8. 30. 2024

Taking Our Lead from Women Prisoners

Kendra Cowley

Women’s contributions to prisoner organizing in Canada have long been overlooked. As such, much of the history of resistance within women’s prisons remains exclusively with the prisoners who lived it. Throughout the winter and spring of 2024, I spoke with the Prison for Women Memorial Collective (P4WMC) as a group, P4WMC members Ann Hansen and Rachel Fayter, and P4WMC Advisory Board member Dr. Isabel Scheuneman Scott about what the history of the Kingston Prison For Women (P4W) has to teach abolitionists today. This article is a culmination of those conversations. 

Every Prisoners’ Justice Day since the closure of the Kingston Prison for Women in 2000, former prisoners have met on the prison’s grounds to hold a healing circle and ceremony “in honour of the sisters they lost inside,” as the organizers name. The Prison for Women Memorial Collective emerged from this 24-year tradition – a group of former prisoners, most of whom served time at P4W, committed to preserving their collective memory. 

P4WMC approached Queen’s University, the then-landlords of the P4W site, to permit the establishment of a memorial garden. The fight continued when Siderius Developments bought the land in 2017 to build Union Park, a luxury condo and retirement community. The collective’s persistent advocacy has highlighted that the legacy of P4W, Canada’s first federal women’s prison, cannot be buried under luxury developments or revisionist historical narratives.

And while P4W is rightfully infamous for its inhumane conditions, its legacy is best represented in the proliferation of women’s prisons that came out of its closure. As my conversations with P4WMC demonstrate, prison reforms, including the building of six supposedly more progressive federal women’s prisons, have always been used to expand the scope of penal power under the guise of more humane treatment. The history of P4W illustrates how prison reform in Canada, like incarceration in general, has been a means of punishing women for their perceived deviation from white middle-class femininity. It’s also a history of resistance: a repertoire of tactics that incarcerated women have used to fight for dignity and autonomy, in a context of ostensibly humanitarian reforms that nevertheless expand the reach of prisons.

The emergence of the Prison For Women and the changing faces of reform

The Prison for Women was built on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee land in 1934, in what is colonially known as Kingston, Ontario. It was the first federal women’s prison in Canada, and until its closure in 2000, any woman sentenced to two or more years in prison would be sent there, no matter where she was from. Prior to 1934, women were incarcerated primarily in men’s prisons, where they were seen as a social anomaly and a threat to order amongst the men. To remove this threat and, supposedly, better meet the needs of imprisoned women, P4W was built across from the Kingston Penitentiary. The establishment of P4W itself created the “woman prisoner” as a separate kind of prisoner requiring “women-centered” carceral infrastructure.

In her book Punishment in Disguise: Penal Governance and Federal Imprisonment of Women in Canada, Kelly Hannah-Moffat describes how P4W was shaped by colonial white supremacy, Victorian morality, and the norms of white femininity that followed from them. The women’s prison functioned as a site of maternalistic discipline, where white women reformers sought to mold incarcerated women into well-behaved homemakers, through “live-in” homemaker programs, forced alterations to personal appearance, manipulation of prisoners’ social habits, and vocational training dedicated exclusively to subjects such as hairstyling, cosmetics, seamstressing, and household management. 

In the 1950s and ’60s, the women’s prison focused on medical interventions and coercive therapies believed to “improve” women’s character and enforce “proper” morality. This included using prisoners as test subjects for experiments with LSD and other clinical trials. Later, in the context of the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1970s and ’80s, reformers used the notion that women are “different but equal” to argue for a “women-centered” prison framework rooted in an “ethics of care.” The state couched its violent carceral policies in a language of empowerment, choice, and healing that made prisoners responsible for both their “mistakes” and their own reformation.

