‘Knowledge Without Acknowledgement’ Violent Women, the Prison and the Cottage

Abstract

The ‘re‐discovery’of violent women in Canada has resulted in changes to the new and innovative policies for women' federal prisons. The cottage‐prison is no longer seen as appropriate for all ‘difficult’ and violent women. This article examines the events which led to those changes, and the failure of the prison system to acknowledge its own accountability in those events. The focus on violent women has obscured the role of the prison in the generation of conflict, and in the second part of the article some of that evidence is considered as well as the continuing need to consider the specific factors which differentiate women's experiences and prisons from those of men.