Neoliberal austerity measures and welfare state retrenchment have meant that voluntary organizations around the globe are increasingly called upon to perform statutory social services. Despite a large and rising presence in criminal justice service delivery, volunteers and voluntary organizations have scarcely received scholarly analysis. This paper uses interviews, ethnography, and document analysis to explore the penal voluntary sector in Canada. Specifically, how individuals in the penal voluntary sector understand their roles in helping criminalized women and how these perspectives vary across different positions. This paper illuminates how agents occupying different helper positions cultivate divergent understandings of (and justifications for) the help they provide. Bourdieu’s field theory is mobilized to demonstrate how variegated discourses of helping co-exist, conflict, and impact the relational dynamics of the penal voluntary sector and its engagement with criminalized women.
Increasing calls for ‘nothing about us without us’ envision marginalized people as valuable and necessary contributors to policies and practices affecting them. In this paper, we examine what this type of inclusion feels like for criminalized people who share their lived experiences in penal voluntary sector organizations. Focus groups conducted in England and Scotland illustrated how this work was experienced as both safe, inclusionary and rewarding and exclusionary, shame-provoking and precarious. We highlight how these tensions of ‘user involvement’ impact criminalized individuals and compound wider inequalities within this sector. The individual, emotional and structural implications of activating lived experience, therefore, require careful consideration. We consider how the penal voluntary sector might more meaningfully and supportively engage criminalized individuals in service design and delivery. These considerations are significant for broader criminal justice and social service provision seeking to meaningfully involve those with lived experience.
Whether prisoner resettlement is framed in terms of public health, safety, economic prudence, recidivism, social justice, or humanitarianism, it is difficult to overstate its importance. This article investigates women’s experiences exiting prison in Canada to deepen understandings of post-carceral trajectories and their implications. It combines feminist work on transcarceration and Bourdieusian theory with qualitative research undertaken in Canada to propose the (trans)carceral habitus as a theoretical innovation. This research illuminates the continuity of criminalized women’s marginalization before and beyond their imprisonment, the embodied nature of these experiences, and the adaptive dispositions that they have demonstrated and depended on throughout their lives. In doing so, this article extends criminological work on carceral habitus which has rarely considered the experiences of women. Implications for resettlement are discussed by tracing the impact of criminalized women’s (trans)carceral habitus (i.e. distrust, skepticism, vigilance about their environments and relationships) on their willingness to access support and services offered by resettlement organizations.
Financial austerity, welfare state retrenchment, and the movement towards evidence-based interventions have intensified the pressures on penal voluntary sector (PVS) organizations. The result is an increasingly competitive field of social service provision in which organizations must differentiate themselves in the struggle over funding, contracts, symbolic authority, and potential clients. We explore this struggle by examining the distinct roads to reentry constructed at four PVS organizations in Ontario, Canada. Our analysis initiates a dialogue between individual narratives and organizational discourses, contending that the road to reentry is coauthored among organizations and criminalized individuals—albeit on unequal terms. Our findings reveal that there are significant pressures for criminalized individuals to perform narrative labor to align themselves with organizational understandings of reentry. Such pressures include: the denial of services or social assistance payments, threats of being returned to prison for “inadequate” participation in rehabilitation, and risks of not being considered for coveted “professional ex” positions at PVS organizations. In light of these empirical findings, we also offer a conceptual reflection on the challenges criminalized individuals likely face accessing services from multiple organizations with differing roads to reentry, suggesting that navigating these diverse roads not only requires narrative labor, but also narrative dexterity.
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