CJCCJ/Volume 63.3 (2021)
A Better Justice? Community Programs for Criminalized Women
By Amanda Nelund
Vancouver: UBC Press. 2020 [Paperback 2021]. 198 p.
In the introduction to her text, A Better Justice? Community Programs for Criminalized Women, Amanda Nelund states that her research was “animated by a desire to imagine justice differently” (p.23). The book is divided into four chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. In the first chapter, Nelund outlines the existing community justice options for criminalized women. In the second chapter, Nelund explores the governance of what she labels “co-existing subjectivities” (p. 89). By analyzing interviews and program documents, she argues that the criminalized woman is constructed as a “neoliberal subject, a psychologized woman, and a marginalized woman, ” findings have important implications for justice delivery (p. 89).
In her third chapter, Nelund discusses how the programs and the professionals that deliver the services use two disparate approaches -one, which problematizes neoliberalism by emphasizing structural oppression and the need for social justice advocacy, another, which aims to reshape the women into “responsible, neoliberal [subjects]” (p. 101). In the final chapter, Nelund explores the notion of resistance and the ways that the programs both promote challenges to the dominant legal system’s punitive norms while also undermining resistance. An important contribution of the conclusion that closes the book is the inclusion of a detailed research agenda for future projects. For Nelund, an important and even exciting finding that could be further explored is that the programs worked to “constitute the criminalized woman as the marginalized woman” (p. 174). The suggestions on enabling the social justice possibilities embedded within alternative justice approaches are a particularly welcome component of the text.
Overall, Nelund’s book is a clearly written, theoretically substantial and critical examination of the ways that criminalized women are both failed and served by the community justice programs that the author evaluated. While it is generally assumed that restorative-oriented programming notably differs from the traditional justice system’s aims, Nelund carefully traces and evaluates ways that alternative justice interlocks with mainstream norms while simultaneously carving out at least some space for transformation. With the factors noted, the research approach adopted to complete the study is also praiseworthy. The text incorporates passages from fifteen qualitative interviews with the staff employed with the programs. The commentary from the staff enhances the collection and furthers the investigation into the sometimes contradictory functions of community-based programs for criminalized women.
I wrote this review shortly after viewing the mainstream film Stillwater. While the fictional Stillwater, Oklahoma is a long way from the City of Winnipeg in Manitoba, the film was an interesting lead to this review of Nelund’s A Better Justice? Community Programs for Criminalized Women. Matt Damon plays the protagonist, Bill Baker, an unemployed oil-rig worker, recovering alcoholic, father of one, from Stillwater, a smaller city in Oklahoma. Near the film’s beginning, Bill travels to Marseille, in France, to visit his young adult daughter, Allison. The site of the visits is largely what propelled my interest in the film. Allison is imprisoned in a French jail where she is in her fifth year of a 9- year sentence for a homicide. During her stay in France, she was convicted of killing her roommate and lover, Lina. Allison protests her innocence and believes she can identify the person she maintains is the true killer. By the end of the film, after many twists and turns in the plotline and several scenes of Bill visiting Allison in prison, Allison is released from the carceral institution, largely due to her father’s investigative efforts. On her return to Oklahoma, she is greeted with a celebration. The local town officials, friends and relatives welcome her back to her former abode. Allison expresses her relief at her return to the community. For me, some of the most poignant scenes intersect with the subject matter of A Better Justice?
The scenes involve Allison discussing aspects of her life as a criminalized woman. When she outlines her father’s failures as a parent to his new girlfriend in Marseille, who befriended the family and worked for Allison’s release, Allison is shaken and troubled. Due to some complicating factors best left undisclosed for readers who may watch the film, it is assured that Allison’s reintegration into her family and community will be a complicated process, as she comes to terms with the factors that contributed to her imprisonment and to the fact that her release was dependent on shifting guilt to a racialized man. For example, Bill failed to pay the storage costs for a locker, meaning that Allison’s mother’s possessions were discarded, leaving Allison with no mementos of her deceased, absent mother. Near the end of the film, Allison asked her father what is wrong with them and why their lives tended to go amiss after a heart-to-heart. The trauma and grief experienced by the family and by Allison are interesting undercurrents that I silently noted as the film rolled with this book review in mind. Even while appearing in a mainstream movie, Allison’s revelations hint at the background factors of poverty, neglect, rage, and trauma common among criminalized women. These factors affirm the importance of studies like Nelund’s that challenge the implementation of justice programs that do not fully attend to women’s liberation and well-being.