It’s in this context that, in 1990, a Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) task force published “Creating Choices: The Report of the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women,” which advocated for the closure of P4W and the establishment of five regional women’s prisons and an Indigenous healing lodge. According to the report, the new institutions were to promote “culturally sensitive” and “supportive” punishment aimed at empowering women to make “meaningful choices” in service of healing and dignity. Informed by the voices of Indigenous prisoners committed to their peers and critical of empty reform, the report was monumental in changing the terms of women’s incarceration in Canada. As P4WMC Advisory Board member Dr. Isabel Scheuneman Scott reminds me, “Creating Choices” was rooted in Indigenous knowledge and experience, and it demanded systemic change. Yet CSC’s implementation of the report ultimately facilitated the expansion of the prison system.

The Woman Prisoner 

The penal system relies on a strict gender binary. Within women’s prisons, perceived masculinity is often viewed as non-compliance linked to aggression, leading to the policing of transmasculine prisoners’ gender expression. Even the category of “women” itself has historically excluded and continues to exclude Black and Indigenous women. As the writer and scholar Robin Maynard notes, Black women are often criminalized rather than protected under patriarchal notions of vulnerability, while Indigenous women are punished for deviating from colonial gender norms. Racialized prisoners experience harsher treatment, longer sentences, and less access to family than their white counterparts.

Gender discipline in women’s prisons often occurs through what I call “playing house.” Prisoners’ quarters are made to resemble the private, domestic home, and prisoners are compelled to perform what the prison system defines as “pro-social” behaviors, including punctuality and cooperation. CSC has historically called these processes “social transformation experiments.” This formula is employed by women’s prisons to claim they are improving living conditions and providing access to the normalities of the outside world, all the while further regulating prisoners’ time, bodies, and relationships.

In her book Taking the Rap: Women Doing Time for Society’s Crimes, former prisoner and Prison for Women Memorial Collective member Ann Hansen recalls the opening of McNeill House, the first women’s minimum security prison in Canada, in 1990. McNeill House was established in response to the 1977 MacGuigan report, which criticized the Prison for Women as “unfit for bears, much less women.” Ann describes McNeill House – a 19th-century limestone mansion in Kingston, originally built for the Prison for Women warden – as being furnished with white shag carpet, white leather furniture, and hundred-dollar tropical plants. An extension of P4W, the house held 11 women under the pretence that, as Ann recalls it, a “six-month stint in a mansion-like setting would produce such a strong craving to maintain upper-class standards that we would somehow magically figure out how to acquire them.” But without any material or structural support, Ann goes on to say, “the only way any of us were going to live in a mansion would be by becoming high-class hookers, or through organized crime.” What did it matter that you ate your meals with a solid oak dining set in a lavish dining room, Ann asks, when you could be arbitrarily sent back across the street for “smoking a joint” or “talking back to a guard sitting on a leather couch in a white room with a white shag carpet?” As Ann reminded me, “No matter how you look at it…there’s another group of people who have all the power – in every way, shape, and form – over your life.”

Both Ann and fellow P4WMC member Rachel Fayter did time at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) in Kitchener, Ontario, initially built as a cul-de-sac of bungalows along a tree-lined boulevard. Built in 1997, GVI was said to counter the harsh conditions of P4W, with its white picket fences rather than barbed wire. Prisoners there had their own private rooms and shared living spaces without guards; they were collectively responsible for the functions of the household. As one prisoner told CTV Kitchener a few years after the prison opened, “There’s nothing to do here [except] wash floors and cut grass.” Ann tells me: “The houses are a facade… They still control you – it’s like oh, you’re the cook, but there is still a scarcity of food, you know?” 

Reforms such as the McNeill house and GVI’s bungalows required prisoners to perform homemaking, and yet the state’s policies and practices prevented prisoners’ actual work of keeping each other alive – of creating networks of kinship. As Rachel puts it, “It’s so messed up… CSC claims they want to make pro-social citizens and have people get out that will be positive contributors to society. But then, at the same time, they’re saying you can’t help people or share with one another.” In addition to prison officials constantly breaking up prisoner couples, which Ann experienced and witnessed, at GVI there was an ever-present possibility of being sent to maximum security for even just entering another person’s bungalow or, as Rachel recalls, sharing toothpaste. This, she pointed out, is punishable under CSC’s “no sharing policy,” which enforces disciplinary charges for breaking the rule. Rachel witnessed someone sent to segregation for helping an elderly disabled prisoner in her forced relocation to another cell. During our conversation, Rachel lamented that you couldn’t even do the life-saving work of checking in on each other: “You see your friend sitting on their porch, or maybe they’re hiding in their house, and you don’t know how they’re feeling. Like, there’s lots of people who die by suicide in prison because they’re so depressed. So you’re worried about your friends, right? And you’re not allowed to go check on them. You’re not allowed to see how they’re doing. You’ll go to segregation.”

