Speakers
Parallel Workshops
Canada became one of the first countries to actively promote and adopt a gender-responsive correctional model inspired by feminist research; this kind of model stresses that women in prison have more in common with other women than with men or men in prison. The intention behind this policy change was to move beyond the notion of equal treatment to focus explicitly on women's differences.We examine how the current state of women's punishment – and how feminist knowledge intended to empower prisoners is often misapplied and how the operationalization or rejection of gender-responsive strategies and programs fail to recognize nuances of intersectionality. Finally, we argue that an emphasis on women's experiences and conditions of confinement is critical and that community-centered reform, while flawed, is the only way out of the circularity of prison reform.