Walking an EmotionalTightrope: Examining the Carceral Emotion Culture(s) of Federal Prisons for Women in Canada

Abstract

This article examines the role of solidarity as a centrally distinguishing feature of two distinct emotion culture(s) operating in federal prisons for women in Canada. We explore the social interactions between correctional officers and inmates and among criminalized women to understand how group cohesion is shaped by the power dynamics between these groups in the prison environment. For correctional officers, solidarity facilitates difficult aspects of their work and enables them to behave antagonistically towards inmates. Despite prison staff's efforts to disrupt prisoner solidarity, solidarity serves two key functions for criminalized women–emotional coping and resistance to systemic oppression.

Keywords

criminalized women correctional officers solidarity emotion culture Canada

Introduction

Prisons are spaces of social control and surveillance. Staff monitor the behaviours, thoughts, and feelings of incarcerated people through various intervention, assessment, and documentation practices (Pollack, 2008, 2009; Schlosser, 2015). This degree of observational scrutiny contributes to upholding normative gendered expectations regarding what emotions are ‘appropriate’ to express (including when, where, and to whom one may express them) (Carlen & Tombs, 2006), which subsequently establishes how one is expected to feel. The feeling and expression of emotions in prison are heavily influenced by social interactions among and between inmates and staff members. These interactions can be volatile, requiring one to engage in a skilled balancing act to navigate the terrain of the different–and sometimes conflicting–emotion culture(s) that exist simultaneously in this space. The emotional atmosphere inside prisons has been found to promote prisoner solidarity (Walby & Cole, 2019), despite staff efforts to disrupt these social bonds (Crewe, 2005; Law, 2012), as well as solidarity among prison officers (Crawley, 2004a, 2004 b). This article contributes to the growing body of literature on the emotional geography of carceral spaces (e.g., Crewe et al., 2014; Jewkes & Laws, 2021) by highlighting aspects of two distinct emotion cultures operating in federal prisons for women in Canada that emerge through the interactions between these two communities, namely an antagonistic-solidary¹ emotion culture among correctional officers (as experienced by criminalized women) and a supportive-solidary emotion culture among criminalized women. While it is important to consider how in-group members experience and understand their emotion culture, it is also important to consider how power dynamics and institutional norms and values shape these interpretations in closed institutional contexts like the prison. To give adequate attention to the oft-marginalized voices of criminalized women, we concentrate our analytic attention on how they understand both their own emotion culture and that of the correctional officers who guard them in these spaces. Our approach emphasises the relational context in which emotion cultures emerge and are practiced, and how they are interpreted by members of a different, albeit relationally and spatially connected, emotion culture.

Koschut (2017, pp.174) defines emotion cultures as “the culture-specific complex of emotion vocabularies, feeling rules, and beliefs about emotions and their appropriate expression that facilitates the cultural construction of [] communities”. Carceral emotion cultures vary due to several factors, including the security level of the institution, the gender of the prison population and staff who work with them, the architectural and material design of the space(s), and the different institutional norms, policies, and practices that structure the goings-on at each institutional site. To understand a carceral emotion culture, we must identify its emotional vocabularies, beliefs, and norms and how these are understood by those with less power in the institutional hierarchy. How do criminalized women interpret the emotion culture of correctional officers in comparison to how they understand their own? What role does solidarity play in producing or sustaining the emotion cultures that emerge in prison settings? Although solidarity is not an emotion, when practiced it generates emotions and feelings (e.g., anger, pride, compassion²) among in-group members that facilitate incarcerees’ coping and resistance efforts and shapes the emotional expressions of penal actors and their treatment of incarcerated people.

The emotions and feelings that are born from experiencing solidarity may be positive or negative; for example, anger, while typically understood as a negative emotion, can be productive and can help to stimulate resistance efforts that facilitate social change, meaning it can be a force for good (Ngai, 2007). It can, of course, also stimulate hate motivated acts of violence and the indifference required to carry out dehumanizing actions like strip searches (Crawley, 2004a, 2004 b). Solidarity is an active process based on an emotional connection that can facilitate the creation of caring communities (Fayter et al., 2021); it is “instrumental–task-oriented–and expressive–empathic emotional–relationships between two or more actors…in a group…or a social class” (Mathiesen, 2006, pp. 145–146). As Ahmed (2004, pp. 189) contends:

Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

There has been “a decline in the importance and intensity of a shared value system of solidarity, mutual aid, and opposition to prison staff” in men's prisons, with loyalty maintained primarily within friend groups and mutual aid occurring in mostly superficial and self-interested ways (Crewe 2005, pp. 182). Conversely, research with women identifies the presence of social support networks based on an ethic of care, particularly in supporting women with the most needs, such as those struggling with mental health issues, serious illnesses, literacy or language barriers, and mothers of young children (de Graaf & Kilty, 2016; Fayter et al., 2021; Law, 2012). The prison's emotional environment necessitates the creation of informal networks of care and solidarity to mitigate the harmful impacts of incarceration. Examining the parameters of different carceral emotion cultures and how they impact group cohesion facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of how power dynamics shape social interactions within this environment.

We begin with a brief review of the literature on emotion work as it pertains to the creation of emotion cultures in the carceral context. After outlining the methods employed, we describe the emotion culture of correctional officers (COs) from the perspective of federally sentenced women (FSW) in Canada who experience their interactions with COs as antagonistic. Next, we explore the emotion culture of FSW, where solidarity facilitated emotional coping and resistance to the hostile treatment they experienced from correctional officers.

Carceral Emotion Culture(s)

We take up Burkitt's (1997) point that emotions are multi-dimensional complexes that are inherently relational, albeit with corporeal and socio-cultural dimensions. Burkitt (1997, pp. 37) stresses that emotions are “constituted by techniques of the body learned within a social habitus … that are part of the power relations that play an important part in the production and regulation of emotion”. In this sense, emotions “are modes of communication within relationships” (37). Hochschild (1979, 1990, 2012) similarly stresses the interactional nature of emotions as governed by social rules that shape feelings and expressions of those feelings. We suggest that the daily interactions amongst and between FSW and COs create emotional scripts that each party draws on when responding to events as they take place in different carceral spaces. For example, Jewkes and Laws (2021) identified variations in how incarcerated women feel about and express their emotions in living or ‘being’ spaces, free places, and therapeutic spaces. These scripts become feeling rules that contour the emotion cultures that shape prison life. Emotions are embedded in and structured through culture, which provides a script that we are expected to observe and perform, or as Koschut (2017, pp. 175) suggests, “socially acceptable ways of feeling and expressing emotions are tied to and reinforce one particular cultural arrangement over others.” In the carceral context, there are competing cultures and cultural arrangements that produce different emotional scripts for different communities.

Goffman (1961) contended that it is only when people encounter an inappropriate affect (e.g., antagonism) that they see both the social rules that structure our conventions of feeling and the possibilities for disrupting or resisting those conventions. It is for this reason that we concentrate our attention on how FSW understand the different emotion cultures for prisoners and security staff, as their ‘voices from below’ provide a unique analytic entry point for this discussion (Chunn & Menzies, 2014). The feeling rules of a given situation, or rather the rights and duties that structure the extent, direction, and duration of feelings in any context, are “a clue of social convention, to one final reach of social control” (Hochschild, 1979, pp. 564; 2012). Emotion management involves both surface acting, which requires the conscious alteration of one's outward emotional display to meet a social convention, expectation, or feeling rule, albeit without altering one's feelings, and deep acting, which necessitates regulating those inner feelings (Hochschild, 1979, 1990, 2012).

Feeling rules facilitate the creation of “emotion zones” (Crewe et al., 2014) or situations and spaces where there are expectations as to what an appropriate feeling and expression of feeling are. Hochschild (1979: pp. 565–6) similarly describes this as “zoning ordinances [that] describe a metaphoric [emotional] floor and ceiling, there being room for motion and play between the two”. She also notes that “feeling rules reflect patterns of social membership” (566), which are demonstrably hierarchical in prison settings. For instance, Crawley (2004b) describes Sex Offender Treatment Programme debriefing rooms as zones in which tutors are allowed and even expected to express anger and disgust towards sex offenders, noting that those who do not risk being judged as deviant. While some feeling rules are generally universal (we should not enjoy witnessing or partaking in violence), others are specific to particular social groups and spaces. For example, prison officers must act “cool and clinical” when responding to injury and death at work or they risk being seen as unreliable or untrustworthy (Crawley, 2004b, pp. 417).

