6   Fitting In

Women Parolees in the Small City

Jennifer Murphy

Despite an overall decline in the crime rate in Canada since the start of the 1990s (Allen 2016, 4–5), public concerns about crime and criminals have, if anything, escalated rather than diminished—a response, in part, to fears inculcated by the media in support of the neoliberal elaboration of the carceral state. At the same time, neoliberal policies pursued both by the federal government and by provincial ones have tended to shift responsibility for social programming onto municipalities and to emphasize the need for community-based solutions to social problems that are in many ways the product of neoliberalism itself. On the whole, however, little evidence exists to suggest that the focus on community-level responses to social problems such as homelessness, addictions, and crime has encouraged greater tolerance for difference and diversity among the residents of Canadian towns and city neighbourhoods. Rather, it appears to have encouraged increased wariness and vigilance, with those who belong to the dominant group intent on maintaining a clear distinction between those who are, and are not, worthy of inclusion in the community.

At the municipal level, plans for development often focus on building social cohesion, as well as on creating “healthy” communities of the sort that will attract investments and the promise of future growth. Rarely does the emphasis fall on the integration of marginalized groups into the community as a whole. Instead, and as a number of chapters in this volume illustrate, the presence of such groups, particularly those consisting of individuals regarded as deviant or morally corrupt, tends to provoke attempts on the part of mainstream community members to ban or isolate these unwelcome intruders, who simply have no place as “insiders” in a well-regulated community. Under any circumstances, this exclusionary reflex poses a serious obstacle for the men and women in prisons and penitentiaries across Canada, who will be expected to reintegrate into local communities following their release. Reintegration is especially difficult, however, in relatively small cities. While it may be possible to live in anonymity in large urban centres, this is seldom possible in smaller communities.

This chapter focuses on the experiences of five women in the small city of Kamloops, British Columbia, women who were attempting to return to the community following their release on parole. Drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with these women, I seek to recover what Ken Plummer (2001, 90) aptly called “voices from below,” with a view to understanding the issues that surround reintegration from the standpoint of those most directly affected.1 The perceptions of these women and their ideas about what would help them succeed in desisting from crime provide an invaluable counterpoint to “top-down” discussions of social exclusion and correctional programming. They also shed light on the dangers of visibility for those stigmatized by a criminal record.

Women and the Canadian Penal System

The Canadian penal system recognizes two levels of responsibility for the incarceration of those convicted of a crime: provincial and federal. Provinces are responsible for offenders who have been sentenced to a jail term of less than two years; such offenders serve their sentence in a provincial correctional centre. Offenders sentenced to two years or more are the responsibility of Correctional Service Canada (CSC) and are housed in federal prisons. In addition, municipalities maintain jails, which hold those who have been arrested for a crime (whether by the RCMP or by local authorities) and are awaiting a bail hearing. City jails are also used for overnight lock-ups in connection with misdemeanours.

According to Canada’s former correctional investigator, Howard Sapers, the number of women incarcerated in federal prisons has been growing, up from 502 in 2006 to 680 in 2016—an increase of 35 percent (Sapers 2016, 62). The increase has been especially dramatic among federally sentenced Indigenous women. In his annual report for 2010, Sapers noted that Indigenous women incarcerated in federal prisons were “the fastest growing segment of the offender population,” their number having grown by close to 90 percent over the preceding decade (Sapers 2010, 43). This increase continued: as by 2016, Indigenous women accounted for 36 percent of female inmates (Sapers 2016, 62), even though Indigenous people represent less than 5 percent of the Canadian population overall. As a review of their files indicated, virtually all of these women had a history of “traumatic experiences, including sexual and/or physical abuse,” while more than half had either attended a residential school or had a family member who did (43). In addition, “two-thirds of their parents had a substance use issue,” and nearly half (48%) had been removed from their family home (43). There is no reason to think that such patterns are anything new.

