Searching prison cells and prisoner bodies: Redacting carceral power and glimpsing gendered resistance in women’s prisons

Abstract

In this article, I explore the routinized practices of prisoner discipline: searching bodies and cells in four Canadian federal women’s prisons. Through an analysis of post-search reports as well as reported incidents of use of force, I discuss three key findings: searching and confiscation patterns across institutions are not dictated by size of the inmate population or security level of the institution; the redaction of information by prison authorities is an increasing and pervasive tactic of penal governance legitimated through an inter-legality of privacy and security; and that the searching of prisoner bodies and cells suggests a highly discretionary use of searching authority across women’s federal prisons that produces a gendered organizational logic. The text of the reports implies how women prisoners continue to be censured for their errant behaviour through the confiscation of personal items deemed to be unauthorized. These data also illustrate the ways in which women prisoners seek to achieve agency and self-determination within limited means.

Keywords

Gendered organizations gender-responsive corrections redaction women prisoners

Introduction

In this era of mass-incarceration civil libertarians, prisoner advocates and human rights lawyers have called for increasing transparency and accountability of prison authority, as well as the legal recognition and protection of prisoner rights and grievance processes. In Canada, as in other western countries, the use of solitary confinement has become subject to numerous legal challenges (Parkes, 2014; Parkes and Pate, 2006). But what of those carceral spaces that are at the edge of law’s control and protection? Unlike segregation cells which have come to symbolize the wrath of the carceral state and ‘the pains of imprisonment’, prisoner cells and daily living spaces remain at the edge of our analytical understanding of penal power. Hancock and Jewkes (2011) suggest how modern prison architecture and design aesthetics are hyper-organized spaces with managers, directives and closed circuit television surveillance of staff and inmates. Working with Hancock and Jewkes’ notion of aesthetics design, I suggest women-centred prisons are well managed spaces that rely on an aesthetic of compliance (such as open concept design of programme spaces; communal living units or pods) that give way to ubiquitous surveillance or watchfulness. Yet within this aesthetic of compliance is a different form of repression: securitization through discretionary tactics of correctional officers who engage in frisking, strip searching, systematic cell searches and confiscation of personal items deemed to be contraband. Are the carceral spaces of women’s prisoner cells governed through a gendered logic? In this article, I discuss the findings of a quantitative study of 1154 post-search reports filed by correctional officers in four women’s federal prisons in Canada between 2004 and 2009. I explore how the searching of women prisoners’ bodies and their cells is deployed to discipline women prisoners’ lives according to a ‘gendered organizational logic’ (Acker, 1990; Britton, 2003) between prisoners and guards. Finally, this research suggests redaction of post-search reports as symbolic of a new form of carceral power.

Creating Choices: Women-Centred Corrections

In 1990, the federal government of Canada accepted the findings of the report Creating choices, that called for sweeping changes to the confinement and treatment of federally sentenced women. Based on the findings of a national survey (Shaw et al., 1989), Creating choices documented the high rates of sexual and physical violence experienced by women, the impact of securitized responses to self-harm and suicide ideation, the lack of women-centred therapeutic programmes and the discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal women prisoners. A key set of recommendations called for several smaller campus-like facilities to be purpose-built to emphasize integrated living, women-centred therapeutic programming, dynamic security protocols involving correctional staff specially trained to work with women and a healing lodge for Aboriginal women to access traditional ceremonies and elders. Correctional Services Canada (CSC) set out that these newly reformed prisons for women were to be governed through a dynamic security model, with an emphasis on programming that was rooted in five guiding principles: empowerment to raise women’s self-esteem, meaningful choices involving diverse programming, dignity to cultivate self-respect and respect for others, and a supportive and nurturing environment (Government of Canada, 1990). It was clear by 2001, however, that the implementation of the correctional model envisioned in Creating choices was unlikely, and indeed the treatment of women with severe mental illness and Aboriginal women was worsening inside the new prisons (Hayman, 2006). A coalition of prisoner advocates, women’s equality-seeking groups and disability rights advocates called for a formal review by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) of CSC’s discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal women prisoners, and prisoners with mental and cognitive disabilities. In 2003, the CHRC issued a report calling for a series of changes to correctional practices to address discriminatory treatment of federally sentenced women. CSC only accepted those recommendations that in their view did not contravene the ‘good order of the institution’; the CHRC did not press CSC to implement the remaining recommendations. In 2005, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) filed a formal submission with the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) to examine the federal government’s claim that its treatment of women prisoners does not violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In its submission, CAEFS argued that CSC was in violation of UN Article 2 (prevention of acts of torture) in ‘its classification and maximum-security units, its continued use of cross-gender monitoring and searching practices, its treatment of Aboriginal prisoners, its use of segregation, and the lack of gender-specific training, educational, and therapeutic programs’ (CAEFS, 2005). Also in 2005, the UNHRC filed its periodic review of Canada’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, finding a failure of the federal government to implement the recommendations of the CHRC and the Arbour Commission (CAEFS, 2005). During this time as well, the Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI) filed annual and special reports outlining serious concerns with regards to the treatment of women prisoners, especially Aboriginal and mentally ill women. In 2006–2007, the Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers, again called for CSC ‘to review use of force incidents at women’s facilities to ensure consistent compliance with policy; and to establish firm targets ensuring all front-line staff receive refresher training in women-centered approaches in accordance with the recommendation of the Canadian Human Rights Commission’ (Sapers, 2007: 10). In 2010, Sapers once more reported:

My Office is increasingly concerned that we are moving farther and farther away from the progressive principles of women’s corrections articulated 20 years ago in Creating Choices. The correctional model we aspired to create for federally sentenced women based on empowering women offenders through providing responsible and meaningful choices appears to be giving way to a different reality. Indeed, conditions in the regional women’s facilities, especially the maximum security units, are looking and feeling a lot like those that prevail within the male penitentiaries. (2010: 49)

These formal challenges to the coercive and discriminatory treatment of federally sentenced women inside Canada’s reformed prisons provide us with a window onto some of the documented practices of correctional authority made known through inmate grievances, annual reviews of management policies and practices to ensure compliance with federal legislation, and when necessary interviews with inmates and staff for investigation purposes. We know very little, however, about the everyday lives of women prisoners in terms of the practices of gender-responsive dynamic security. In this study, I explore one of these other sites of correctional authority: the tactics of routine practices of the searching of women prisoner bodies and their cells.

Research Design

This study was initiated in 2009 to systematically document the prevalence of strip searching in women’s federal prisons following the tragic death of a young woman held in segregation inside one of the newly designed prisons for women. In 2007, 18-year-old Ashley Smith died while held in a segregation cell inside one of the purpose-built women-centred prisons (Grand Valley Institution for Women) in Ontario, Canada. She was held in segregation (solitary confinement) for two years – contrary to domestic and international laws – and was deprived of human contact, forcibly administered non-prescribed anti-psychotic medication for sedation, routinely restrained and strip searched. She was also involuntarily transferred across the country and confined in three of the new women’s prisons during her two years in federal custody, suggesting a systemic practice of brutalizing treatment rather than an isolated tragedy. In addition, media reports the months following her death indicated that prison administrators refused to release documents and video footage of Ashley’s interactions with staff the night she died. A Coroner’s Inquiry later determined her death to be a homicide, not a suicide. I set out to explore the daily disciplining and governance of prisoners inside these reformed women’s prisons.

The women’s prisons that are the subject of this study are all classified as multi-level institutions housing medium and maximum security women. Maximum security inmates are held in secure units that also include segregation cells.¹ The prisons are: Nova Institution described on the CSC website as home-like: ‘there are eight homes. Each has enough single bedrooms to house five to seven women’.² Grand Valley Institution (GVI) is described somewhat differently as ‘a residential-women’s multi-level design model where offender accommodations are residential houses, a residential-style living unit, and a direct observation living unit’.³ Edmonton Institution for Women (EIFSW) is a multi-level security facility where inmates are housed in different styles of living units depending on their security level: residential houses; a residential-style living unit; or a direct observational living unit. Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge is a multi-level security facility. The Lodge offers a very open environment and is run much like a minimum-security facility. Inmates live in residential houses and have access to elders and Aboriginal cultural practices. It is important to note that Aboriginal women who are classified as maximum security cannot serve their sentence in the Healing Lodge.

In Canada, federal prisons (which include specialized facilities such as regional psychiatric centres and healing lodges) are governed under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act⁴ which grants discretionary authority to regional directors, and institutional wardens to implement a complex series of Commissioner’s Directives. A review of Commissioner’s Directives indicated that post-search reports would yield information regarding searching practices (prisoner cells as well as bodies). Post-search reports are utilized for general population prisoner and cell searches only, and are not used to record searching of prisoners or cells in segregation. In 2009, an Access to Information (ATIP) request was filed with CSC for all post-search reports for four English-speaking women’s federal institutions and the Healing Lodge for Aboriginal women, over a four-year period: 2004–2009. This timeframe represents the years in which external investigations by the CHRC and the UN Special Rapporteur were underway, as well as the time of Ashley Smith’s confinement and death in custody.

