led her into addiction, which in turn led to arrests and incarceration. During the War on Drugs, Burton was arrested and would cycle in and out of prison for more than fifteen years. When, by chance, she finally received treatment, her political awakening began and she became a powerful advocate for "a more humane justice system guided by compassion and dignity" (Booklist, starred review). Her award-winning organization, A New Way of Life, has transformed the lives of more than one thousand formerly incarcerated women and is an international model for a less punitive and more effective approach to rehabilitation and reentry. Winner of an NAACP Image Award and named a "Best Book of 2017" by the Chicago Public Library, here is an unforgettable book about "the breathtaking resilience of the human spirit" (Michelle Alexander).