Incarceration and Re-entry for Provincial Prisoners: Is there Hope?

Abstract

This thesis explores the impacts of hope on the experience of incarceration and re-entry into the community and how ex-prisoners make sense of and foster hope in their lives. This research was conducted through qualitative interviews with nine participants in the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada. Qualitative interviews discerned four main themes emerging: the overall experience of provincial incarceration and the positive and negative aspects of that experience, the process of re-entry and the barriers that ex-prisoners face in that process, the motivations to change and begin desisting from crime and finally, the way in which ex-prisoners feelings of hope impacted their experiences throughout this process. Amongst the key findings is, the participants who lacked the feeling of hope during their imprisonment generally felt more disoriented during their re-entry in the community. Next, although prisons are painful and negative spaces, they can also offer an opportunity for reinvention (Crewe and Ievins, 2020). As such, many of the participants in this research found various ways to “reinvent” themselves post-imprisonment. In alignment with procedural justice literature, this research found that when prisoners had positive interactions with correctional officers, it profoundly impacted their feelings of hope. As such, the participants who had procedurally just interactions described feeling more hopeful in their prison sentence and later re-entry into the community. This research also found that although these ex- prisoners had shorter sentences, they still felt various strains in their process of re-entry. The most predominant way that the participants navigated their re-entry into the community and further desistance from crime was by distancing or “knifing off” old peers (Laub & Sampson, 2001). Despite having difficulty interpreting hope, after thought and reflection, each participant made sense of the term by attributing it to a more positive future.