Raw data were eventually received from CSC’s ATIP office in 2011 – two years after the initial request. In total, I received 1154 post-search reports. Post-search reports only allow for the collection of very limited information (checking of boxes rather than detailed or descriptive comments by prison officers). Names of the prisoners are blacked out, and the ethnicity or race of the prisoner is not recorded. Categories of information that are to be recorded by a prison officer are:

The reason for the report to be completed: 18 possible response categories include non-routine strip search, body cavity search, strip search of visitor, routine search in which the use of force is required, x-ray, dry cell, vehicle search, enhanced search, frisk or strip search of a group of inmates, frisk or strip search of staff, emergency search without prior authorization, all searches of community-based residential facility, all searches where contraband or evidence is seized, inmate owned computer, ion mobility spectrometry devices, drug detector dog or other.

The reasons for the search: routine, intelligence or other. There is no qualitative first person account required.

The target of the search: information indicated by checking off a category from a list that includes: staff, inmate visitor, cell, inmates, volunteer, official visitor, contractor, Aboriginal elder, common room, students, visiting area, range and other.

If the search was pre-authorized by the warden (yes, no, not required).

Search results: recorded by checking off what was found from an itemized list: no contraband seized, drugs, drug paraphernalia, alcohol/brew-like substance, alcohol brew-making paraphernalia, inmate owned computer, ION scan reading and drug type, itemizer reading and drug type, unauthorized items, weapons, drugs. There are two lines for officers to provide details of specified quantities such as number of pills and so on.

Names of the officers conducting the search are to be recorded, as well as the names of any of person present during the search. Officers must record if there was a threat risk assessment completed (yes, no),⁵ and the status of the situation following the search (e.g. entry refused, arrest, entry permitted, police notified, subject detained).

The post-search reports received were heavily redacted. Although federal legislation allows for public access to government documents, this access is subject to review and redaction. One of the more restrictive legal boundaries that confront prison researchers is section 16 (Law and Enforcement of Security) of the Act wherein in the following exemption is permitted: ‘[t]he head of a government institution may refuse to disclose any record requested under this Act that contains information that the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to be injurious to the security of penal institutions’.⁶ Thus any information deemed to reasonably pertain to the security of a prison is exempt from public access, and can be redacted at the discretion of the ATIP officers within CSC. Canadian prison scholars have sought to challenge CSC’s practices under section 16, through either tactics of negotiation (Mopas and Turnbull, 2011), legal action (Parkes, 2014; Parkes et al., 2008; Yeager, 2006, 2008) and media exposure (Piché, 2011). Understanding the flow of discretionary authority and information within regimes of ATIP is important to the study of carceral power (see Larsen and Walby, 2012). The extent of redaction found in the post-search reports for this study exposes how redaction works to circumvent the flow of information about prison conditions through legitimate bureaucratic processes of exemption. Substantial use of redaction suggests that knowledge of the search targets (prisoners or prison spaces) is constructed as potentially ‘injurious to the security of penal institutions’. ATIP requirements are used to legally justify the withholding of information about the treatment of prisoners, thus what we cannot know about prison conditions and uses of authority, is as important as what we do know.

Given the nature of the information provided on the post-search reports (check-lists rather than officer comments or descriptions), the reports were initially coded by institution for the number of searches conducted, the targets of searching, the reasons for searching and the nature of items seized. However, the initial coding was limited by a significant amount of redacted information. A second coding was completed to examine the degree of redaction. In the following section, I outline the various legal frameworks that govern the authority of correctional officials to search prisoners, as well as to redact information requested by academics with regards to the treatment of prisoners.

Searching as Gendered Discipline

Searching as a tactic of correctional authority is key to institutional order as it allows for the surveillance of spaces and bodies. Canada’s Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA) itemizes the legally proscribed powers of correctional staff to conduct routine searches of inmates, as follows:

47. (1) A staff member may conduct routine non-intrusive searches or routine frisk searches of inmates, without individualized suspicion, in the prescribed circumstances, which circumstances must be limited to what is reasonably required for security purposes.