In his annual report for 2015–16, Sapers (2016, 44) also noted that Indigenous inmates remain “more likely to be classified as maximum security, spend more time in segregation and serve more of their sentence behind bars.” In 2012, his office had released a special report, Spirit Matters, that criticized CSC for its inadequate implementation of sections 81 and 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (Canada 1992)—sections that were “intended to ameliorate over-representation of Aboriginal people in federal penitentiaries and address long-standing differential outcomes for Aboriginal offenders” (Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator 2012, 3).2 The report argued that, by neglecting these two sections, CSC had failed to abide by the intentions of the Supreme Court as outlined in the Gladue decision ([1999] 1 SCR 688), which mandated judges to use specific criteria in determining sentencing for Indigenous offenders. As the report indicated, healing lodges—originally envisioned as an Indigenous alternative to incarceration in a federal institution—were few and far between, and those operating under section 81 were chronically underfunded (3–4). It further noted that, “until September 2011, there were no Section 81 Healing Lodge spaces available for Aboriginal women” (3), making it especially difficult for women, in particular, to access culturally relevant programming. In addition, while CSC claims to support the principles of restorative justice, its efforts to implement these principles have been limited to programs carried out within the correctional setting.

Decisions about parole for federal offenders are made by the Parole Board of Canada, an independent body that operates under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.3 It appears that women are granted conditional release more readily than men: according to the parole board, in the five years from 2010–11 to 2014–15, the grant rate for full parole was 39 percent among women, as opposed to 25 percent among men (Canada, Parole Board of Canada, 2015, 31). In the same period, women also proved somewhat more likely than men to complete full parole successfully (86% versus 81%), although no significant difference was observed in relation to day parole (50, 48). For both men and women, recidivism, as signalled by the revocation of parole, more often reflects a breach of parole conditions than the commission of a new offence. In 2014–15, the rates of revocation for a breach of condition were 10 percent and 8 percent, for those on full parole and day parole, respectively, while the rates of revocation for a new offence were 3 percent and 1 percent, respectively (44).

Understanding how men and women manage to reintegrate successfully into community upon release provides a wider perspective about the efforts of parolees, correctional agencies (both government and nonprofit), and other community members. This opens the view beyond a narrow focus on recidivism rates, which are, in fact, a measure of unsuccessful reintegration. In addition, reintegration for both men and women who have served either a significant federal sentence or several sentences over a period of years may be measured in a number of different ways and may look different at various stages of a parolee’s life. According to Shadd Maruna (2001), desistance—that is, the ability to abstain from crime—is not an either/or proposition. Rather, it should be understood as a trajectory punctuated by occasional setbacks, much as recovery from addiction is generally marked by intermittent periods of relapse.

Deinstitutionalization and Incarceration: The Policy Context

Since the 1980s, when policies of deinstitutionalization were widely embraced at both the federal and provincial levels, the influx of the formerly institutionalized into local communities has provoked a dramatic increase in social conflict (Wharf 1990). After the major recession in the early 1990s, federal responsibilities for social programs were downloaded, first onto provincial governments and then onto municipalities, as a way to balance federal and provincial budgets and eliminate deficits.4 In response, resistance developed to the reintegration into the community of ex-offenders, former psychiatric in-patients, and recovering addicts, many of whom simply joined the ranks of the homeless. The proliferation of halfway houses, group homes, and shelters to assist in reintegration only increased community anger, and the perception grew that communities had reached a saturation point in integrating “outsiders.”

Even though there was a decade-long period of sustained economic growth at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, there was no effort to restore funding for social programs to the levels that existed before the cutbacks of the 1990s. Instead, federal and provincial governments focused on tax cuts to individuals and corporations, while encouraging privatization of formerly public services, such as health care and employment programs. The election of a Conservative federal government in February 2006 was accompanied by promises of a “tough on crime” approach that would include harsher penalties for offenders. Between 2006 and 2011, the costs for federal prisons rose by 87 percent, reaching $2.98 billion in the fiscal year 2010–11 (Davis 2011).

Kamloops itself has had a long history of community involvement in institutions, and some of the attitudes prevalent in the community in the late 1990s were informed by the response to the announcement, in July 1983, of the impending closure of Tranquille, an institution for developmentally delayed adults and children. As Diane Purvey notes in the previous chapter, the provincial government made the decision to close Tranquille without prior consultation with the community, and the closure took place a mere eighteen months later. Wharf (1992) describes this process as a prime example of poor planning and top-down decision making on the part of the neoconservative Social Credit provincial government of the day. The legacy of that process became apparent in Kamloops when the John Howard Society, Thompson Region proposed opening a halfway house for men on the North Shore in 1999. Resistance focused again on the idea of “saturation,” exemplified by the initial sense of grievance (not borne out by city statistics) from the mainly working-class North Shore residents that this area of the city already had a disproportionate amount of social housing. Membership in the opposition group spread to include community residents from all across the city, who focused on grassroots organizing to mobilize protests at city hall. Municipal politicians who originally supported the halfway house proposal rapidly changed their minds and withdrew planning permission, and in the November 1999 municipal elections, in which a new mayor and council were elected, political opposition to halfway housing in the city solidified (executive director, John Howard Society, Thompson Region, pers. comm., 10 October 2005).