Nelund’s research is important because it aims to be a catalyst for social transformation (189). As Nelund points out, it is ironic that women must be involved in a justice system that tends to exacerbate life challenges before they can access the programs to address the adverse conditions and maximize coping in oppressive systems. Nelund makes it clear that she was motivated by a desire to evaluate the programs and services available to women following their release. Her manuscript is motivated by the often-stated concern that women, particularly Indigenous women, are subject to the largest increase concerning incarceration rates within Canada. Nelund reminds us that the call for community alternatives to imprisonment is typical among criminologists due to the widely held conviction that the current criminal justice system is not working. While sharing the critiques of the current system, Nelund pushes forward to determine whether the programs for criminalized women hold promise as gateways to lives beyond the prison.
In A Better Justice, Nelund argues that our action plans as critical criminologists who align with the most marginalized must go beyond general recommendations to determining specific strategies that would see to decarceration and reintegration. She subjects established community programs for criminalized women to analyze and evaluate, particularly concerning gender. Nelund work makes a unique contribution to the scholarly literature. It draws from staff interviews, agencies program documents from several agencies based in the City of Winnipeg in the Canadian province of Manitoba. At the outset of the Introduction, Nelund’s laments that the community agencies that deliver services number at 6 – Onashowewin, Mediation Services, the Salvation Army, the Elizabeth Fry Society of Manitoba, the Native Women’s Transition Centre, and New Directions (p. 3). She stated that all of the organizations are located in the downtown and North End of Winnipeg. Nelund observes that it took a mere twenty minutes to drive past the entirety of the agencies serving criminalized women (p. 3).
Throughout her text, Nelund reveals and analyzes the complex underpinnings that govern criminalized women. Her findings show that alternative programs neither completely reproduce the norms of the dominant justice system nor provide the radical alternatives called for by progressive criminologists is thought-provoking. Instead, formal and informal practices and governing mentalities reflect a tension between neoliberal and progressive social justice approaches.
Nelund’s A Better Justice? effectively outlines the ways that alternative programs show allegiance to mainstream criminal justice norms and practices. At the same time, she carefully documents the ways that resistance to dominant structures also materializes. As a result, the book leaves the reader holding the promise that more effective approaches to treating criminalized women in Canada are possible. The timing of the text is ideal as Canada’s grapples with the continuing legacy of colonization and the ways it has shaped the current justice system to the detriment of many, including the women who are increasingly subject to it punitive overreach. While not offering a precise agenda for change, A Better Justice? will help inform the current debates on transforming the criminal justice system in ways that are decolonizing, humanizing, less discriminatory, and, in fact, more just.
In early paragraphs, connections were made between the film Stillwater and the text under review. Concerning Allison, a main character in Stillwater, we know little of her life after prison. We know from the storyline she has factors to reconcile, as well as a life to re-establish. Nelund’s book reminds us of the importance of attending to women’s lives post-release by ensuring that the necessary services are in place and that those programs effectively attend to the social justice considerations that the alternative justice literature has amplified as central to women’s incarceration.
In conclusion, the book is an important read for criminology, socio-legal and women’s and gender studies students, instructors, and scholars. In addition, practitioners and policy-makers will also find this text an essential one to consider as they plan the post prison, less punishment-oriented world that A Better Justice promotes and that films like Stillwater (while largely fictitious and with its flaws) reminds scholars and practitioners is still urgent, a factor that is well-known to the criminalized women that are involved in the programs that underwent study.
JOSEPHINE L. SAVARESE
ST. THOMAS UNIVERSITY
FREDERICTON, NEW BRUNSWICK