Building on Thomas Ugelvik's (2011) work, this article seeks to capture the food-related experiences and challenges faced by provincially and federally incarcerated women in Canada. This research shows that criminalized women engage with food in different ways than Ugelvik's sample of men did while in prison. We consider how prison fare operates as a form of status degradation and how the less eligibility principle allows for incarcerated populations to be fed low-quality foods. This is followed by a discussion of how the ways in which women share and trade food demonstrates an ethic of care and a strategy of coping and resistance. Mealtime resistance via the storing, sharing, and trading of food exemplifies how women negotiate power in the carceral context; this use of individual agency, albeit limited, fosters togetherness and solidarity, making prison time temporarily more comfortable and manageable. By showcasing participants' firsthand accounts of prison fare, we explore how women's relationships with food shape their material experiences of incarceration.

Research Summary: This article examines a chain of policy directives concerning self‐injury inside federal correctional facilities in Canada. Specific attention is paid to the impact of these policies on federally sentenced women. I argue that the Correctional Service of Canada's focus on risk assessment fails to address the needs of the women they confine. Instead, women's needs are reconceptualized as institutional risk factors. Policy Implications: Women who self‐injure are still routinely disciplined for their behaviour in Federal Canadian prisons through admittance to administrative segregation. This policy challenges two sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (s. 7 and s. 15) and must be changed. In this article, I will recommend a new women‐centered approach to replace current practice.

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.

RésuméLes femmes qui sortent de prison continuent de faire face à des épreuves provenant de leur emprisonnement. Dans cet article, nous abordons les façons dont la prison, et par extension l'État, suivent les femmes à l'extérieur de la prison jusque dans leurs communautés. Tandis que l'État tente d'assurer une réintégration réussie des ex-prisonnières, ses politiques, reflétant un agenda néolibéral de responsabilisation individuelle, entravent possiblement les chances des femmes de réintégrer leurs communautés. Ici, nous explorons les expériences de (ré)intégration des femmes par l'entremise de témoignages d'ex-prisonnières ayant servi de longues sentences, de leur famille et de leurs défenseurs. Le contrôle que ces femmes ont connu en prison résonne dans leur vie après leur mise en liberté: elles ressentent une désagrégation, une marginalisation et un besoin de (re)négocier leur vie. Tandis que les femmes peuvent quitter la prison, le contrôle qu'elles ont subi durant leur incarcération demeure imprégné dans leur esprit et leur corps. L'État continue d'exercer, bref, une autorité sur elles à distance par les séquelles de leur emprisonnement ainsi que par une surveillance continue.

More than 180 people in Canada have faced criminal charges related to HIV nondisclosure. Media coverage is often sensational and commonly portrays people living with HIV as hypersexualized threats to the (inter)national body politic. This article analyzes mainstream news media coverage of four HIV nondisclosure cases to examine how the accused (two men, two women) are constructed as sexual predators, which we found occurs through two key discursive moves. First, by tying the narrative to stereotypical conceptualizations of hegemonic and toxic masculinity and pariah femininity to construct the individual as promiscuous, hypersexual and dangerous. Second, by crafting a narrative that evokes complex moral emotions; notably, these include the ‘negative’ emotions of anger, disgust and fear. Given that racialized men are disproportionately represented and demonized in media accounts, and the tense race relations in the current western political landscape, it is important to consider how emotions (rather than medical evidence of the risks of transmission, intent to infect or actual transmission) might contribute to shaping punitive mentalities and the harsh application of the law. By examining how race, gender, class and sexuality are mobilized to construct narratives of Black masculinity as inherently toxic and women’s sexual freedom as exemplifying pariah femininity, and the ways in which the coverage evokes negative moral emotions, we contend that media coverage shores up moralized discourses about sexuality, masculinity and femininity and HIV/AIDS.

Based on eight in-depth interviews conducted with security guards who work in the psychiatric units of two hospitals located in Ottawa, Canada, this research found that private security agents unknowingly draw on Sykes and Matza’s five techniques of neutralization to justify their use of violence and coercive force against patients and to overcome their feelings of guilt for participating in the administration of brutal intervention practices, including physical and chemical restraints. Guards claimed that these practices benefit the patients more than it hurts them and in cases where they believed the interventions to be unwarranted, guards either accepted the medical staff’s judgment to make decisions about when coercive force should be used or condemned the authority the nursing staff has in determining how to manage patients. They also drew on militant codes of security conduct to justify their tough demeanours and resilient attitudes towards medicalized violence. Implications for forensic practice include considerations of the effects of the (gendered) power relations that structure closed institutional settings and can harm already vulnerable patients, as well as the negative consequences of using security to enforce arbitrary institutional rules.

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This research note begins by situating some of the major areas of inquiry within social-science research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS non-disclosure. The evolution of the use of this criminal justice measure in the attempt to regulate HIV/AIDS transmission illustrates what has been termed “criminalization creep,” whereby steadily increasing numbers of people are charged with increasingly severe crimes. We outline some of the key and precedent-setting cases in Canadian law in order to explore the problematic of criminalization and suggest avenues for future research on this subject.