There is literature which considers the challenges of prisoner release and re-entry but little research which addresses the successful resettlement of formerlyincarcerated individuals in the years, not months, after release from prison. This article attempts to partially fill this void by focusing on the intersection of two temporal issues: duration of incarceration and the impact of this time on long-term resettlement. Using data from an ethnomethodological study of successful former long-term prisoners, this article discusses the post-carceral challenges encountered by ex-convicts, the strategies used to overcome these and concludes by considering these in relation to the prison expansionist agenda.Timmy 1 is a lifer who spent several decades in prison. Having begun his prison sentence as a teenager, he missed out on the usual rituals associated with growing into adulthood; instead, he became an adult in prison and institutional life was his reality. After release, he struggled to cope and to find his place in society. It wasn't easy and little things 'tripped him up'; eloquently demonstrating this metaphor, he once said that he kept stumbling over the sidewalk because there were 'no curbs in prison'.Timmy is only one of the approximately 13,200 individuals in Canada incarcerated for sentences lasting for more than two years (Canada, Statistics Canada 2007) with half of this group serving more than the median 945 days 2 (Canada, Statistics Canada 2010). As of 31 March 2010, there were 4,774 life-sentenced individuals serving a minimum of ten years in prison before parole eligibility and, therefore, the proportion of people serving greater time than the median is high (Canada 2009). Most of these men and women will eventually return to the community on graduated or statutory release and they will be asked to reintegrate into the social body. Most will succeed. Recent data indicate that over the past ten years, 82% of day paroles, over 70% of full paroles and 58% of statutory releases were successfully completed (Canada, Statistics Canada 2008).
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Every year, millions of people spend Christmas behind bars, yet very little scholarship examines the carceral Christmas. This research attempts to add to the literature by using over 70 years of prisoners’ writings to describe how this holiday season is physically and psychologically experienced by convicts. Drawing on third space scholarship, we argue that prisoners use the manifestations of the holiday season to temporarily ‘escape’ the carceral milieu. More specifically, we contend that the dominant discourses, while not completely refuted, become redefined and reconstituted during the celebratory period. The typical binaries found within the prison (free/captive, inside/outside, keeper/kept), are blurred as a more liminal space emerges. Ultimately, this new imagined space provides a mechanism through which prisoners survive a carceral Christmas.
Contemporary resistance scholarship increasingly positions individuals as agents operating within power relations and as such, this stimulating and diverse body of work illuminates the complexity of powerresistance. The richness of this academic engagement notwithstanding, there continues to be a paucity of work which offers a framework for conducting an analysis of resistance. In this article, we propose a general framework through which power-resistance can be coded, analyzed and theorized. Using data from an ethnomethodological study of 20 former longterm male prisoners in Canada, we demonstrate the usefulness of our 'resistance pyramid' to render visible the objectives, purposes, strategies, tactics and skills which characterize the processes, and not just the practices, of resistance. We argue that it is exactly these, often obscured, processes that allow us to appreciate the density of resistance-power, the multiple ways it operates and the significance of individuals' social, personal or political capital.
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