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Carceral Optics and the Crucible of Segregation: Revisiting Scenes of State-Sanctioned Violence Against Incarcerated Women

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Containing Madness

Abstract

Combining the visual criminology literature with the nascent scholarship on ‘critical hauntology’ this chapter examines two infamous cases of carceral abuses of power in federal prisons for women in Canada; namely, the 1994 illegal cell extraction and strip searches of eight women by a male institutional emergency response team in the now closed Kingston Prison for Women and Ashley Smith’s tragic 2007 carceral death. Using image stills extracted from the correctional videography of the events as they unfolded in real time, this paper identifies haunting parallels between the cases with respect to illegal uses of force against women housed in maximum security segregation cells and the historical continuity of these extra-punitive carceral control practices.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Fifth Estate is a CBC hour-long investigative journalism show.

  2. 2.

    At the time, P4W was the only federal prison for women in Canada . A transfer out of P4W entailed either being isolated in a men’s federal prison or in a regional psychiatric treatment centre—both options created greater geographic dislocation for the prisoner.

  3. 3.

    The “WRAP” consists of applying restraint belts beginning at the individual’s feet, all the way up to her shoulders, ceasing all possibility of bodily movement; a hockey helmet is placed on the head to prevent injury in the event that they topple over and to prevent the subject from biting anyone.

  4. 4.

    The Pinel Board involves strapping an individual to a board in five-point restraints (hands, feet, head, chest, hips and legs) to cease bodily movement.

  5. 5.

    In this section, I rely on two images generated strictly from the correctional videos of Smith ; I reserve one of the most violent and disturbing images of the women being strip-searched in P4W for the final section of this chapter.

  6. 6.

    Lincoln and Lincoln (2015) refine Gordon’s (2008, 2011) work by distinguishing primary haunting, which they contend involves considering ghostly apparitions, from secondary haunting , which is mediated by a third party that produces the texts and images that haunt (the focus of this chapter and of Gordon’s work).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Jennifer M. Kilty

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  1. Jennifer M. Kilty
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Correspondence to Jennifer M. Kilty .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Jennifer M. Kilty

  2. Department of Criminology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford, ON, Canada

    Erin Dej

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Kilty, J.M. (2018). Carceral Optics and the Crucible of Segregation: Revisiting Scenes of State-Sanctioned Violence Against Incarcerated Women. In: Kilty, J., Dej, E. (eds) Containing Madness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89749-3_6

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