Doing Time on the Outside: Deconstructing the Benevolent Community

Abstract

Doing Time on the Outside: Deconstructing the Benevolent Community Madonna Maidment Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006; 188 pp. The 1990s and the early days of the new millennium seem to have ushered in an era in which women's incarceration became a key focus for criminological scholarship. In Canada alone, we saw the publication of An Ideal Prison (Hannah-Moffat and Shaw, 2000), Imprisoning Our Sisters (Hayman, 2006), and Punishment in Disguise (Hannah-Moffat, 2001). The timing comes as no surprise to those who saw the video-taped images of women being abused by prison staff at Kingston's federal Prison for Women. It was, in part, these tapes and the subsequent public outcry and public inquiry that motivated both penal reform for women, and increased feminist scholarship in the field. The subsequent rhetoric of reform promised healing and empowerment. Yet as the volumes noted above have argued, the reality has been dramatically different. Maidment's Doing Time on the Outside is similarly critical of the reform agenda. In fact, Maidment develops the argument that women offenders are subject to decidedly disempowering strategies of formal and informal social control outside the prison as well as in. In fact, their pathways to and from the prison gates are characterized by Maidment as inherently bound up with their experiences of transcarceration. Far from being a "benevolent jailer," the Canadian women's penal system is largely self-perpetuating. Following Foucault, Maidment sets herself the task of closely examining the disciplinary control of "criminalized" women inside and outside formal institutions of social control. She is concerned with the ways in which legal, medical, and "psy"-entific professions conspire to survey and constrain the options of women, especially once they have left the prison. In large part, this is accomplished through the creation of what Maidment refers to as "patterns of dependency, medicalization, and infantilization." The related processes of informal social control, especially at the local level, are often counterproductive, reproducing rather than reducing women's criminality. In contrast, Maidment finds that women fare better if they are encouraged to rely on informal networks. That is, interpersonal support networks appear to be far more conducive to successful community reintegration than any formalized or state mechanisms of social control. Maidment comes to these conclusions on the basis of her analysis of two data sources. The first really provides context for the second. This was a database of demographic data on all women sentenced to prison in Newfoundland and Labrador from 1990 to 2000 (n=359). The second, qualitative piece derives from her intensive interviews with 22 women, each of whom had more than four convictions. Consequently, the voices of these women enliven the pages of the text. Having set the stage with the usual reviews of relevant theoretical, methodological and substantive literature in the opening chapters, Maidment gets to the crux of her analysis in Chapters 4 through 7. It is here that she traces the "criminalization trajectory," characterized by pathways to prison; prisoning of women; transformation from prison; and persistence of state and local control agents post-release. Chapter 4 confirms what we already know about the structural and biographical histories that shape criminalization: poverty, abuse, histories of institutionalization, and defiance of gender norms. Once incarcerated, the ways in which women experience the "pains of imprisonment," set out in Chapter 5, often determines their subsequent success upon release. Paradoxically, Maidment finds that rather than preparing women for post-release success, the prison experience typically (re)produces institutional dependency. …