As Prison for Women Memorial Collective members reminded me throughout our conversations, the largest threat to the prison as an institution is prisoner solidarity. And while the prison continues to adapt, to disrupt relationship-building and collective organizing, prisoners continue to resist.

Gendered tactics of resistance 

Prisoners have always resisted their conditions of confinement through diverse and emergent tactics of revolt. The riot and the strike are used in women’s prisons just as they are men’s. In 1978, 98% of prisoners in P4W allegedly participated in a hunger strike and work stoppage on Prisoners’ Justice Day. In 1994, six P4W prisoners, resisting the violence of segregation, fought and incapacitated multiple correctional officers, resulting in a violent assault from the all-male, all-white Institutional Emergency Response Team (IERT). When the video of the goon squad assault aired on the CBC’s investigative journalism program The Fifth Estate, P4W became more visible to the public eye, inspiring outside protests that hastened its closure. Starting in 1972, the prisoner-produced newsletter Tightwire offered a platform for P4W prisoners to share art, ideas, and experiences, and to educate readers about life in the prison. From 1991 to 1996, the prisoner-produced, -filmed, and -edited TV show Contact aired on public TV, including a live call-in segment in which P4W prisoners shared their experiences and engaged with the public in real time. 

Yet conversations with P4W Memorial Collective members made clear to me that we must pay attention not only to those all-gender forms of prisoner defiance, but also to how the regulation of womanhood and motherhood has fundamentally shaped the forms of resistance required in women’s prisons. 75% of incarcerated women are sole caregivers to children under the age of 18 at the time of their arrest. Women are often incarcerated far from their children and their home and yet are deemed unfit mothers, punished for “abandoning” their children. As Dr. Scheuneman Scott reminded me, this is particularly true for Indigenous women, who not only are over-represented in the prison system, but also spend longer in prison than non-Indigenous women and face harsher punishment in maximum security institutions farther away from their homes. Indigenous women are also more likely to have their children funnelled into the foster care system. Punishing women for being unfit mothers while withholding access to children and spaces of parenting has become a core feature of women’s incarceration in Canada.

This dynamic means prisoner resistance is often high-stakes, as Ann, Rachel, and Dr. Scheuneman Scott underscored. Prison officials’ ability to take away incarcerated women’s access to their families, Ann says, “is the main reason why there is not a lot of resistance… The power of the state to punish you if you resist in prison is so huge.” This feeling was echoed by Rachel: “You break a minor rule and they just refuse. No, you are not allowed any visits for the next month. No, you can’t go to the family day social. It’s just really horrible.” 

The first woman prisoner in Canada to be classified as a terrorist, Ann was imprisoned due to her involvement with the anarchist group Direct Action. Even though Ann was incarcerated explicitly for her radical political beliefs and actions, she recognized the realities of trying to organize inside. “People don’t come into prison, no matter how political they are or what they did in the street, and go in and organize… [To organize in those conditions,] someone’s gotta have a lot of respect from a lot of people, and it’s gotta be something they all want. People are practical about resistance, especially given the punishment that would no doubt follow.” While Ann held on to her political convictions, she lamented that “after a few years in prison, you start to see so much injustice around you that it creates a sense of inertia.”

