Trends in the Imprisonment of Women in Canada

Abstract

There are conflicting claims about whether women's imprisonment in Canada has followed the trend toward increasing punitiveness observed in a number of other western nations. This paper provides a detailed description of the scope of women's imprisonment in Canada since the early 1980s to adjudicate between these claims. Using different measures of imprisonment and data from federal and provincial prisons for women, the paper shows that we do not have convincing national evidence that there has been substantial growth in women's imprisonment Canada over the past few decades. There are however, some important gaps in the existing data that make it impossible to describe the full extent of the imprisonment of women and, more importantly, trends in the size of the population of women in prison. At the same time data from one province – Ontario – describe an important and disconcerting shift in the nature of women's imprisonment that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars: a large and growing proportion of the imprisoned female population is made up of women who are not serving sentences. The paper concludes with a call for more attention to the increase in the remand population and to what it means for theories of punitiveness.