Since 1999, however, the city has become a centre in the region for psychiatric services, and two new psychiatric facilities for patients transitioning from Riverview Institution in New Westminster to the community have opened, one on the North Shore and one on the South Shore. In addition, half a dozen new social housing complexes have been built by the John Howard Society, Thompson Region, in partnership with BC Housing and other community agencies, in which parolees are housed among other low-income tenants (executive director, John Howard Society, Thompson Region, pers. comm., 20 November 2009). No major protests have ensued, and there appears to be an acceptance of these new social housing complexes as long as there is no discussion of parolee involvement. This “hidden” but contested area for local residents, as well as social service agencies and the “outsiders” themselves, has led to a focus on “invisibility” for parolees, both men and women, who reside in Kamloops and an apparently willful blindness on the part of municipal politicians and community members to recognize the Other in their midst.

Outlook and Its Residents

In 2010, when the interviews were conducted, the five women who are the focus of this chapter were all living in a three-quarters house in Kamloops, which I will call Outlook Apartments. Prior to their parole, all five had been incarcerated in the only federal women’s facility in British Columbia, the Fraser Valley Institution, located in Abbotsford, about 285 kilometres southwest of Kamloops. While they are still in the prison, women who have been granted parole prepare a release plan, which specifies their preferences with regard to geographic location, type of employment, and level of support. The women have three options: Outlook, a halfway house in Vancouver, or a private home placement.

Opened in 2004 as a pilot project, Outlook provides housing for women who have been granted either day or full parole. At the time, the only other facility for federal women parolees in British Columbia was a halfway house in Vancouver. In comparison to a halfway house, a three-quarters house offers less on-site support, in an effort to encourage independent living, which is a key step in integrating into the community. Owned and operated by the John Howard Society, Thompson Region, and governed under BC’s Residential Tenancy Act (2002), Outlook consists of satellite one- and two-bedroom apartments in Kamloops’s North Shore area; it is a neatly kept, low-rise building in a working-class neighbourhood of older homes. Women are eligible to live at Outlook when they are granted day or full parole. CSC pays for support services and provides a living allowance for the resident women, who can stay until their warrant expires (that is, until their sentence is completed). The building is a women-only space: the parole officer and all the support workers are women. Men can visit the apartments only if they pass a criminal records check and home assessment. Even then, they are not allowed to stay overnight; however, children can visit with their mothers and stay overnight.

A counsellor is available seven days a week at Outlook to assist with life skills: shopping, budgeting, and so on. Major issues for the women include parenting skills, crisis management, poor impulse control, and coping strategies. All the women interviewed had multiple difficulties—for example, problems with substance abuse, chronic mental health conditions, emotional issues stemming from sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse, and poor literacy and numeracy skills. The John Howard Society, Thompson Region hopes that the women will use the organization as a temporary bridge to the community so that they will learn how to access community services, which they will eventually need to do on their own (executive director, John Howard Society, Thompson Region, pers. comm., 12 November 2008). Most of the five interviewees had lengthy histories of incarceration, however, and had become accustomed to institutional life. Both the support workers and the parole officer expressed concerns about the women’s sense of entitlement: having had a great deal of support within the institutional setting, the women felt challenged when they were expected to develop some degree of independence. In addition, most of the women had, at best, minimal work experience.

Outlook generally houses five women at a time, and they have a structured daily routine. They check in with a support worker by phone several times a day and keep a logbook that details their comings and goings. If they are out of the apartment for more than two hours, they must contact the support worker to notify her. There are two support workers: one works during the day and the other checks on curfew at night (9:00 p.m.). The women were all provided with psychological counselling on a weekly basis, focusing on the crime cycle, sexual and physical abuse, and reintegration into the community.