48. A staff member of the same sex as the inmate may conduct a routine strip search of an inmate, without individualized suspicion,

(a) in the prescribed circumstances, which circumstances must be limited to situations in which the inmate has been in a place where there was a likelihood of access to contraband that is capable of being hidden on or in the body; or

(b) when the inmate is entering or leaving a segregation area. (Corrections and Conditional Release Act, SC 1992, c. 20)

Thus, correctional law sets out a very broad definition of what constitutes grounds for a routine frisk or strip search. The resultant Commissioner’s Directive 566–7 (Institutional Search Plan: Searching of Inmates) states that inmate consent, reasonable grounds and suspicion and/or belief, and search log reports are not required for routine frisk searches and strip searches (when entering or leaving segregation) unless contraband or unauthorized items are confiscated. Non-routine frisks and strip searches (of those inmates not in segregation) require prior authorization, reasonable grounds and suspicion and/or belief, and search logs must also be reported. Non-routine strip and frisk searches of prisoners are governed under sections 48 and 49 of the CCRA, wherein searches are permissible when it is believed that an ‘inmate is carrying contraband or evidence relating to a disciplinary or criminal offence’; only in the case of non-routine strip searches must the search be authorized by the institutional head. Inmate cells, and their other living and social areas, are systematically searched every 30 days according to an Institutional Search Plan (CD 566–9).

Beyond the official discourse of searching as a necessary tool of institutional security to suppress drugs and weapons, what can post-search reports tell us about how searching and confiscation operate as a gendered tactic of carceral control? While this study does not attempt to compare the post-search reports of women’s and men’s prisons, we can explore the unique patterns of searching across women’s institutions. For example, the inmate population capacity of each institution in this study as well as the proportion of post-search reports for each institution is set out in Table 1. These data show that 48 per cent of all search reports were filed in one of the smallest institutions (Nova), exceeding the number of searches reported in Grand Valley Institution (GVI) which has more than twice the inmate capacity.

Table 1.

Federal women’s prison by capacity and post-search reports received (2004–2009).

Facility and capacity	Frequency	%
Nova (81)	563	48.8
GVI (171)	381	33.0
EIFSW (125)	186	16.1
Healing Lodge (30)	24	2.1
Total	1154	100

The home-like atmosphere of Nova Institution described on the CSC website is reminiscent of the mid-century prison as safe haven for wayward girls in need of domestication (Hannah-Moffat, 2001). Yet despite the maternal logic (Hannah-Moffat, 2001) of home-like prisons, these data suggest Nova Institution to be a more securitized environment; the contents of women’s cells are more likely to be confiscated, or women are more likely to be non-routinely frisked or strip searched. It seems that despite a discourse of home-like confinement, the spatio-legal regulation of Nova is generally more punishing than other multi-level security prisons for women. The disparate rates of searching and confiscation between institutions that are designed to share similar operating principles of women-centred correctional planning and dynamic security, suggest an institutional penal culture.

When we inquire further of the data as to what targets were searched (Table 2), we see that spaces rather than prisoners’ bodies are more likely to be searched. Target categories listed on the post-search report, including non-routine strip searches and frisking, were coded as ‘inmate’ targets (106 incidents or 9.2 per cent of all incidents). However, almost half of the search targets were redacted by CSC before the reports were released; 463 incidents’ targets (or 40 per cent) were redacted and 119 (approximately 10 per cent) were unreported, suggesting possibly a higher number of prisoners were targets of searches. Redaction – made visible through the use of black stripes across text rendering it unreadable – appears as a part of the official record. The practice of redaction while a pervasive flexing of bureaucratic authority needs also to be considered a part of how carceral power is both documented and disappeared.

Table 2.

Target of searches, all institutions.

	Frequency	%
Cell	330	28.6
Inmates	106	9.2
Common room	43	3.8
Redacted	463	40.1
Target unreported	119	10.3
Other	92	8.0
Total	1153	100

By far, the most frequently redacted information was the reason for the search (95 per cent). Commissioner’s Directives set out that searching of inmates, cells or common areas, is justified when done in compliance with the search plan established by the Institutional Head for purposes of intelligence gathering (such as suspicion of illegal activity, or harm to staff or inmates, or threats to institutional security). As Table 3 illustrates, the redaction of reasons for almost all searches suggests most searches were non-routine (where coercion is used) or where items are confiscated. These data imply how governance of women’s prisons is achieved through an ‘interlegal’ regime (De Sousa Santos, 1987) of Commissioner’s Directives, section 16 of the Access to Information Act and the CCRA. The redaction of search targets and reasons for searches, and the control of access to information by third parties (such as academic researchers) under various legal frameworks of privacy and security, work together to enable the highly discretionary acts by correctional officers. As Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat (2006) suggest, discretionary power continues to underpin institutional regimes despite the appearance of systematic rule-based procedures and checklists.

