Punishment in Disguise: Penal Governance and Federal Imprisonment of Women in Canada by Kelly Hannah-Moffat (review)

humanities 425 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 not dominant in the committal process, had little power to shape the experience of patients inside the asylums. Comparative studies in particular force their authors to limit their range. Moran has concentrated on primary sources from the middle decades, with the result that his treatment of developments in Ontario after about 1870, and the influence of changing medical and legal ideas on asylums, is brief. Moran himself argues that strategies to manage mental disorder >outside the walls= of the asylum need to be more fully examined. However, case studies of >wanderer, pauper, and prisoner= exemplify his important finding that local jails in both jurisdictions continued to be places of refuge and containment for the mentally disabled after the advent of asylums. Committed to the State Asylum will interest students of the history of the state, of psychiatry, and of asylums. This monograph above all shows that comparative history is an excellent method for uncovering both continuities and differences in the history of societal responses to insanity. (A. KIRKMONTGOMERY ) Kelly Hannah-Moffat. Punishment in Disguise: Penal Governance and Federal Imprisonment of Women in Canada University of Toronto Press. xii, 250. $50.00, $22.95 In Punishment in Disguise, Kelly Hannah-Moffat traces the historical evolution of penal policies in federal regimes of women=s imprisonment in Canada. Building on Foucauldian analyses of power, the book seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the varied and complex governance strategies which have been used to regulate women prisoners, and to initiate and legitimate various reform efforts from the nineteenth century to the present. In particular, the analysis emphasizes several themes including the way in which patterns of female penal governance have involved multiple, often contradictory, strategies and techniques by state agents and reformers; the important role of non-expert, non-state reformers in shaping prison regimes; and the ways in which institutional dynamics and correctional management have undermined well-meaning penal reform efforts over time. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the emergence of the first women-centred prison regimes in the nineteenth century in which maternal reformers sought to reform women prisoners by establishing separate women=s prisons and utilizing kinder, gentler techniques of governance based on Victorian constructions of ideal womanhood. The analysis reveals how the use of a maternal logic, with its purported emphasis on benevolent techniques of reform, nevertheless also served to justify repressive, punitive disciplinary xxxxxxx 426 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 techniques against those women who resisted the >motherly= reform approaches, or who were defined as >incorrigible.= Chapters 3 and 4 trace the role of maternal logic, as well as other forms of governance, in the early female unit at the Kingston Penitentiary and, later, the Prison for Women which opened in 1934. Despite official recognition of maternal reform strategies, Hannah-Moffat argues that the Prison for Women did little more than warehouse women and, in practice, was a prison regime designed for women deemed unreformable. The governance of women at the prison began to change from 1945 to 1970 as new psychiatric , social work, and scientific reform techniques were integrated with existing non-expert forms of knowledge and maternal governance. HannahMoffat highlights the critical role played by laywomen volunteers and volunteer organizations such as the Elizabeth Fry Society in shaping the type of rehabilitation strategies used to regulate and govern women prisoners during this period. Chapters 5 and 6 document the efforts of feminist reformers over the past several decades to reform women=s prisons, culminating in the influential 1990 report, Creating Choices. Based on an explicitly feminist vision of justice and women-centred corrections, Creating Choices led to the closure of the Prison for Women and to the construction of four new regional facilities and a Healing Lodge. Hannah-Moffat highlights the many ways in which institutionalization and institutional dynamics have limited the possibility of change and served to compromise, redefine, and, in some cases, obliterate beyond recognition the original vision embodied in Creating Choices. She argues that the limits of current women-centred regimes are both inevitable and intransigent, since, like...