All the women had multiple diagnoses, which posed a number of obstacles to reintegration, but their expectations for successful re-entry were very high—and, according to their support workers, not realistic. The executive director of the John Howard Society, Thompson Region and the parole officer both argued that the Fraser Valley Institute “enables” women and allows them to be unrealistic in their goals; the women came to Outlook with a sense of entitlement, and “they lose the picture about serving a sentence for a crime” (parole officer, pers. comm., 30 November 2005). A number of major barriers to reintegration were identified by the executive director of the John Howard Society, Thompson Region, the support workers, and the women themselves. In particular, they were concerned about employment, since local businesses are generally unwilling to hire federal offenders regardless of the nature of their crime. Similarly, most employment agencies in the community will not recruit volunteers with criminal records let alone volunteers with histories of violent crime like those of most of the women. As a result, many of the women gained experience through volunteer work, mainly at the SPCA.

The five women interviewed for this study, whom I will call Patricia, Amanda, Jane, Danny, and Frances, ranged in age from their mid-twenties to fifty-three. One woman was Indigenous, and another identified as transgender. Their parole terms ranged from one year to life, and they had served various lengths of time—from two to eighteen years—in the federal prison system. One woman was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, and two others had served several federal sentences (and numerous provincial sentences) for drug-related crimes. Two of the women had just completed their first federal sentence. They had all been living at Outlook for three to six months at the time of the interviews. While the women were a diverse group in terms of age, criminal history, and length of incarceration, they shared a number of characteristics, such as low educational levels, limited work histories, significant mental health diagnoses, and addiction problems. This combination of issues led to a multiplicity of challenges in finding (and keeping) employment, maintaining sobriety, and reintegrating into community. The narratives themselves reveal the difficulties facing the women, both as individuals and as a group, to “fit into” the Kamloops community.

The Interviews: Common Themes

In describing the barriers to reintegration that they encountered, the women identified four overlapping areas of concern: employment and education; mental health issues and addictions; membership in the community; and visibility versus invisibility. For the most part, these women had to struggle to fit into dominant patterns of female behaviour, and, in interviews, they depicted themselves as living relatively isolated lives in Kamloops, drawing their support mainly from one another. In the eyes of both the parole officer and the support workers, however, the women’s tendency to stick together as a group posed a problem, one that not only complicated efforts to provide support to these women but also exacerbated the barriers that already existed for former inmates.

Education and Employment

Four of the five women interviewed had not completed Grade 12. For Danny, transgender and in her early fifties, the educational challenges were related to learning disabilities: “I failed Grade 2, 3, and 4—no one diagnosed me as dyslexic until I was an adult.” She finally got the help she needed in prison to learn to read and write: “Well, I finally passed Grade 10 with the help of a tutor, but that’s as far as I got.” Patricia, the youngest parolee interviewed and the person with the longest work history, had also not passed Grade 12: “I’m studying for the GED exam right now so that I can go back to school to study business. Eventually, I’d like to work in the hospitality industry.” Frances, a First Nations woman who had lived on a remote reserve in the North for her whole life until incarceration, had not been interested in formal schooling. “I live a traditional life,” she said, “sewing, hide-skinning, and that supports my family.” Only Jane had finished high school, but when she tried to upgrade her education in Kamloops, she found that she was ineligible for financial assistance because she had previously defaulted on a student loan.

The connection between education and employment was clearly articulated by several of the parolees, who were frustrated that they were not able to access the training for employment that they had expected both in prison and on the outside. Several of the interviewees also saw this issue as specifically related to women in the federal system. For example, Amanda stated that “the women are left behind,” and Jane returned to the subject several times in the course of the interview, stating that “the women are forgotten” and “the John Howard Society say they have a program to help us find work, but they don’t.” Both Jane and Amanda wanted to work in construction, which is still regarded as a nontraditional field for women, but they had been unable to get the training they requested. Patricia, though, had a job to return to once her parole was over. “I’ve always worked in the service industry,” she said. “I was a supervisor in a restaurant in Kelowna before I went to jail. As a matter of fact, my old boss offered me my job back when I can get back to Kelowna.”

For women deemed unemployable due to physical or mental disability, the application for income assistance was described as difficult and demeaning. Jane described the humiliation of being interviewed by the local Ministry for Employment and Income Assistance office to determine eligibility for welfare benefits:

Women lose hope in the first two minutes in that office. I’ve complained to the manager about how they’re treated, but she doesn’t care. There’s a thirty-day work search program required before you qualify for funding. I can’t even volunteer: even churches and the thrift shops won’t accept volunteers with addictions problems, plus a criminal record is the biggest barrier.

