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This article examines how women incarcerated in provincial and federal prisons in Canada experience medicalization as the predominant form of correctional psy intervention. In order to privilege the oft ignored and typically silenced voices of incarcerated women, this article draws on life history interviews with 22 formerly incarcerated women who were living in halfway houses and working to transition from prison to the community. The analysis highlights the (over)use of prescription psychotropic medications as a governance strategy and the impact this practice has on women serving time. Participants had limited access to non-medical interventions in general, and no access to counselling services outside the purview of correctional control. The overlapping of correctional and psy interventions in the prison setting transforms psy treatment not only into a mechanism of social control, but also into a punitive and disciplinary enterprise that delegitimizes the women's self-identified needs.

Prisons are inherently emotional environments where both staff and prisoners engage in a continuous process of emotion management while working and living in carceral spaces. This paper explores how Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) values and norms shape how predominantly nonuniformed staff manage compassion inside the prison environment. This includes when and to whom they are allowed to express compassion, when they need to hide or suppress the expression of compassion, and how expressing compassion toward prisoners can elicit feelings of disgust among some staff. We argue that, in the emotional arena that is prison, compassion is (re)configured into an individualized and compulsory emotion by way of CSC's organizational emotion culture that emphasizes punishment and control (the security-care nexus) rather than a transformative act that helps to resist the harms of incarceration and encourages healing. Compassion thus becomes a disciplinary apparatus whereby staff self-discipline as they alter their own emotional orientation toward their work, prisoners, and other staff and as a practice to collectively surveil, evaluate, and regulate one another. We contend that compassion bound to questions and practices of security stifles rehabilitation in this environment and that health and other care work must be reintegrated into community settings.

Over the past three decades, Canada has expanded its capacity to confine citizens in ways that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities and people grappling with mental health and substance use issues, as well as poverty and homelessness. Carceral expansion, however, is not restricted to increasing institutional capacity; it also entails mechanisms to govern vulnerable people through the broader community-based carceral system. Based on a series of focus group interviews with representatives from over a dozen different community-based advocacy groups in Ottawa, Canada, this article examines the emotional labour these radical activists employ in their anti-carceral advocacy work. We explore how emotions and affects structure the strategies mobilised by these groups, and how they enable these advocates to resist carceral expansion. We also examine how critics of the anti-carceral position held by our participants tend to frame their interventions in ways that seek to delegitimise these activists as overly emotional or irrational in their denunciation of carceral violence, even as advocates remarked how their radical activist positions on penal abolition have been co-opted by proponents of police reform. This is revealing of the ways in which the emotional states of actors with fewer resources and authority can be mobilised by those in positions of relative power, transforming the emotional landscape of contestation.

This article examines the role of solidarity as a centrally distinguishing feature of two distinct emotion culture(s) operating in federal prisons for women in Canada. We explore the social interactions between correctional officers and inmates and among criminalized women to understand how group cohesion is shaped by the power dynamics between these groups in the prison environment. For correctional officers, solidarity facilitates difficult aspects of their work and enables them to behave antagonistically towards inmates. Despite prison staff's efforts to disrupt prisoner solidarity, solidarity serves two key functions for criminalized women–emotional coping and resistance to systemic oppression.

AbstractThis article explores emotional harm in the context of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in Canada. With the exception of Matthew Weait in the United Kingdom, few scholars have examined what harm means in cases of HIV nondisclosure. We conceptualize the harm that follows nondisclosure as an affective response to the "HIV positive Other" and argue that law creates a legal norm about what harm is and feels like in cases of HIV nondisclosure when there is no clear consensus about how harm should be defined. Mobilizing the sociology of emotions literature, we contend that criminalizing HIV nondisclosure engages affective, moral, and criminal censure to regulate the behaviours of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH), thus reproducing HIV stigma and propagating emotional harm for PLWH. Canada's response to HIV nondisclosure should instead involve a transformative justice approach that avoids the harm of criminalization and imprisonment while recognizing the emotional harm experienced by complainants.

