“We're Not All That Criminal”

SUMMARY

The theoretical and empirical traditions of those of us in academia toward the study of “women offenders” has led to a myopic approach to research based on the implicit assumption that criminalized women are markedly different from the rest of mainstream “law-abiding citizens.” This treatment-based approach individualizes criminalized women and increasingly places the blame on cognitive deficiencies to account for one's wrongdoing. Such approaches are devoid of any contextual analysis as to why certain groups of marginalized women are criminalized in the first place. Canada has taken a lead role in developing therapeutic measures to correct and normalize those women (and men) it deems to be failures in our society. To counter the notion of Canada as the benevolent jailer, this essay interrogates the discourse surrounding women's involvement in crime by deconstructing the language which dominates in Canadian prisons; counteract the cognitive-based model of “corrections” which portrays criminalized women as logically deficient; and elucidate the inherent contradictions in official definitions of “reintegrative success” for criminalized women. This article challenges the preoccupation of chronicling the lives of women exprisoners solely through a focus on individual criminal wrongdoings. Rather, the central aim is to critique the androcentric, culturally exclusive knowledge-making processes which exclude marginalized groups in the first place, most notably the voices of disenfranchised women

Key Words:

• Criminalized women
• knowledge deconstruction
• feminist epistemologies