‘You need somebody to believe in you before you can believe in yourself’: Narratives of reinvention among Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Canadian prisons

Drawing on 63 in-depth interviews with federally incarcerated women in Canada, we explore how prison can paradoxically function as a site of reinvention. Using the reinventive institution framework, we demonstrate how pre-prison experiences interact with institutional conditions, including programming, relational support and cultural reclamation, to shape narratives of transformation. For women, this process is deeply shaped by colonialism, with cultural and spiritual programming offering an alternative framework to understand the self and one’s future. Contributing to narrative criminology’s understanding of change, we show that for many women, reinvention was made possible not only by what prison stripped away but also by what it provided: new ways of understanding, relating to and narrating the self that many had never previously encountered. While these accounts reveal the conditions by which reinvention becomes possible for women within the colonial context, they simultaneously expose the fragility of that transformation and the broader failures of social support systems that make prison one of the few accessible spaces for healing and self-reconstruction.