Post #303
1050 words; 5 minutes to read
By Emily Stewart, Associate Editor
Summary: Seemingly positive accounts of prison tell us as much about incarceration as they do about the systems outside of it, revealing gaps in the support and resources available in the community.
There is little question that prison is a place of punishment and harm. Decades of research have documented its harms on incarcerated people, families, and communities.
Yet a growing body of research complicates this picture. For some, prison can also provide temporary refuge from violence, homelessness, substance use, and instability, as well as opportunities to access support, learn new skills, and begin to work towards a different future.
These accounts raise a difficult question: How can a place of punishment and harm also become a place of refuge or personal change?
Research from the University of Alberta suggests that one way to understand these accounts is by looking at what came before prison. Drawing on 63 interviews with women incarcerated in a federal prison in Western Canada, the authors found that what women valued inside often took on meaning precisely because the same resources, relationships, and opportunities had been limited or completely absent in their lives.
Life before prison
For many women, experiences encountered in prison contrasted with much longer histories of hardship and instability. They described lives marked by violence, unstable housing, substance use, abusive relationships, and involvement with systems such as child welfare and treatment centres. As Roxane shared:
I lived a really unstable life. Like I was in and out of group homes and treatment centres, like it was just… it wasn’t in me to try and look for another way of living, ‘cause I didn’t know.
Others knew they needed support but didn’t know how to ask for it or where to go. As Patricia described:
I needed help, but I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t know where to go. I tried… but I kept failing and failing. Then… like I actually… quit. [I was] trying to die, I guess. I was giving up.
These experiences were widespread: 90% of women in the study reported experiencing physical victimization, 80% reported sexual victimization during childhood, and nearly two-thirds had experienced periods without stable housing.
And for many, these were not temporary periods of instability, but experiences that had shaped much of their lives and their sense of what was possible.
The resources to imagine a different future
While women spoke about their frustrations and constraints of incarceration, alongside these experiences was a striking pattern of women describing certain aspects of prison as meaningful or even transformative. These accounts often centred around three areas: programming, spiritual and cultural supports, and relationships.
- Programming: Many women described education, substance use treatment, and other programs as particularly meaningful, offering them practical skills and new ways of understanding their emotions, relationships, and past experiences. As Riley described:
It teaches us how to deal with our emotions and how to cope. […] I find that it actually does help because before I looked at things in a really pessimistic way, like telling myself that I couldn’t do it, or that I was a failure. And now I’m able to redirect myself to like, ‘I can do this, you know? I am worth it’. If I just try, sometimes there’s a road bump in the road, but I can get over it.
- Spiritual and cultural support: For many Indigenous women, prison was the first place where they had opportunities to learn from Elders, smudge, drum or participate in sweat lodge ceremonies. Cultural reconnection wasn’t simply about healing. It also gave women new ways of understanding themselves, their histories, and their futures in the context of colonial harm. As Roxane described:
I completely turned my life around. I’m now in a traditional Pathways Unit here–living a traditional life. So, I basically learned about my history and understood about colonization and residential schools and the impact thereof. I just needed to really understand how involved I was as a Native American and um, I just don’t wanna be defined by that. […] I know that education is key to gaining back a lot of what our people lost.
- Relationships: Some spoke about staff, Elders, and other incarcerated women who treated them with respect, encouraged them, and saw them as capable of change. As Patricia explained:
I got this one guard that helps me when I’m at my toughest times, or when I need someone to talk to. […] He takes the time to come talk to me, ‘You did this wrong. You need to go work on that’. […] I guess it’s just in here because I never had that positive role model in my life.
Importantly, however, these accounts of transformation were not always stories of getting “back on track.” For some, what they encountered in prison opened up new ways of living and imagining themselves that had not previously seemed possible.
The fragility of reinvention
As many women themselves acknowledged, reinvention remained a fragile achievement.
Whatever changes women began to make inside prison would eventually be tested by the realities of life outside, and often without the same supports and resources to sustain them. Lauren captured this tension when she described prison as “playing life”:
It [jail] talks about getting out, but it’s not set up for anyone to be living. The women enjoy living here. This is an easier day-to-day… life in terms of existing and etching out a living because there’s nothing that they can hold onto outside of these walls. There’s such a breakdown of family, there’s no consistent work, there’s no consistent education, there’s been no consistent societal teaching. And so, this is … this is great. This is … playing life.
Looking beyond prison
As the authors argue, these accounts should not be read as evidence that prison is working or that incarceration is somehow less damaging than decades of research has shown.
Instead, they reveal something much more troubling about the shortcomings of our re-entry supports and broader social systems. When opportunities for support, healing, and personal change become more accessible within a punitive institution, it points to serious gaps in social welfare, community, and Indigenous support systems.
The question, then, is not what prisons are doing right. It is why do people have to enter prison before they can access the support and resources to imagine and work towards a different future, and how can we make those opportunities available in communities before incarceration becomes the place where they find them.
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