Table 3.

Reasons for search.

	Frequency	%
Routine	2	0.2
Intelligence	1	0.1
Other	44	3.8
Redacted	1104	95.7
None reported	3	0.3
Total	1154	100

As all non-routine frisk and strip searches (those where the use of force is required, or occur outside of segregation units) must be reported, the state must manage how this information (the target of the search and the reason for the search) is released to the public and for what purpose. On one hand, these incidents must be reported to be in compliance with annual reporting protocols to the government minister responsible, but on the other hand, their dissemination must be highly controlled.

In order to better understand the implications of these redacted data with regards to search targets and reasons for searching (that is, to get a clearer sense of the prevalence of the non-routine searching described above), I considered the overall prevalence of reported incidents of the use of force against women inmates based on aggregate data reported by CSC. The use of force is defined under Commissioner’s Directive 567–1, as ‘the use of force to gain control of an inmate through non-routine use of restraint equipment, physical handling and control, the use of inflammatory or chemical agents, batons, firearms, or deployment of the Emergency Response Team’. According to a report commissioned by CSC into use of force incidents (2003–2007),⁷ a review of 185 incidents, found that 30 per cent of the sampled use of force incidents in women’s institutions occurred in the Atlantic Region where Nova Institution is located; almost 20 per cent of incidents occurred in Prairie Region (Edmonton Institution for Federally Sentenced Women), and only 5 per cent occurred in the Ontario region (Grand Valley Institution). Again, the overall inmate capacity at Nova is among the smallest in the country (81 prisoners at the time of study), yet the institution accounts for the largest proportion of use of force incidents. By contrast, GVI is the largest facility for federally sentenced women (171 inmates at the time of study), and accounts for very few reported use of force incidents.

How do we explain the appearance of Grand Valley and Edmonton Institution – the two largest federal prisons for women – as being institutions where use of force incidents, non-routine strip searches and frisking of inmates living in general population are less likely to be reported than in Nova, a much smaller institution? Are GVI and EIFSW simply well-ordered prisons filled with compliant prisoners, or, are there more women in segregation in these two institutions? As reported by the Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI), CSC has been rebuked for its extensive use of segregation in women’s prisons, especially of Aboriginal women, women with severe mental illness, women who self-harm and women classified as high risk due to their institutional history (escape attempts, hostage takings, assaulting of prison officers). Recall that strip searching of inmates in segregation is a routine security practice, and therefore unreported through post-search reporting mechanisms. Thus, it is difficult to systematically account for the overall use of strip searching (routine and non-routine) in institutions with higher numbers of women classified as maximum security and Aboriginal women who are more likely to be held in segregation. EIFSW has the highest proportion of Aboriginal women prisoners given its geographic location in Canada’s prairie region, but as important is the systemic practice of classifying Aboriginal women as maximum security prisoners, and denying them access to the Healing Lodge. Therefore, prisoner profile at EIFSW is of an Aboriginal woman confined to the maximum security unit. This would possibly explain the perceived lower rate of routine searching at EIFSW, than within Nova. While use of force data help contextualize the patterns of use of force in women’s prisons, these data also reveal the implications of how reporting documents are structured, and a labyrinth of reporting processes and documents, each circumscribed by law. In sum, post-search reports expose both the partiality of knowledge about discipline and control in women’s prison, and how laws intersect to obfuscate how prison officer authority is used.

The Gendered Organizational Logic of Women-Centred Prisons

Searching in women’s prisons appears to have little to do with its official purposes to locate drugs and weapons and prevent them from circulating in the institution and presenting a threat to institutional security. As Table 4 shows, one-third of all reports indicated no contraband was seized, and almost half of the reported seizures were for unauthorized items. According to Commissioner’s Directives 48 and 49, an unauthorized item is that which is not listed on a prisoner’s approved list of cell effects (personal items), whereas contraband is any item considered evidence relating to a disciplinary or criminal offence. As these data show, security staff at Nova Institution were far more active in searching prisoner living areas and seizing of unauthorized personal items, than correctional officers at other larger institutions, such as GVI and EIFSW.

Table 4.

Search results (items seized): All institutions.