We explore these cultural arrangements, how they shape interactions between correctional officers and FSW, and how carceral emotion cultures facilitate group cohesion and reproduce power relationships that can be antagonistic between these communities. We pay close attention to solidarity as it shapes the emotion cultures of correctional officers and FSW, where the oppressive nature of the interactions and relationships between these groups illustrate Hochschild's (1979, pp. 566) point that feeling rules “can be used to distinguish among them as alternate governments or colonizers of individual internal events.” Hochschild (1990) is referring to how feeling rules are ideologically shaped by framing rules–ways of interpreting the situational context and how to feel and behave in that context. In prison, the security and risk logics that preserve the institutional hierarchy and the power dynamics that structure interactions between staff and incarcerated people similarly permeate the framing and thus feeling rules of this locale. This ideological position is accentuated by our cultural investments in the pleasure of punishment, or rather, our “punitive feelings in a world of hostile solidarity” (Carvalho & Chamberlen, 2018, pp. 217), which leads correctional officers to engage with FSW in antagonistic ways. While FSW experience the emotion culture of COs as punitive, controlling, and underscored by deep feelings of skepticism and indifference, they cope with and resist these carceral framing and feeling rules via solidarity.

Method

Carceral spaces are inherently affective environments as confinement evokes intense emotional responses and affectively charged behaviour from both staff and incarcerated people (Carvalho & Chamberlen, 2018; Crawley, 2004a, 2004b; Crewe et al., 2014; Jewkes & Laws, 2021; McKendy & Ricciardelli, 2022). This article is part of a nationally funded, qualitative research project entitled, Feeling the Carceral, that was designed to investigate and document the emotional geography (Davidson & Milligan, 2004) and thus emotion culture(s) of federal prisons in Canada. The research team conducted N = 75 semi-structured interviews (57 with formerly federally incarcerated individuals and 18 with correctional staff members). Given the importance of space, place, gender, and affective experience to this project, we focus our analytic attention on the recollections of formerly incarcerated women (N = 20³) who recounted their experiences serving time in Canada's five⁴ federal penitentiaries for women: N = 13 Grand Valley Institution (GVI); N = 1 Joliette Institution; N = 3 Nova Institution; N = 2 Edmonton Institution; and N = 2 Fraser Valley Institution. In terms of racial demographics, participants identified as N = 13 white, N = 4 Indigenous, N = 2 Indigenous and white, and N = 1 Southeast Asian, and all identified as having working class backgrounds and experiences of poverty and housing precarity. Participants ranged in age from 25 to 69 years, and their sentences ranged from two years (the minimum length of a federal sentence in Canada) to life⁵, with the average federal sentence length of approximately 5 years.

After receiving approval from our university's research ethics board, participants were recruited through non-profit and charitable organizations that work with criminalized people, personal networks, and snowball sampling. Following approval for recruitment from the Executive Directors of these organizations, staff were asked to distribute the project's recruitment materials to service users. Those who were interested in participating contacted the research team via email or phone and virtual⁶ interviews were conducted by three doctoral-level research assistants (RAs) under the supervision of the project's principal investigator from December 2020 to August 2021. On average, interviews lasted approximately 90 min. Given the importance of place to the project and to participant narratives, in addition to using pseudonyms, we identify participants by the institutions they served time in. Due to the small community that formerly incarcerated FSW constitute in Canada and the personal networks and snowball approach used to recruit participants, adding further demographic details about each participant would threaten anonymity.

Following verbatim transcription, the RAs and principal investigator coded the interview transcripts using NVivo qualitative analysis software. This involved a continuous process of thematic narrative coding (Riessman, 2008) to tease out the ways that different carceral spaces elicit different emotions–paying attention to the ways that different social interactions within each space shape emotions and feelings. While all coding procedures atomise data, per narrative inquiry methods (Riessman, 2008) we coded large swaths of text to keep stories intact. The RAs and principal investigator each conducted open coding on a select group of interviews, then met frequently to discuss, refine, and come to agreement on the assigned codes; this process helped to ensure dependability or inter-coder reliability and enabled us to cross-reference codes when analysing how things fit together across participants. Thematic narrative analysis concentrates on ‘what’ is said rather than how a speech act is organized, although all forms of narrative analysis are typically case centered – ‘the case’ herein being former federally incarcerated women in Canada. As stories are variously created, communicated, and interpreted by individuals and communities with different histories, social identities, and experiences that impact their telling and interpretation (Riessman, 2008), the interviews were used as opportunities for participants to narrativize their feelings about different carceral experiences.

