Abstract
In Punished for Aging: Vulnerability, Rights, and Access to Justice in Canadian Penitentiaries, Adelina Iftene amplifies the little-heard voices of aging inmates incarcerated in Canadian penitentiaries. Those voices came from 197 interviews with inmates aged 50 years and older and in seven federal penitentiaries in Ontario—Canada’s largest province—including one maximum, four medium and two minimum security institutions. Iftene overlays those voices with compact, yet clear, analysis of the policy and legal context in which punishment is administered, attending specifically to how inmates experienced the process of aging whilst subjected to the techniques and forms of incarceration.
The voices relayed by Iftene are from public prisons; Canada does not have privately administered prisons. These inmates are the responsibility of a federal governmental agency, Correctional Services Canada (CSC), whose penitentiaries hold individuals convicted of offences under Canada’s Criminal Code and sentenced for two years or more in custody. These federal penitentiaries are found across Canada and administered by regional offices of the CSC. The Commissioner of Corrections heads the CSC and is ultimately responsible for all policies and administration within these penitentiaries, including the provision of health care—the Commissioner carries out these functions independent of Cabinet’s direction. The Commissioner’s authority is sourced in Canada’s Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA) and Corrections and Conditional Release Regulations (CCRR), which give shape to the institutional boundaries of—including opportunities of egress from—this carceral space. Iftene describes the federal system of penitentiaries early and continues to supplement this description throughout the book, immersing the reader with the unfamiliar, black box that is Canada’s prison system. This treatment ensures that the reader is aware of the context in which inmates’ experiences are emplaced, allowing the reader, irrespective of their familiarity with the jurisdiction or topic, to follow Iftene’s analysis with ease.
With the benefit of this context, Iftene refers primarily to two case studies—Eric and John—and otherwise quotes from other anonymized interviewees to tell “the story of the interplay between aging and imprisonment through the eyes of those who have experienced it” (p. 8). Eric and John, in particular, are illustrative of two distinct experiences of aging in prison—an older individual incarcerated later in life, and an individual who had been incarcerated for decades by the time of the interview; their stories are used to represent, in narrative form, the themes that emerged from Iftene’s interviews. Notably, Iftene tells us that inmates recounted an inflexible built environment and social infrastructure designed for younger inmates, and unresponsive to the particular needs that emerge from an aging body. The condition of incarceration compounded with the corporeal changes of aging, which rendered older inmates vulnerable to humiliation, exclusion and violence from officers and other inmates, and constrained their movements in, prolonged the duration of and further inflamed their pain from this carceral space. Although Iftene does not centre theory, her account suggests the materiality of the prison and the inmate’s body act upon each other in a co-constitutive process, shaping the experience of incarceration. In other words, the enactment and experience of punishment is inextricable from the techniques of enclosure and isolation, solitary confinement, the placement of panic buttons, distance to drug dispensaries, provision of Tylenol over other painkillers, and shared cells and gymnasiums, among other things, which are encountered differently, and matter differently to aging inmates as a result of their bodies.
Iftene describes this suffering, at least in my reading of it, as a lawful feature of Canada’s prison system—not as an aberration or unlawful conduct. Drawing from Olivia Barr’s A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place, I mean lawful in the jurisprudential sense of discerning ways of relating to one another that accord with what is seen, immanently through the legal forms of a given jurisdiction, as permitted or, in some cases, prescribed—as opposed to prohibited or proscribed in law. Without burdening her account with legal theory, Iftene engages the prison from the office of the jurist, describing the legal and administrative procedures and practices within penitentiaries that produce ways of relating to inmates—of punishing inmates—lawfully. In doing so, Iftene insists that the reader not avert their eyes to the cruelty of Canada’s prison law and administration and not think of these experiences as exceptional. Iftene then articulates a claim of justice immanently through law, as well, citing various, competing bodies of law—constitutional and otherwise—to open up the carceral space produced through the CCRA and CCRR and to begin to identify different ways going forward in relating lawfully to inmates. This is an exemplary work of juristic technique, in the sense that Iftene pushes the reader to consider movements toward justice immanently through law whilst dissimulating the sociolegal metatheory I see as underpinning it. Such technique enables the reader, irrespective of their familiarity with the jurisdiction or topic, and irrespective of their formal discipline, to follow Iftene’s call to imagine punishment differently. It also keeps the inmates’ voices at the centre of this work.
Imagining punishment differently in Canada entails five key reforms for Iftene. First, decarcerate aging inmates, beginning with changes to the parole system, introducing an effective compassionate release mechanism so that more aged inmates, who do not present a risk to the public, are released into the community. Second, improve conditions within federal penitentiaries so that those who remain in custody are not as vulnerable to conditions of incarceration. Third, strengthen independent oversight of the CSC by granting additional powers to Canada’s Office of the Correctional Investigator. Fourth, establish a grievance process that is administered at arms-length from the CSC, ensuring inmates are able to make complaints and to do so free of reproach. Fifth, provide inmates with better access to the court system to ensure CSC is accountable to the legal rights of inmates. Iftene spends the latter half of the book provoking the reader to consider these reforms as ways forward, as initial steps by which the reader can re-conceive their relation with inmates. Punished for Aging then culminates much the same, in provocation, with Iftene calling to the reader to reconsider and transform what is lawful to bring us closer to a just society. It is our responsibility, as readers, to take up that call.