This article examines how the judge, defence counsel and Crown prosecution in R. v. T.S. mobilised feeling and framing rules to assess the credibility of the complainants and accused. T.S. is a former Canadian Football League linebacker who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault for failing to disclose to two women that he is HIV positive. Our analysis of the trial transcripts reveals how T.S.'s failure to disclose his HIV-positive status and his lack of an overtly emotional courtroom display led to his construction as callous towards the health of his sexual partners and subsequently to his characterisation as noncredible. Alternatively, the complainants had to authentically re-perform their original emotional reactions to learning that T.S. was HIV positive while testifying in court in order to be deemed credible. This signals the retroactive aspect of emotions in the context of a trial. Using Ahmed's notion of the 'stickiness of emotion', our second finding reveals that while the type and intensity of emotional courtroom displays structure interpretations of credibility in criminal trials, moral emotions such as indignation, fear and disgust stick to HIV. This implies a connection between perceptions of morality and credibility where people living with HIV/AIDS who fail to disclose are assessed as always-already unremorseful and noncredible thereby showcasing the continuity of HIV stigma. We show how determinations of credibility in HIV nondisclosure cases can problematically devalue the emotions that structure disclosure decision making in favour of prioritising the feelings of anger, shock, fear, frustration and disgust felt by complainants.

AbstractDrawing on interviews with civil society actors in the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) sector in Canada, this article explores how these actors contribute to shaping the illness identities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the shadow of efforts to criminalize exposure to HIV. While the biographically disruptive qualities associated with an HIV diagnosis have been addressed in the medical sociology literature, we turn our attention to the key role played by ASOs as interlocutors in this process. Paying specific attention to the intersection of processes of medicalization and criminalization, we ask how they are re‐stigmatizing a condition that has shifted in the public consciousness from its earlier association with deviance and moral culpability. One important implication of our findings concerns the need to take greater account of how the illness identity and experience can be shaped by a 'biography of telling', of a renewed pressure to disclose intimate details of one's health status as a way to perform responsible practices of citizenship.

Le nombre de femmes, particulièrement de femmes autochtones, incarcérées dans les pénitenciers fédéraux canadiens et dans des unités d'isolement a augmenté régulièrement au cours de la dernière décennie. Le présent article propose une analyse des politiques fondées sur l'intersectionnalité et utilise l'étude de cas d'une femme autochtone pour examiner comment les femmes purgeant une peine fédérale vivent l'isolement et les problèmes d'inégalité qui sont illustrés par leur surreprésentation dans cette forme de détention des plus austères. Nous explorons les façons genrées et racialisées dont le Service correctionnel du Canada (SCC) interprète les comportements, les attitudes et même les personnalités des femmes qui sont placées en isolement. En examinant les politiques en matière de santé mentale, de genre et de culture dans le contexte de la gestion du risque et des besoins, nous concluons que le SCC ne protège pas les femmes marginalisées, mais convertit plutôt leurs besoins en risques à gérer. Nous proposons aussi d'autres réponses et solutions stratégiques visant à produire les changements sociaux et structuraux qui sont nécessaires pour réduire le caractère injuste des politiques et des pratiques correctionnelles.

While the social sciences are experiencing narrative and emotional turns that are largely based on exploratory and theoretical qualitative research, the problematic dismissal of qualitative research approaches continues to loom large outside academia. Frequently described as a collection of "anecdotal stories," qualitative research is dismissed as unscientific and unreliable— comments that limit the perceived usefulness of qualitative findings, especially in terms of policy reform. This article problematizes evaluating qualitative research according to quantitative measures of rigour and explores the richness and value of documenting experiential stories and the process of storying in social science research. Notably, we take up the issues of criminal record suspension (pardons) and the abolition of carceral segregation as two case studies to demonstrate how the qualitative value of experiential research and personal stories are simultaneously mobilized and rejected by key actors such as politicians, government researchers, and judges. Our analysis highlights the power that stories have when it comes to influencing change within the criminal justice system, depending on who takes up/rejects these stories. We conclude with a discussion of why stories matter and how, when "layered," they can contribute to the production of meaningful interventions to the ongoing criminalization and punishment of vulnerable people.

AbstractThis article offers a narrative analysis of the two CBCFifth Estateinvestigative documentaries about Ashley Smith ("Behind the Wall," 2010; "Out of Control," 2010) and juxtaposes the documentary narratives against claims made by feminist criminologists with respect to women's corrections. Examining the coherent 'through narrative' that is constructed in each documentary, we claim thatThe Fifth Estateuses dominant medicalized conceptualizations of mental illness and mental health treatment to frame the Smith case, leaving questions about the gendered nature of her criminalization, imprisonment and mistreatment unasked. Considering the socio-political context of neoliberal and post-feminist individualism, we argue thatThe Fifth Estatepresents the case in a way that maintains the status quo and may resonate with their national audience, but which also reinforces the pathologization of women prisoners and upholds gendered stereotypes.