The Pains of Jail Imprisonment: Experiences at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre

The Pains of Jail Imprisonment: Experiences at The Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre by Laura McKendy A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2018, Laura McKendy ABSTRACT Canadian jails are increasingly being used to hold pre-trial rather than sentenced prisoners. In fact, a growing number of individuals are serving a significant portion of their sentence by way of banked remand credit (Deshman and Myers 2014). This temporal reconfiguration has important implications for the very nature of ‘punishment,’ yet studies of jail experiences remain scarce within penal scholarship (Irwin 1985; Welch 1999; Walker 2014; Griffin 2006). This dissertation explores the experiences of men and women who spent time as a pre-trial and/or sentenced prisoner at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre (OCDC), a notorious jail located in Canada’s capital city. Employing Sexton’s ‘subjective’ conceptualization of punishment, and drawing on interviews conducted with 33 participants, I consider how prisoners define, perceive and respond to conditions at OCDC. Prisoners’ accounts reveal that much of what is experienced as ‘punishment’ in the jail context relates to unintended yet profound forms of physical and symbolic harm (Sexton 2015). Central to prisoners’ accounts were the pains of ‘warehouse’ living, guard- prisoner dynamics, medical mistreatment and health damage. The emphasis on such pains illustrates not only the salience of ‘unintended’ harms (Sexton 2015), but the extent to which the body remains implicated in the experience of punishment. Interestingly, these pains were not necessarily ameliorated by the social world produced by prisoners, as Sykes (1958) observed in his classic study. Instead, the institutional dynamics of the jail gave way to a culture marked by tension, mistrust and violence, while also impairing the ability of individuals to imbue the carceral experience with counter-punitive meaning. Prisoners’ resistant efforts both in and outside of the jail walls, however, point the dialectical nature of power, or the ways in which objects of power can react in ways that undermine its purported objectives (Foucault 1977). ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many individuals contributed to the success of this project. First and foremost, thank you to the individuals who shared their stories in support of this research. Thank you to my supervisor, Aaron Doyle, and committee members, Michael Mopas and Justin Piché, for your support and encouragement over the course of my graduate studies. I would also like to extend gratitude to Joshua Price and Maeve McMohan for their thoughtful input. Special recognition must also be paid to the dedicated administrative support staff in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. I would also like to thank the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University for their generous funding support. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family members, including those who have passed, for their patience and love. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii GLOSSARY OF TERMS ................................................................................................. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 Overview of thesis ........................................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................................... 10 Contemporary penal theory and the state of prison research ........................................ 10 Theorizing shifts in the contemporary penal context .................................................... 11 The Canadian experience ............................................................................... 16 The state of prison research ........................................................................................... 21 The ‘pains of imprisonment’ ......................................................................................... 24 The effects of imprisonment ......................................................................................... 37 Responses to punishment: Prisoner adaptation ............................................................. 40 Prisoner culture: Early scholarship ................................................................ 40 Collective responses in contemporary contexts ............................................. 44 Prisoner identity work and individual coping strategies ................................ 49 Summary of research on prisoners’ experiences ........................................................... 54 The need for jail research .............................................................................................. 55 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .................................................................................... 62 Narrative methodology .................................................................................................. 64 Narratives and prison research ...................................................................................... 66 Recruitment and sample ................................................................................................ 68 Conducting interviews................................................................................................... 72 Thematic analysis .......................................................................................................... 73 Validity in narrative research ........................................................................................ 74 Reflexivity and the role of the researcher ..................................................................... 78 Ethical issues ................................................................................................................. 80 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 85 iv CHAPTER 4: THE OTTAWA-CARLETON DETENTION CENTRE .......................... 87 CHAPTER 5: WAREHOUSE ‘LIVING’ ......................................................................... 99 Daily living conditions ................................................................................................ 100 Food and meal practices .............................................................................................. 106 Lack of mental and physical stimulation..................................................................... 111 Alienation from the outside world .............................................................................. 115 Experiences in solitary confinement ........................................................................... 119 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 127 CHAPTER 6: GUARD TREATMENT .......................................................................... 130 Guard culture ............................................................................................................... 131 Guard practices that increase the pains of imprisonment ............................................ 133 Comparing staff across institutions ............................................................................. 141 Nuanced perceptions of guards ................................................................................... 144 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 145 CHAPTER 7: HEALTH AS A SITE OF PUNISHMENT ............................................. 147 Concerns upon admission: Denied medications and medical support ........................ 148 Inadequate healthcare and medical neglect ................................................................. 150 Lack of psychiatric care .............................................................................................. 154 Denied medical agency ............................................................................................... 156 Lack of healthcare and accommodation for pregnant women .................................... 158 Damaged health ........................................................................................................... 161 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 165 CHAPTER 8: PRISONER ADAPTATION AND RESISTANCE ................................ 168 The social qualities of the jail environment ................................................................ 170 The jail social hierarchy .............................................................................................. 172 Individualism ............................................................................................................... 179 The code of silence .....................................................................................................

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