Although the women expressed interest in becoming productive members of the community, the challenges to becoming a volunteer or worker in the community were considerable. At the time of the interview, Jane and Amanda were delivering the daily newspaper at 6:00 every morning. Shortly after the interviews took place, local police contacted the parole office with their concerns that the women might use the paper route as an opportunity to look for houses to break into, and both women were advised that they could not continue with the job. Jane encapsulated the frustration of being unable to go to school, volunteer, or work: “I’m feeling trapped. I don’t want to go back to jail. I’m just fading away. Right now, it’s a bad day. I’m not feeding my soul, not productive.”

Mental Health Issues and Addictions

A complicating factor for the women in their reintegration process was the prevalence of both mental health diagnoses and addiction problems. All the women in this study attended Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and/or Narcotics Anonymous (NA) programs (sometimes daily), as well as counselling and psychiatric appointments. Prescription medication to treat anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar spectrum disorder was commonly given to the parolees on a long-term basis. Several women reported long-term use of prescription medication, in some cases from childhood onwards, in addition to struggling with addiction to alcohol and illegal drugs.

Maidment (2006, 72) states that approximately half of the women in Canadian prisons admit to addiction to alcohol and/or drugs, and she suggests that the figure is actually much higher. Most of the women discussed addiction and its role in their trajectory towards incarceration, release, and then reincarceration. While current medical approaches to addiction focus on harm reduction rather than abstinence and the 12-step model, parolees routinely have a “no drugs and alcohol” clause attached to their parole conditions and can be reincarcerated if that clause is breached. For Danny, serving a life sentence and on parole for the rest of her life, a zero-tolerance policy with regard to alcohol and drug use is likely to result in repeated reincarcerations.

For the most part, however, the women supported the 12-step abstinence model rather than harm reduction. For example, Jane, who described herself as “an addictive personality” and whose siblings and nieces and nephews have all struggled with addiction problems, was vehement in her denunciation of any suggestion that drugs should be legalized:

Eighty percent of the people in prison are there because of a drug addiction, but legalizing drugs isn’t the answer . . . I’ve spent time in the Downtown Eastside, and I’ve seen what happens to women addicts. Harm reduction makes no sense. The Four Pillars approach just enables people to stay addicts—the safe injection site is just wrong.

She subscribed instead to the AA/NA model and attended meetings two or three times a week. The meetings, she said, “are helping to keep me clean but nothing else—I’m very frustrated because I need to be able to support myself and opportunities [for work] don’t open up overnight.” In addition, Jane had the opportunity to go to a halfway house for women in Vancouver but refused, since “it’s drug-infested and there’s lots of absences—I just don’t want to be in the lifestyle any more.” She was also critical of government-funded addiction programs. “Government hasn’t broken the cycle of drug addiction,” she said, partly because government officials “don’t look to us as a source of information but as part of the problem.” But, she added, “my fellow citizens and society and government are part of the problem.”

Most of the other interviewees also had dual diagnoses of mental health problems and addiction issues. Amanda had been incarcerated several times for crimes relating to drug addiction, and at her last conviction, her parents told her that while they were supportive of her, they were relieved that she had been arrested because they knew that “I was going to die soon on the streets if I hadn’t been caught.” Danny, who was fifty-three at the time, had spent her childhood in the foster care system in Ontario, described herself in her twenties as “an angry adult on dope” who made poor choices. Her adulthood had been marked by addiction and periodic stays in psychiatric wards, where she was diagnosed as having a personality disorder, and she was finally given a life sentence for second-degree murder: “I’ve spent most of my life in institutions—I was on the outside for no more than ten years as an adult, just functioning, sometimes doing different jobs, often doing nothing.”

Frances described the controls exerted by the parole system in the community. Referring to drug and alcohol abuse, she said, “I’ve had a couple of slips since I’ve been here because of the stress.” The last slip was a few weeks before the interview, when she was arrested and spent the weekend in the city jail; she was under a week of house arrest at the time of the interview. The struggle with both addictions and mental health diagnoses compounded the difficulties the women faced in fitting in to the Kamloops community. It decreased their ability to look for paid employment or volunteer work and added to the difficulties most of them faced in dealing with the boredom and isolation they experienced in living in a small city that they did not know well and where most of the citizens they interacted with were support or health care workers, corrections officials, addiction counsellors, or, occasionally, fellow church-goers. Informal ways of meeting other community members seemed to be absent. As Amanda expressed it, “I get up, I go for a walk, I pass the time.”