		Federal prison				Total
		Nova	Grand Valley	EIFSW	Healing Lodge	Total
Search Results	No contraband seized	56	195	151	3	405
	Alcohol	3	5	0	0	8
	Unauthorized items	395	130	22	16	563
	Weapons	1	1	0	0	2
	Drugs	19	2	1	1	23
	Brew para.	3	1	0	0	4
	Drug para.	1	1	1	0	3
	Redacted	68	15	2	4	89
	No items reported	17	28	8	0	53
Total		563	378	185	24	1150

Further examination of the data focusing on what kinds of items were confiscated for being unauthorized items shows how security regimes are not necessarily about detecting threats to institutional security or preventing violence. Searching appears to be a practice of power that follows a ‘gendered organizational logic: a set of assumptions and practices such as rules and policies that reinforce gender inequality’ (Acker, 1990 cited in Britton, 1997: 797). According to Acker (1990: 144) this gender inequality in the workplace, however, is between male and female workers, and results from several intersecting processes:

divisions of labour, design of physical space; symbols or images that reinforce the division of labour; individual identity of the worker expressed through language, clothing, and presentation of self; and a gendered substructure that is reproduced in practical work activities.

Acker’s work opens up the conceptual framework of institutional workplaces to expose the role of policy (e.g. training, promotion criteria, performance evaluations) in the construction of a gendered organizational logic. Britton (2000) examines correctional security work as masculine, thus female officers contend with sexist treatment in the workplace. One could assume, however, that because a majority of correctional staff in federal women’s prisons are women (all post-search reports were signed by female correctional officers), a gendered (sexist) organizational logic – as defined by Acker and Britton – would not exist. My data suggest, however, that female correctional officers construct their own gendered organizational logic in which the confiscation of women prisoners’ personal items operates as a means of reproducing a hierarchal structure of compliance and submission. Rather than hierarchy between men and women correctional officers, these data show an intra-gendered hierarchy among women prisoners and security officers.

Reports listing unauthorized items were further coded into categories of items that were seized by female correctional officers (see Table 4). The most common confiscated items were clothes (such as pink t-shirts and camisoles), make-up, personal hygiene products (toiletries), pornography and dildos. For example, at Nova Institution where the highest number of unauthorized items were reported, seized items included hairdryers, hair straighteners, Oscar eau de Toilette perfume, nail polish, tampons, necklace, earrings, charm bracelets, hair shampoo and conditioner, Readers Digest books, a teddy bear, a CD entitled ‘Girl’s Night Out’ and an exercise mat. These data show that women confined to Nova Institution experienced the greatest degree of routinized searching and confiscation of personal items by female correctional officers, and these personal items appear to be arbitrarily defined as unauthorized, and not clearly relevant to matters of institutional security.

The confiscation of items seems to censure women prisoners who wish to conform to feminized ideals of appearance and conduct. This contradicts most prison research that portrays staff engaged in the domestication and feminization of women prisoners. For example, feminist analysis of carceral spaces of women’s prisons, such as Dobash et al. (1986) who examined the history of women’s imprisonment demonstrate how the disciplining of women prisoners seeps into the ‘most intimate and mundane aspects of daily life’ (cited in Howe, 1994: 147). Carlen’s (1983) study of women confined to a Scottish prison shows how women’s bodies are controlled and monitored through the configuration of prison cells into family units that construct the prison as home. Penality is conditioned by discourses or regimes of femininity: policing the appearances, labour and behaviour of women. Freedman (1981) and Hannah-Moffat (2001) illustrate how discourses of maternalism, domestication and white middle-class respectability have shaped carceral power and governed carceral spaces of women’s prisons in the United States and Canada. Contemporary studies of women prisons in the United States have examined women’s prisons as gendered organizations of surveillance and supervision. Jill McCorkel (2003: 42) writes of how punishment and therapy elide within women’s prisons to ‘fix the feminine self and punish the criminal’ under an appearance of gender neutral correctional policies. Moran et al. (2009: 701) writing in the Russian context, describe the institutional refeminization of women prisoners through rituals of the prison beauty pageants. This study’s findings suggest female correctional officers engage in disciplinary actions such as searching and confiscation, in a manner that seeks to ‘punish the criminal’ as McCorkel (2003: 42) implies.

