Women getting out of prison face the same challenges coming out that put them there in the first place, says sociologist
BY REBECCA KENDALL
Have you ever thought about what your life would have been like had things been different? How things would be if you were born into a home where your poor and single mother resorted to crime to get by and ended up going to prison, leaving you and your siblings in foster care? Have you ever considered the possibility of a world where people don’t have to commit crimes to feed and clothe themselves and their children? A world where social programs and welfare are a funding priority and prisons no longer exist? A U of G sociologist is asking these questions and recently signed a deal with the University of Toronto to publish a book about her findings. Doing Time on the Outside: Decon- structing the Benevolent Community is scheduled to be released in summer 2006. Written by Prof. MaDonna Maidment, who joined U of G last September, the book is the result of two years of interviews with women in her home province of Newfoundland and Labrador who had been in prison for at least two years and were scheduled for release or had recently been released. Maidment says 85 per cent of those interviewed were in prison for property-related offences like welfare fraud and shoplifting. “They are single mothers trying to support their kids on welfare and are committing crimes of survival just trying to make ends meet. It costs $150,000 a year to keep a woman in prison. That’s more than 15 times their annual salary, and that’s part of the reason they’re in there to begin with. If the state were to put money into social programs and the welfare system, there would be no need for prisons.” She says many people who are poor and disadvantaged are being incarcerated because the state’s answer to their problems is just to lock them away. And prison isn’t usually their first taste of state-imposed social control, she adds. Most have already been in contact with a variety of agencies throughout their lives, including child protection, foster care, welfare officers and psychiatric interventions. The more layers of social control a woman has encountered in her life, the more chance she has of going to prison and the less chance she has of staying out, Maidment says. The women whose lives are documented in her book spoke about how they ended up in prison, their challenges on the outside and their entanglement with other control systems throughout their lives. She says she found that, for most, freedom is not attained when the cell door is opened and they walk back into society. Instead, she argues, people move from a position of incarceration to one of transcar- ceration, never actually being free of the factors that played roles in their imprisonment. “They face the same challenges coming out that put them there in the first place, including poverty, sexual abuse, inequality and mental health issues.” Maidment says the penal system considers two years without reoffending to be the mark of a successful ex-prisoner, but for some women, two weeks is considered a milestone if they’ve been in prison a long time or in a psychiatric hospital. “They’re going back to the same marginalized conditions, abuses and poor neighbourhoods they came from. Nothing’s changed.” She grew up in St. John’s, Nfld., as one of four daughters and says that, although this research is enlightening from academic and social perspectives, her interviews of female prisoners left her with a heavy heart. She soon realized she’d already looked into the eyes of some of these women when they were her friends and classmates years earlier. “I go back, and their lives have gone one way and mine’s gone another,” she says. “It was a real eye-opener and really troubling to realize that any of us, myself included, could have ended up on the other side of the bars. You quickly realize that their lives could have gone another way if only they’d been given different opportunities. There are some really troubling stories.” Maidment, who did her BA and MA at Memorial University and her PhD at Carleton, is co-founder of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, one of 25 volunteer, non-profit societies across Canada that work to enhance public awareness and education about the circumstances of women involved in the criminal justice system. They also aim to challenge and break down stereotypes about crimi- nalized women. She says the Atlantic provinces have a high incidence of criminalizing mental illness and that incarceration shouldn’t be the response to managing medical conditions and homelessness. “We send people out into the community, and clearly they aren’t equipped to cope there, and the prison system is one system that can’t turn them away. I’m really interested in why that is and why we’re criminalizing mental illness so highly in this specific region.” Maidment’s office shelves are filled with books on criminal justice, criminological theories, electronic surveillance technologies, wrongful convictions and penal abolition. In the middle of it all is a framed photo of Maidment, her sisters Cathy and Lisa, and Oprah Winfrey, who overcame some of the same cir- cumstances that faced the women in Maidment’s study, including sexual abuse, poverty and discrimination, to become one of the most recognized faces on the planet. While working in Ottawa for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as a policy analyst, Maidment had e-mailed producers at the Oprah Winfrey Show in what she thought was another vain attempt to get tickets for herself and her sisters. Lisa is a huge fan of Winfrey’s, and they’d been trying to get tickets for years. “When I got home that night, a producer had left a message on the phone saying that not only did we have tickets, but we were also going to be front-row guests on the show,” says Maidment. The catch was, she had to keep it a secret from her sisters, so she made up a story about winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Chicago to see the Phantom of the Opera. Because Cathy works for Air Canada, it wasn’t easy explaining why their reservations weren’t showing up in the airline’s computer system, says Maidment. “I was a nervous wreck for two days.” Once on the plane, the secret was revealed. With producers and camera operators sitting in the seats next to the sisters with cameras stowed away in the overhead compartments, the surprise unfolded. “As soon as we got to 26,000 feet and the seatbelt sign went off, the flight attendant came on the headset and asked for everyone’s attention for a special announcement,” says Maidment. A recorded message from Winfrey then appeared on the TV monitors. The sisters were the focus of the show’s introductory segment as part of a “Good News” show and were indulged with champagne, imported chocolate, a limousine and first-class treatment for the next two days. “We were on the news in Newfoundland and Labrador for three nights straight,” says Maidment. “I usually show the tape from the Oprah show in class, and the students love it. I spring it on them on the last day of class.”