Membership in the Local Community

The women had a variety of comments about reintegration into the community, mostly predicated on their placement in a small city that was not their home. Most of the women expected to return to their home community once their parole ended, particularly if they could not find work or a supportive subcommunity in Kamloops. The difficulties they expressed focused on their need to stay occupied and involved in addiction recovery and mental health stabilization while they were in Outlook, especially in the face of isolation, loneliness, and boredom.

Jane had the longest involvement in the community; she had spent time in Kamloops in the 1980s, and it was where her serious addiction problems began. She had lived for the past eighteen years in Vancouver, however, and did not want to return there. She relied on the community for some support, particularly the Secwepemc community on the local reserve. She described being helped by Elders when she was looking for counselling on addiction issues, and she regularly attended sweats on the reserve, although she did not identify as Indigenous. She clearly articulated her sense of herself as a citizen: “[I] have a real interest in politics. I always vote. Just because I was a convicted criminal doesn’t mean I’m not a citizen of Canada with the same rights as everyone else.” She also wanted to form connections and relationships with people in the community who could help her set up a program to assist women with addiction problems on their release from prison. “I’m looking to the community for support,” she said, “and I’ve made connections at TRU [Thompson Rivers University] and with community nurses at Interior Health.”

In contrast, Frances, who stated that she had no connection to Kamloops and that she “was so lonely in the city,” refused to be involved with the First Nations community in the area, saying, “It’s not my band here.” She described herself as “keeping to myself, not doing anything, I don’t know anyone.” She spoke sadly several times in the interview about her need to go home; she was trying to get transferred to Prince George at the time of the interview so that her family could visit her. They could not afford to travel to Kamloops to see her, and she had not seen her four children or her young grandchild for almost three years. She also said that, while she thought that the worst thing about prison was the loneliness, “it’s been pretty lonely here too.” This sentiment was expressed by several of the women, who described their group as supportive of one another but who were frustrated that they seemed unable to meet and form connections with other people.

Danny described herself as introverted, “not a social butterfly”; she did not want to mix with people on the outside. She had some support from the other women in the building but did not appear concerned about meeting more people in Kamloops. She attended medical appointments regularly in Vancouver, where she thought there was more understanding of the challenges she faced as a transgender person. Indeed, she felt that her status as a transgender individual was a more significant barrier to reintegration than her status as a parolee: “I realized when I got here that there’s not much diversity in Kamloops.”

Only Patricia seemed to feel at home in Kamloops. She attended the local church, where she “felt very welcome,” and she believed that she was reintegrating quickly because the living conditions in Outlook were “closer to real life than Fraser Valley Institution.” Patricia’s circumstances were considerably different from the other four women, although she also shared an addiction history with them. She was the youngest of the group, had served only one federal sentence, was closely connected to family, and knew the community well even though she had not lived in Kamloops previously. Unlike the other women, she could pass as a regular member of the community, and the stigma of being an “ex-con” did not seem to attach to her in the same way that it did to the others. She fully expected to return to regular life after her parole ended and described her crime as an aberration: “I was on a seriously wrong path.”

Visibility Versus Invisibility

The women also spoke of the tension between their need to reintegrate into the community and the pressure to remain invisible within a political climate that stigmatizes ex-offenders and parolees. Although Jane said that she had not personally experienced problems in the community, she spoke of community attitudes that were of concern to her, mainly gathered from reading newspaper reports. She expressed the dilemma succinctly: “The mindset in this community is once a criminal, always a criminal. You’re free, but you’re not—they’re looking over your shoulder all the time. [But] when you’re sitting in the community, but not in the community—doing nothing—it’s useless.”

All the women expressed concerns about being identified in the community as parolees and about the impact that would have on their ability to work, volunteer, or even remain safe in Outlook. Jane had a paradoxical approach to invisibility, sometimes disclosing her status to people she met and sometimes not. She acknowledged that “the word halfway house is an issue in this community,” but she seemed frustrated about having to remain invisible: “People have to stay hidden—it helps the John Howard Society to remain hidden, but the community can’t help us if we’re hidden.”

