Prisons that Empower

This paper uses recent policy changes in Canadian women’s imprisonment to examine the emergence of neo-liberal strategies of penal governing. The first section critically assesses the claim that new strategies of crime control involve a reconfiguration of the responsibilities of state and civil society. In the second section, the logic and interpretive politics of empowerment strategies are evaluated. An emphasis is placed on how‘empowerment’, a term previously associated with radical activists and social movements, is now as easily used by the Correctional Service of Canada to legitimate and justify the construction of a regime at five new regional prisons for women. This article reflexively examines the feminist and Aboriginal knowledges that contributed to the construction of empowerment as a legitimate and viable penal reform strategy; and it shows how feminist and Aboriginal reformers’ notions of empowerment can be aligned with very different political rationalities and used as a strategy of responsibilization by policy makers and correctional officials. In particular, it shows how these knowledges get linked to penal power and used to create a new regime of governing and reinforce pre-existing relations of power. Finally, a discussion of the reassertion of sovereign and disciplinary power, when it comes to governing those who fail to take responsibility for their own empowerment is provided to show how neo-liberal strategies of government develop alongside, and operate in conjunction with, other forms of power.