Searching and confiscation practices within women’s prisons also reveal the nature of the prison as a workplace, organized through a gendered logic that creates conditions of inequality between female guards and female prisoners. Britton (1997) found that female guards working in both men’s and women’s prisons internalized the gendered (masculine) organization of the prison. For example, in her study guards reported ambivalence towards the lax rules (lack of order) in women’s prisons with regards to personal items allowed in cells, such as knitting needles or ‘little girly stuff’ (1997: 807). My data suggest that correctional officers in Canadian women’s prisons re-order the gender-responsive prison (that is, reproduce the women’s prison as a paramilitary organization) through the confiscation of ‘little girly stuff’ as those items symbolize disorder. Whereas Britton focuses on the reproduction of a gendered (and raced) organizational structure in men’s and women’s prisons between guards (training policies and assignment of workplace tasks) my data reveal how female correctional officers use confiscation of personal items from prisoner cells to reinforce an intra-gendered hierarchy through the application of gender neutral rules and procedures. Women employed as prison guards, may utilize searching and confiscation as tactics for asserting their professional identities as officers working in potentially dangerous environments, not as matrons employed as role models for wayward women.

While post-search reports are neutralized visual fields of itemized contraband to be checked off or recorded, the items that are confiscated exist as ephemeral artefacts for women prisoners as they are personal items that are enjoyed only for a short period of time. Women prisoners who possess too many pieces of clothing, make-up or items not properly recorded on their cell effects sheet, are to be documented as violating institutional rules, thus cast as defiant of authority. Commissioner’s Directives that allow for searching and seizure of items deemed unauthorized or contraband, are practised as micro-processes of gendered punishment. Beyond the managerial tactics that are revealed in these data (e.g. the practices of correctional officers during their shifts), we also glimpse how spaces become sites of the embodiment of carceral power as an inmate’s private space is also simultaneously a highly regulated space easily transgressed by guards. As Hancock and Jewkes (2011: 626, emphasis added) demonstrate, ‘while lack of privacy has long been recognized as a pain of imprisonment for inmates, for prison staff it is a new form of control and, in a job that is largely routine, boring and monotonous’. Searching and confiscation are ubiquitous and routinized carceral rituals that reveal something more than just an ideologically driven, bureaucratic ordering of institutional security. As these data show, each prison embodies its own set of cultural and correctional practices in relation to governing women prisoners’ bodies and cells. I suggest that the high rate of confiscation of unauthorized personal items (such as demonstrated at Nova Institution) reveals another dimension of gender-responsive corrections wherein the carceral space is governed through a gendered organizational logic that controls and monitors women prisoners’ bodies.

If we further analyse the types of items that were confiscated from women’s cells, and categorized as ‘unauthorized’ on the post-search reports (N = 760), pharmaceutical drugs were the most common item seized by correctional officers (see Table 5). Interestingly, the names of prescription drugs were redacted on the reports, but were described in notes entered by correctional officers as being confiscated because they were improperly stored (not in sealed bottles or blister packs), in plain view or unlabelled. For example, a post-search report filed based on the search of one cell at GVI showed 26 different prescribed medications seized; however, all but five prescriptions were later returned to the inmate by health care staff. In a recent study of the off-label use of pharmaceuticals – such as the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel – by correctional authorities for the purposes of sedating inmates, has shown that 63 per cent (370 of 591) of women prisoners are receiving psychotropic medications, and 75 per cent of those women were held in Nova Institution (Kilty, 2008, 2014). Thus, the use of sedating drugs by correctional authorities has resulted in a wider circulation of these drugs, especially within women’s prisons. The remaining unauthorized items that were confiscated from women’s cells included those items which were not properly recorded on prisoners’ approved cell effects lists, such as excessive clothing items, toiletries and make-up, stereo equipment or music (CDs, tape recorders), sex toys and pornography. A large number of items were listed on the post-search reports that could not be easily classified – such as tampon wrapping papers or paint brushes – suggesting the focus of searching appears to be random and chaotic, unhinged from Commissioner’s Directives. Yet these data may signify a penal culture of relentless and systematic intrusiveness into the private spaces of women’s cells.

Table 5.

Unauthorized items seized: All institutions.

	Count	Percentage of cases
Clothing	85	11.2
Prescription drugs	133	17.5
Sex toys	16	2.1
Porn	2	0.3
Make-up	5	0.7
Toiletries	82	10.8
Stereo/electronics	63	8.3
Food	49	6.4
Unclassified	325	42.8
Total responses	760	100