Several of the women also spoke about the need to remain hidden within the North Shore location of Outlook. Jane said that few people in the neighbourhood knew that Outlook housed federal parolees, since “it’s the quietest house on the street.” Indeed, before the building was bought by the John Howard Society, Thompson Region, the apartments had been rented by women most of whom were involved in the sex and drug trades. While Outlook had remained under the radar, both Jane and Amanda described it as a “very sneaky tactic” on the part of the John Howard Society. They felt that the neighbours had a right to know who was living in the apartment building, and yet Amanda also stated that “I feel safe in this house” because of the anonymity. Patricia commented on the location itself: “The neighbourhood isn’t good, but there are some good people in the nearby houses.” She said that she kept a low profile in the neighbourhood and that no one seemed to know that Outlook housed parolees. Her connections with the neighbourhood centred around church attendance, and she was the only woman interviewed who seemed to have made some friends in the community.

For other parolees, such as Danny and Frances, the focus was less on trying to build a community within Kamloops and more on remaining hidden in a community that is limited in terms of diversity (Danny) or attempting to move out of the community as quickly as possible to return to a familiar place (Frances). The dislocation for Frances was spatial, cultural, and temporal, and the only solution that she saw was to leave Kamloops: “I’m hoping to be in Prince George by Christmas.” Until then, Frances seemed to experience her release on parole into Outlook as simply another form of incarceration that left her lonely and isolated.

Implications for the Small City

A number of key themes emerged from the data. Clearly, parolees face multiple barriers in their efforts to reintegrate successfully into the small city, some of which are related to the extensive, long-term effects of numerous incarcerations and reincarcerations. Another theme is the impact of both individual well-being (physical and mental health, addiction issues) and community tolerance (access to housing, employment, professional and personal supports) on reintegration. Sapers (2007) discusses the pervasive barriers to successful reintegration, describing the limited program capacity in prisons in the area of retraining, addictions, and mental health—for Indigenous women in particular and for both men and women generally. Both Ken Plummer (1995) and John Ralston Saul (2008) address the issues facing the dispossessed: Plummer, in negotiating an identity of “difference,” and Saul, in proposing a fluid and nonlinear approach to citizenship within the “métis civilization” of Canada. These themes were woven throughout the narratives and expressed in a variety of ways: the difficulty in moving towards living independently after years of institutionalization and control by numerous authorities; the frustration around limited programming in prison that hadn’t led to meaningful employment after release; and the stigmas associated with living in poverty, in poor health, and in social housing units.

In addition, the prevalence of chronic and persistent mental health conditions and addiction problems among parolees—often as concurrent disorders—further complicates and often compromises parolees’ ability to remain in the community. Howard Sapers argues that because women offenders tend to have low educational levels, limited employment histories, and mental health and addiction problems, they need to be provided with a number of services to assist in reintegration upon release—for example, comprehensive mental health assessments and treatment, educational upgrading, and employment training. Currently, most employment training in federal prisons consists of food preparation, cooking, cleaning, and laundry services—that is, domestic work (Sapers 2010, 49–50). Most of the women interviewed for this study rejected this training for menial, minimum-wage jobs as useless, and they expected the John Howard Society, Thompson Region or a similar organization to provide them with training that would help them move into higher-paid and more interesting work.

The major themes emerging from the interviews focused on the adaptation of parolees to their post-prison environment in terms of living conditions (housing, employment, and income), health (physical, mental, and addiction issues) and personal identity (the stigma of the “ex-con,” along with race and ethnicity). The onerous conditions of their release were challenged quite forcefully by the women in Outlook, who demanded more services from local agencies than originally planned by Correctional Service Canada and the John Howard Society, Thompson Region. These women managed their tainted identities through the development of a close-knit group within the small apartment building in which they lived, often continuing relationships that had developed during their incarceration in the Fraser Valley Institution.

The challenge of finding resources in smaller communities is also a factor in the tolerance of these cities to accommodate “outsiders” or “others” as members or citizens. The women described difficulties in finding family doctors or other health professionals to provide a continuum of care for them rather than having to rely on walk-in clinics. Both parole officers and support workers with the John Howard Society, Thompson Region had, with mixed results, asked their own family doctors to provide care for parolees when they were unable to assist them in finding medical care.

