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In "Punishment in Disguise", Kelly Hannah-Moffat presents a look at some current forms of penal governance in Canadian federal women's prisons. Hannah-Moffat uses women's imprisonment to theorize the complexity of penal power and to show how the meaning and content of women's penal governance changes over time, how penal reform strategies intersect and evolve into complex patterns of governing, how governing is always gendered and racialized, and how expert, non-expert, and hybrid forms of power and knowledge inform penal strategies. The author posits that although there has been a series of distinct phases in the imprisonment of women, the prison system itself, given its primary functions of custody and punishment, is consistent in thwarting attempts at progressive reform. While each distinct phase has its own corresponding ideology and discourse, the individual discourses have internal complexities and contradictions, which have not been adequately recognized in the general literature on penology. Avoiding universal and reductionist claims about women's oppression, Hannah-Moffat argues that relations of power are complex and fractured and that there is a need to explore the specific elements of institutional power relations. Backed by solid research, "Punishment in Disguise" makes a strong contribution to criminology and feminist theory by providing an alternative approach to analysing the governance of women by other women and by the state

This article examines the discrepancies between theories of risk and penality and emergent strategies of risk/need identification and management. Working back from the strategies themselves, I argue that the current generations of risk/need technologies are a significant departure from the pessimistic theoretical accounts of risk in criminal justice associated with the 'new penology' and 'actuarial justice'. I argue that risk knowledges are fluid and flexible and capable of supporting a range of penal strategies. The evolution and meanings of risk in correctional assessment and classification are examined to show how understandings of risk have shifted from static to dynamic categorizations. I show how the concept of need is fused with risk, how particular conceptions of 'need' and 'risk' are situated in local penal narratives, how need reconstructs risk and revives correctional treatment as an efficient risk minimization strategy. I argue that strategic alignment of risk with narrowly defined intervenable needs contributes to the production of a transformative risk subject who unlike the ' fixed or static risk subject' is amenable to targeted therapeutic interventions. Newly formed risk/needs categorizations and subsequent management strategies give rise to a new politics of punishment, in which different risk/needs groupings compete for limited resources, discredit collective group claims to resources, redistribute responsibilities for risk/needs management and legitimate both inclusive and exclusionary penal strategies.

This article examines some of the theoretical and substantive issues associated with the uncritical embrace of selected feminist ideals in recent Canadian attempts to restructure and rethink federal women's imprisonment. The article focuses on the limitations of a woman-centered model of corrections and how these models of punishment fail to depart from more traditional conceptualizations of punishment. The definition and constitution of a woman-centered regime is troublesome because it relies on a problematic category of "woman"; it is insensitive to wider social, economic, and political cultural relations of power; it sets up a false dichotomy between the woman-and male-centered regimes; and it denies the material and legal realities of imprisonment. These concerns illustrate clearly that although the woman-centered model of corrections appears to be less intrusive and less punitive, it is not; further, the oppressive qualities of incarceration are simply obscured by a feminized social control talk.

AbstractReforms to Canadian sentencing law in 1996 and the Supreme Court of Canada decisionR. v. Gladue[1999] opened the door to a new normative set of legal practices that endeavour to integrate racial knowledge about offenders' collective and individual experiences of race relations and oppression into traditional legal criminal practices. One outcome of the reforms and court cases was the formation of dedicated Gladue courts for Aboriginal peoples. This paper explores the formation of Gladue courts, the legal techniques used to produce contextualized racial knowledges, how this information is admitted as evidence before the court, and how this knowledge is used to reframe legal subjects and the risk they pose.

The discretion that is inherent in legal decision making creates ambiguity about the reasons for parole boards' decisions. Although research has documented some of the factors shaping parole decisions for male prisoners, the release process for female prisoners remains largely unexplored. This study asks: What characteristics of violent female offenders and their offences do parole boards emphasize in their decision to release? We employ a multi-method approach to (1) determine the association between parole release and individual, offence and institutional characteristics, (2) clarify the issues that parole boards emphasize when determining whether a prisoner is 'ready' to return to the community and 3) analyse how parole board members reconcile past and unalterable factors in a woman's criminal background with concerns about her future dangerousness by assessing her degree of insight into her crime/s, criminogenic factors and triggers and whether she has learned alternative strategies for managing her potential risk. Data from federally sentenced women in Canada suggest that a parole board's assessment of a violent offender's ability to 'change' positively emerges as a central concern in whether she will be granted parole. Despite their discretionary power, parole boards thus appear to reinforce a dominant correctional logic that requires women to take responsibility for their choices and target dynamic risk factors in order to reduce the likelihood of recidivism.