Given the particularities of incarceration at P4W, it is no surprise that family separation was often a key concern driving the organizing that did happen. Throughout our conversation, Ann often mentioned Gayle Horii, a stockbroker locked up for white-collar crime. “[Gayle] became an incredible activist,” Ann told me. “She could have been a member of any guerilla group on the international stage, you know, IRA, FLN, you name it.” Ann spoke about how Gayle, who had become the chairperson of the inmate committee, fought relentlessly for her comrades, despite the near-futility of official processes for seeking redress for wrongs done by the prison system. So when Gayle was denied a transfer to Vancouver to be closer to her husband as he underwent life-threatening surgery, many other prisoners joined her in a hunger strike. Ann remembered that segregation cells were double- and triple-bunked with people refusing to eat unless Gayle was granted her transfer. Eventually, after she stopped drinking water, she was. 

As with Gayle’s struggle, it is in prisoners’ willingness to share risks that resistance takes shape in a place of profound deprivation. An anecdote from Ann captures how this sharing and redistributing of risk looked in practice: “Everybody’s smuggling up a little bit of sugar, which could also be used to make a brew, or they bring up an apple, or an orange, or whatever…or you may be on your way up from the cafeteria, and there’s the guards, and they’re frisking everybody. And your friend, who for some reason doesn’t get frisked very often, says, ‘I’ll take that sugar today,’ and then they get caught, and they don’t rat it out.” All three P4WMC members I spoke to made it clear that risk is never equal for all prisoners. Black and Indigenous people are 2.5 times more likely to experience excess force while in prison, and spend far more time not only behind bars but in solitary confinement. Of the seven suicide deaths at P4W between 1981 and 1991, six were Indigenous women. 

It was to confront such realities that Indigenous prisoners created the Native Sisterhood organization inside P4W in the early 1970s. Composed of Indigenous peoples from all over Turtle Island, the Native Sisterhood created space for various Indigenous spiritual practices, cultural identities, and kinship models to grapple with the compounding losses of family, land, culture, and Indigenous governance. Recognizing the power of collectivity and shared risk, the Sisterhood welcomed politically aligned non-Indigenous prisoners into its circle. Until the closure of P4W, the Native Sisterhood continued to provide access to cultural and spiritual spaces for Indigenous prisoners there – responding to the crises of colonial dislocation and loss, advocating for more and better, and documenting and spreading stories of women’s lives and resistance inside. While the network of new federal prisons separated the Sisterhood – a longstanding colonial tactic of incapacitation – the closure of P4W nevertheless spread the seeds of resistance and Indigenous prisoner organizing across the country.

Toward abolition

The Prison for Women Memorial Collective has secured 1700 square feet to develop its memorial garden on the former site of the Prison for Women. Protected by the city and funded by a grant, the garden will remain even if the land is sold. For the collective, the garden is an act of remembering, a refusal to forget the women who lived and died inside P4W. For abolitionists, the garden serves as a reminder of the stakes of our work – so long as prisons exist, there will be people who don’t make it out alive. (You can learn more about the memorial garden on the P4WMC website.)

As the members of P4WMC emphasized throughout our conversations, the history of the Prison for Women also serves as an important reminder that even hard-fought reforms cannot adequately address the foundational violences of the prison. “Like the proverbial snake,” Ann says, “[the prison] can periodically shed its skin to reveal itself shinier, but as an otherwise identical version of its original self.” Yet this doesn’t mean prisoners and those in solidarity with them should stop pushing for less violence in prison. As Ann also remarked to me, “How are you going to say to someone who has been in segregation for years, let’s say Ashley Smith who died in the hole…that we are not going to get rid of segregation because it is reform? How devastating would it be to hear that people think we have to get rid of the entire prison system and capitalism or nothing at all.” Instead, Ann offers a frame she learned from studying the Black Panther Party: harm reduction and “survival pending revolution.” 

As abolitionists, we should seek to understand the tactical repertoire of resistance that has long existed inside women’s prisons, especially when such tactics challenge our preconceived notions of what militancy should look like, taking our lead from prisoners organizing for their own liberation. The history of P4W allows us to track the predictable, patterned ways that prisons use reform to further entrench punishment. It helps us understand how “reform” can be a strategy for upholding white supremacist, colonial notions of womanhood. It charts a lineage of prisoner resistance inside Canada’s women’s prisons and provides important lessons for abolitionist organizing today. And, vitally, it calls on us to remember the women who struggled against the violence of the prison and lost their lives in the process.