The women also considered the need for invisibility to be a hindrance in finding employment and, more generally, in reintegrating into the community. In addition, many of the women struggled to reconcile their need, as a group, to remain hidden within the community and their right to exercise personal control over their anonymity, in, for example, making decisions about whether to conceal or reveal their status to neighbours or new partners. The visibility/invisibility dilemma is, however, complicated by the manner in which an “ex-con” is marked by his or her past—what Dominique Moran (2014) calls “inscriptions of incarceration.” The marks of a parolee’s tainted history may be embodied, in the form of tattoos or the tough, masculine, stance of some of the women, and therefore difficult to hide. But these marks may also be internal, in the form of low self-esteem and an attitude of hopelessness and defeat. Along with the ubiquity of mental health diagnoses, coupled with low levels of education and literacy, these psychological factors contribute to a lack of employment opportunities and the relegation of former offenders to the ranks of the underclass.

Another small city in British Columbia, Prince George, has incorporated the three-quarters model into its own reintegration programs for women federal parolees (executive director, John Howard Society, Thompson Region, 18 January 2013). Prince George, which is roughly the same size as Kamloops, has a prison and a remand centre, as well as drug and alcohol treatment centres. It also has a significant Indigenous population, and there is pressure from the CSC to provide resources and services to parolees who want to return to their home communities, whether in town or on reserve.

Conclusion

Evaluating the process of reintegration requires a shift in focus from a dichotomy between rehabilitation (success) and recidivism (failure) towards an understanding of reintegration and “desistance” (Maruna 2001) as a continuum that may involve a number of reincarcerations. The rehabilitative trajectory of most of the parolees whom I interviewed included occasional breaches of parole conditions (and consequent reincarceration), addictions treatments (in detox and rehab centres), and psychiatric care (both in and out of psychiatric wards). Few new offences were committed, however, and most of the parole breaches involved drug and alcohol conditions. In the five years following the initial interviews, I received regular updates on the status of the five women, during which time several of them returned to prison for breaches of parole. At the end of the five-year period, Jane, Patricia, and Frances had achieved warrant expiry and were living in the community. Amanda and Danny had returned to prison.

Understanding reintegration also demands a recognition of the degree to which women parolees, especially, occupy transcarceral spaces in which their confinement is perpetuated by social controls embedded in the community, in the form of the stigmatization of former offenders (Moran 2014). These five parolees provided differing views on rehabilitation, but they all expressed the need for adequate housing, along with retraining and employment opportunities. Ultimately, the findings of this study indicate the need for a fundamental reframing of reintegration, from a focus on what puts parolees back in prison to a broader and more complex understanding of what keeps them out of prison. In the small city, two factors that contribute to successful reintegration are sufficient resources and services and an acceptance by the general community of difference and diversity, which would indeed allow the women to “fit in.”

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1 The interviews in this chapter form part of a larger study into reintegration issues experienced by both men and women parolees in two small cities in the southern interior of British Columbia, Kamloops and Kelowna. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather data; these interviews were then transcribed in their entirety and then analyzed using narrative and feminist approaches in an effort to uncover what Sandra Harding (1986, 193) described as an “oppositional consciousness” that challenges dominant social norms around crime, addictions, and the nature of belonging.

2 In the description of the report, section 81 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act made it possible for CSC “to enter into agreements with Aboriginal communities for the care and custody of offenders who would otherwise be held in a CSC facility,” with the goal of providing for “a degree of Aboriginal control, or at least participation in, an offender’s sentence” (Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator 2012, 3). Section 84 aimed “to enhance the information provided to the Parole Board of Canada and to enable Aboriginal communities to propose conditions for offenders wanting to be released into their communities” (4)—although, as the report pointed out, in the hands of CSC, this had become a “cumbersome” and “onerous” process.

3 “Parole Board of Canada,” Government of Canada, 2016, https://www.canada.ca/en/parole-board.html. The Parole Board of Canada also has jurisdiction in provinces and territories that do not have their own parole boards. See “Federal and Provincial Responsibilities,” Public Safety Canada, 2015, https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/cntrng-crm/crrctns/fdrl-prvncl-rspnsblts-en.aspx.

4 For a useful discussion of Canadian social policy in the final decades of the twentieth century, see chapter 12, “The Welfare State Since 1980,” in Alvin Finkel’s Social Policy and Practice in Canada (2006).