Criminalizing Women

Gender and (In)justice in Neoliberal Times

Edited by Gillian Balfour, Elizabeth Comack

This book introduces readers to the key issues addressed by feminists in their engagement with criminology over the past four decades. It explores the narratives of women’s lives as “errant females,” sex trade workers, “gang” members and drug traffickers to map out the connections between the choices women make and the conditions of their lives. It shows how criminalized women and girls have been disciplined, managed, corrected and punished as prisoners, patients, mothers and victims through imprisonment, medicalization and secure care. And it considers the feminist strategies that have been used to address the conditions inside women’s prisons, to defend criminalized women’s human rights and to draw attention to the systemic abuses against poor and racialized women.

Contents

• Introduction 
• I. WOMEN, CRIMINOLOGY, AND FEMINISM
• The Feminist Engagement with Criminology (Elizabeth Comack)
• II. MAKING CONNECTIONS: Class/Race/Gender Intersections
• Introduction (Elizabeth Comack)
• Sluts and Slags: The Censuring of the “Erring Female” (Joanne C. Minaker)
• The In-Call Sex Industry: Reflections of Classed and Gendered Labour on the Margins (Chris Bruckert and Colette Parent)
• Surviving Colonization: Anishinaabe Ikwe and Gang Participation (Nahanni Fontaine)
• Representations of Women in the Drug Trade (Susan C. Boyd)
• III. REGULATING WOMEN AND GIRLS
• Introduction (Gillian Balfour) 
• Charlotte’s Story Revisited: The Criminal and Psychiatric Control of Women (Robert Menzies and Dorothy E. Chunn) 
• From Villain to Victim: Secure Care and Young Women Involved in Prostitution (Steven Bittle)
• From Welfare Fraud to Welfare as Fraud: The Criminalization of Poverty (Dorothy E. Chunn and Shelley A.M. Gavigan)
• Therapeutic Programming as a Regulatory Practice in Women’s Prisons (Shoshana Pollack) 
• Empowering Risk: The Nature of Gender-Responsive Strategies (Kelly Hannah-Moffat) 
• Passing the Buck: Transcarceral Regulating of Criminalized Women (MaDonna R. Maidment)
• IV. MAKING CHANGE
• Introduction (Gillian Balfour)
• Are Women’s Rights Worth the Paper They’re Written On? Collaborating to Enforce the Human Rights of Criminalized Women (Gayle Horii, Debra Parkes, and Kim Pate)
• Making Change in Neoliberal Times (Laureen Snider)

About the Authors

Gillian Balfour is Associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Trent University.

Gillian recently completed a PhD in sociology at the University of Manitoba where she examined the role of lawyers in the criminalization of men and women accused of violent crimes. Her PhD research examined the practice of law as a social act that is constrained and enabled by socio-political interests of “law and order,” professional codes of conduct, and the identities of victims and offenders and the meaning of violence that are encoded with stereotypes of whiteness, Indianness, dangerousness, poverty, heterosexuality, femininity and masculinity.

Her research interests include law reforms in the areas of domestic and sexual violence, women, crime and social justice, feminist criminology and Aboriginal peoples in the criminal justice system. Gillian teaches Sociology of Law, Feminist Criminology and Introductory Sociology.
 

Elizabeth Comack is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. She received her Ph.D in sociology from the University of Alberta, her M.A. from Queens University and B.A.(Honours) from the University of Winnipeg.

Elizabeth’s research interests fall within two main areas: the sociology of law and feminist criminology. Over the past three decades she has written and conducted research on a variety of topics: the origins of Canadian drug laws; the capital punishment debate; the legal recognition of the ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’;  the abuse histories of women in prison; violence, inequality, and the law; safety and security issues in Winnipeg’s inner-city communities; and masculinity, violence, and prisoning.  Her current research projects stem from her involvement in a SSHRC/CURA project, under the auspices of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba (CCPA-MB), entitled “Transforming Aboriginal and Inner-City Communities.”  In one of these projects, now underway, she and Nahanni Fontaine of the Southern Chiefs’ Organization (SCO) are interviewing Aboriginal peoples about their experiences with the police.

Elizabeth’s teaching regularly includes third-year courses in the department’s Criminology Program (Sociology of Law, and Women, Crime and Social Justice) as well as graduate seminars in the Sociology of Law and Feminist Criminology. She has also taught Feminism and Sociological Theory, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as the Honours Thesis Seminar.

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