Punishment in Disguise: Penal Governance and Federal Imprisonment of Women in Canada (review)

Kelly Hannah-Moffat's Punishment in Disguise is a sociological study of female incarceration in Canada. By delving into the underlying relations between the keepers and the kept, the author concerns herself with the manner in which the state, along with penal reformers, govern female prisoners. Relying heavily on Foucauldian theory, Hannah-Moffat explores the unequal relations of power between reformer and female prisoner in order to demonstrate that penal power can be gendered.

Hannah-Moffat begins her discussion with prison-reform efforts in late nineteenth-century England. Reformers such as Elizabeth Fry insisted that female prisoners ought to be supervised by female staff in order to ease the pain of imprisonment and normalize female prisoners. Yet Hannah-Moffat argues that, however benevolent, maternal power shaped, guided, managed, and regulated the conduct of female prisoners. The practice of women governing other women using maternal strategies may seem less invasive and regulatory than other forms of penal power, but they are nonetheless an exercise of power.

Having placed penal reform in a larger context, Hannah-Moffat turns her attention to the Canadian experience by using Toronto's Andrew Mercer Reformatory and Kingston's Prison for Women as case studies. She contends that by the early twentieth century, reformers subscribed to white middle-class ideals of appropriate female comportment and lobbied for the construction of separate institutions for women. By virtue of their gender, female reformers were legitimized as 'authorized knowers' of what was best for female prisoners. However, this innate or 'everyday' feminine knowledge was being challenged. By the time the Prison for Women opened in 1934, maternal power coexisted with a more scientifically based rehabilitative model of correctional reform. The benevolent volunteer was no longer deemed adequate to manage female prisoners, and relevant professional training was increasingly influenced by scientific and, especially, medical and psychiatric interpretations of women's crime.

During the early 1970s, several North American prisons experienced riots and the violent death of inmates and staff, and faced serious allegations of abuse and misconduct. This led to an outpouring of public criticism and political pressure. In this context, liberal and radical feminists wanted to secure female prisoners equal access to prison programs and improve the conditions of confinement. These reformers, sensitive to the politics of difference, pushed the government to develop a 'women-centred' prison model that would take into account the differences between male and female prisoners. This notion of a 'women-centred' approach was articulated in Creating Choices, the report of the 1990 Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women. Like their nineteenth-century counterparts, this new generation of reformers argued that female convicts should be governed in a way that recognized their difference from men. However, instead of relying on maternal metaphors, reformers now depended on ideals of empowerment, healing, and choice supported by cultural feminism, Aboriginal culture, and other social movements.

In response to the recommendations of the task force, the Correctional Service of Canada opened four new regional facilities and one Aboriginal 'healing lodge' based on this 'women-centred' approach. However, Hannah-Moffat argues that the government subverted the language of feminist reformers in order to justify its own punitive strategies, by redefining empowerment as 'responsibilization.' In other words, prison authorities now expected the offender to be responsible for her own rehabilitation. While the government seems to be implementing the findings of Creating Choices by offering educational and job-training opportunities, Hannah-Moffat claims that these activities are not truly empowering because incarcerated women have no real choice about whether or not to participate. Those who choose not to take advantage of these empowerment opportunities are constructed as high-risk and accordingly submitted to the more punitive treatment of irresponsible prisoners. Thus, argues Hannah-Moffat, 'strategies of reform can seemingly satisfy reformers' demands for change, while simultaneously adapting to the often contradictory demands by correctional officers to discipline and "responsibilize" prisoners...