Community Re-entry ─ Uncertain Futures for Women Leaving Prison

In their journeys to prison and community re-entry, women leaving prison tend to share overarching challenges connected to lives of poverty, trauma, and abuse. Community Re-entry: Uncertain Futures for Women Leaving Prison provides a rare opportunity to hear directly from women who have spent time in a Canadian federal penitentiary. Based on more than a decade of engagement with women in prison, the authors gathered rich and personal information on women’s lived experiences during incarceration and what they anticipated and hoped for on release. This book relates their narratives and the authors‘ critical analysis of their experiences both within and outside prison. By bridging relational and other critical theories (critical feminist, critical race, critical disability, and post-structural understandings) with lived experience, this volume sheds light on the challenges incarcerated women face as they seek to return to the community as valued and contributing citizens.

Community Re-entry‘s unique perspective on women’s post-imprisonment policy will appeal to academics, community-based advocates and activists, and undergraduate and postgraduate students studying criminology and social science courses on gender and crime, correctional policy, and qualitative research methods.

Alison Pedlar is a Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Waterloo. Alison has broad applied research and practical experience in issues related to disability, aging, and leisure services in Canada. Her teaching and research activity focused on social policy, planning and development of human services. Much of her work was conducted within a participatory and collaborative research framework, and included community development work with older adults, individuals with disabilities, criminalized women, and other marginalized populations. Her primary research program was concerned with community, citizenship, social justice, and rights.

Susan Arai is a registered psychotherapist and Adjunct Professor in Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. During Sue’s 20 year career in Departments of Community Health Sciences (Brock University) and Leisure Studies (University of Waterloo) her writing and practice focused on mindfulness, healing and transformation in the aftermath of trauma, navigations of oppression and marginalization within social systems and institutions, community inclusion, critical pedagogy, and reflective practice. Sue has worked and conducted research in health and human services with hospitals, municipal and regional governments, federal corrections, community health centers, healthy communities initiatives, social planning councils, and disability organizations. She is currently in private practice and a clinical member of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists. She has received training in relational psychotherapy, Psych-KR, mindfulness-based stress reductionR, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and sensorimotor psychotherapy.

Darla Fortune is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Her research is embedded in a concern for social justice and aims to create positive change in the lives of people most at risk of experiencing exclusion from community. In past research, Darla engaged with women who entered community after a period of incarceration to critically examine the notion of inclusion for individuals who often experience chronic marginalization. Themes of inclusion and social justice have been carried into Darla’s research within the contexts of dementia and long-term care. In this realm, Darla strives to counter dehumanizing care practices dominated by medical and institutional models of care by emphasizing the need for a cultural shift that embraces relational approaches. A belief in the capacity of individuals who are marginalized to create positive social change drives Darla’s research program.

Felice Yuen is an Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada in the Department of Applied Human Sciences. Broadly, her research encompasses healing, social justice, and community development. She often employs arts-based approaches in her research. Her work with the Native Sisterhood, an Indigenous women’s group in a federal prison, and with Journey Women, a group of women dedicated to exploring and advocating for Indigenous women’s healing has led to publications in Critical Criminology, Arts in Psychotherapy, Leisure Sciences, and the Journal of Leisure Research.