What the unredacted texts of the reports do show is how women prisoners continue to be censured for their errant behaviour through the confiscation of personal items deemed to be unauthorized. These data also illustrate the ways in which women prisoners seek to achieve agency and self-determination within limited means (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001). They dress in pink and lavender ‘street clothes’, wear make-up and seek sexual gratification in order to resist abjection within the systems of carceral power. Subtler practices of resistance – hidden unauthorized items of clothing or make-up – can be seen in the context of carceral power as violations of everyday rules. The ways in which women occupy their prison cells can be seen as acts of defiance, however subtle or intimate. Post-search report data suggest that most women prisoners do not engage in outwardly defiant behaviours such as being charged or placed in disciplinary segregation that would place them at risk for coercive discipline. Instead, their resistance manifests in the collection and safekeeping of unauthorized yet mainly innocuous items. These practices of collecting ephemera are critically important to the understanding of resistance and appropriation of space by women prisoners as ‘more personal or intimate challenges to authority’ (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001: 507). Everyday prison interactions are intentional strategies of resistance that are about retaining autonomy – indeed prisoner submission or compliance should be properly understood as ‘making do’ (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001: 504). Thus resistance can be glimpsed through expressions of pleasure, play or boredom (Carrabine, 2004: 61) and through the uses of the prison cell.

Martel’s (2006: 601) study of women’s experiences while confined to segregation cells inside Canadian women’s prisons, describes how prisoners ‘develop particularly strong attachment to the images, photographs, books, or religious/spiritual artifacts that furnish their cell and endow it with a personalized character, albeit in a frugal manner’. I have built on Martel’s study by suggesting that these practices of personalizing the character of cells is a form of resistance. While Martel (2006: 601) sees such strategies as ways of marking time served, because ‘objects are about maintaining a connection to one’s past’ and a way of ‘managing one’s distinctiveness and […] self-representation’, I see these strategies as being profoundly important acts of resistance towards the complex and often arbitrary exercises of carceral power.

Conclusion

This study began by seeking to explore the routinized practices of discipline within the general population of women-centred prisons. I explored heavily redacted post-search reports filed by correctional officers in four federal women’s prisons for a period of five years (2004–2009), examining the targets of searching, the reasons for searching and what was confiscated by correctional officers. My findings show that despite gender-responsive correctional policies of therapeutic programmes and campus-style living units, prison guards also impose securitized objectives of staff, public and prisoner safety through searching of prison cells and prisoner bodies.

Searching of prisoner bodies and cells and confiscation of personal items appear to be discretionary security practices across institutions, and are not dictated by the size of the inmate population nor security level of the institution. One of the smallest institutions in the study (Nova Institution for Women) reported the highest rates of search and confiscation of ‘unauthorized’ personal items, whereas a much larger institution (Grand Valley Institution for Women) had a much lower reported rate of searching prisoners and cells. Overall, post-search reports showed the items most often confiscated were clothing, make-up or improperly stored pharmaceutical drugs. Staff at Nova seized the largest number of ‘ephemeral’ items that were categorized as ‘unclassified’ in their post-search reports. The focus of searching in women’s prisons appears to be a form of gendered carceral power aimed at the censuring of women through confiscation of unauthorized and unclassified items, such as street clothing, make-up, toiletries, pornography and sex toys. In considering the actions of correctional officers in these women-centred prisons in the enactment of routinized security practices, I have argued that gender-responsive correctional models have enabled a gendered organizational logic wherein guards appear to deploy highly discretionary surveillance and confiscation tactics. In contrast with the assertions of Acker (1990) and Britton (2000, 2003) that a gendered organizational logic operates to exclude women or discipline women as workers through policies, work task design and methods of performance evaluation, I found that female correctional officers are granted greater authority as workers through gender-responsive correctional policies to discipline and govern women prisoners.

These findings suggest gender-responsive correctional models, as well as the implications of a gendered organizational logic, are not unhinged from a security/control ethos. That is, prison order and inmate control are achieved through a gendered organizational logic. The categorization of items seized as ‘unclassified’ rather than unauthorized, suggests a highly discretionary and invasive use of officer authority. These findings point to the importance of future research on the intersection of security and gender-responsive correctional models, such as the work of Russell and Carlson (2013) and Hannah-Moffat (2010). The everyday practices of punishment documented in this study are difficult to unravel if access to institutional records and prisoners continues to be denied by the state. As CSC continues to evade accountability and oversight of its authority, despite external demands from the UNHRC and the CHRC, activists and academics can work together to develop partnerships with former prisoners and to document conditions of confinement. Finally, research is needed on the occupational worlds of correctional officers to document how they navigate the spaces between the intentions of gender-responsive care, and carceral control.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Gillian Balfour is an associate professor of Sociology, and has published on the challenges of a feminist criminology in a neo-liberal context; and the disparate impacts of sentencing law reforms for criminalized and victimized Aboriginal women. She is currently conducting an expansive history of discipline of women prisoners in Canada, documenting how women resist the conditions of their confinement.

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