Looking for Ashley: Re-Reading What the Smith Case Reveals about the Governance of Girls, Mothers and Families in Canada by Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich (review)

In Looking for Ashley, lawyer and socio-legal scholar, Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich, has effectively transformed her doctoral dissertation (completed as the first PhD student in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University) into a riveting investigation into the untimely death of Ashley Smith.¹ Most readers will know that Ashley died on 19 October 2007, while housed in solitary confinement at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Ontario. Most will recall news reports that Smith was found unconscious in her cell by guards who stood outside videotaping her actions, following orders not to intervene. It is well known that Ashley died in hospital from what was described as a “self-initiated asphyxiation” resulting from the ligatures she routinely tied around her neck. Once described as a relatively happy Moncton teenager, Ashley Smith rapidly deteriorated during her four years of incarceration at the New Brunswick Youth Centre and in various federal women’s prisons. Throughout her imprisonment, Ashley was held in solitary confinement and subjected to restraints, tasering, strip searches, assaults, and constant surveillance.

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich draws from her interdisciplinary training in law and feminist legal studies as well as her own background as a former youth “at risk,” to produce a focused and insightful examination of the circumstances leading to Ashley’s demise. In the six chapters that comprise Looking for Ashley, Bromwich theorizes Case Smith through insights from feminist legal theory, critical criminology, critical girlhood scholarship, and political philosophy. Writing against the pre-existing troubled teenager narrative, Bromwich makes (non)sense of the various constructions of Ashley ranging from “Inmate Smith” explored in Chapter 3, to “Child Ashley” in Chapter 4, to “Patient Smith” in Chapter 5. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the study and articulate its theoretical foundations. Chapter 6 concludes the book by situating Ashley’s case within the disciplinary prison complex. It also emphasizes Bromwich’s counter-narrative of Agentic Ashley and discusses the ways in which this version is potentially liberatory in cracking open the “world machine.”²

Rather than presenting Ashley as simply tyrannized by untreated mental illness, Bromwich presents a persuasive case that her capture by the carceral state apparatus driven by necro-political aims made her death in custody almost inevitable. Marked as what Agamben calls homo sacer, Ashley could do little to avoid the state-sponsored social, political, and practical death she experienced due to encounters with Canada’s “correctional” system. In her “meta-text,” Bromwich interrogates ways various actors portray Ashley within “the case bearing her name.”³ She seeks to write a “story about the stories told” and to critically analyze the ways these narratives bolster neo-liberal regimes of punitive power structured through governmental logics that are classed, gendered, and discriminatory towards girls as well as being racialized.⁴ Throughout the text, Bromwich refuses to see Ashley as only disempowered. Instead, Bromwich problematizes the refusal to imbue Ashley with authority or girlhood power as a central research challenge. Bromwich invites her readers to see Ashley’s case beyond the pathologizing gaze of mental health discourses. Ashley is grievable, even admirable, as a resistant young woman with varied interests from poetry, to kayaking, to listening to music. Pondering what Ashley’s “own story” might have been had she survived to tell it in her words has merit.⁵

Bromwich’s thoughtful text is the first full-scale effort to theorize and problematize the actions and policies that facilitated Ashley’s expiration while under the close watch of prison authorities. As Bromwich points out, previous research has largely analyzed Ashley Smith as “Patient Smith,” a young woman suffering from untreated mental health issues. Ashley was simultaneously imputed with the authority to make “good choices” to correct her errant behaviour while also read as an incorrigible. Ironically, some of the worst treatment Ashley experienced occurred in...