Antagonistic Emotion Culture of Correctional Officers

Carceral cultures manifest through cultural representations, including via images, symbols, speech acts, and practices that are internalised and “‘move people’ to affectively identify with a collective entity and reproduce its underlying power relationships and social hierarchies” (Koschut, 2017, pp. 178–9). There are several images and symbols that reflect the emotion culture of correctional officers, including their dark militaristic uniforms, large key rings, bottles of pepper spray, handcuffs, batons, and radio communicators, which together identify a culture steeped in power, punishment, and surveillance. These symbols provide correctional officers with a degree of psychological protection that makes performing difficult acts like strip-searching “more permissible” (Crawley, 2004b, pp. 418).With respect to the speech acts and practices they perform, FSW spoke about feeling belittled and dehumanized as they were shackled, handcuffed, pepper sprayed, strapped to beds in five-point restraints, strip searched, isolated, and otherwise locked up. Examinations of the emotional labour performed by correctional staff emphasize the existence of feeling and display rules that promote in-group solidarity using humour and strategies of depersonalization and detachment (Crawley, 2004a, 2004b; Humblet, 2020). While this emotion work promotes solidarity amongst staff, it also contributes to the tense relationships they have with incarcerated people and upholds hierarchical power relations.

FSW experience the emotion culture of correctional officers as antagonistic, which structures how COs interact with them and the expectations COs have regarding their emotional displays. While participants acknowledged that this was not the case with all staff members, they described COs as interacting with them in dehumanizing, emotionally abusive, and antagonistic ways. As Paula (P4 W & GVI) stated, “a couple of them were really caring. And it wasn’t to be vindictive or to write reports on you or anything. They were genuinely concerned or wondered how you were doing”. Overall, however, FSW described the speech acts and practices of COs as harmful and characterized by arbitrary rules, abuses of power, and emotionally bullying behaviour, which they described as a feeling rule for this emotion culture (Crawley, 2004a , 2004b).

Certain guards who, for no reason, like to pick on certain people. Those people go out of their way to make their day worse, every time they see them or even hear their name, they make sure they ruin your day a bit more. If you give no reaction, it almost pisses them off that they didn’t break you when they attempted to and then they’ll go above and beyond to fuck your day up even further to make sure they break you the next time. There's no winning. Absolutely no winning (Kathy, GVI & Joliette).

Similarly, Jenna (Nova) reported that it is common for security staff not to trust incarcerated people: “they’ll give you an inch and expect you to take a mile, and then when you don’t, it's like they start taking things away from you or just messing with you emotionally and making you feel like you did something wrong. And I honestly think that is to test you and to catch you up”. Participants described guards seizing their food or personal items during a search, leaving them feeling powerless and, for some, stripped of their identities. As Lexie (GVI) expressed: “you make little bracelets and then you put them on and then the guards would take them off on a search just to make you feel [less] like a human. They would strip you of all the stuff…I almost felt like I had identity issues.” These practices are consistent with the assertion that members of dominant groups “find ways to reinforce differences between themselves and the subordinate group that preserve their superiority” (Fields et al., 2006, pp. 168), engendering a sense of solidarity amongst the privileged. This kind of antagonistic-solidary emotion culture constitutes the feeling and framing rules of prison life for correctional officers who must perform organizationally prescribed emotions to avoid being seen as suspicious, unreliable, or untrustworthy by colleagues and management (Crawley, 2004b).

When FSW experienced antagonistic behaviour from COs, they reported feeling unable to express any emotions in response to their treatment. As Kathy (GVI & Joliette) stated, “any reaction that you have to the belittling and bullying that just happened to you, it's going to be a negative consequence no matter what.” While prisoners report feeling safe to express their emotions while in their cell or with peer-support teams (Jewkes & Laws, 2021; Walby & Cole, 2019), Zaida shared a story about being denied visits with her daughter, noting that staff harassed her about this while she was locked in her cell:

I just want[ed] to sleep and ride the emotions out. You couldn’t even do that. You couldn’t be sad in jail. You couldn’t be angry. You’re not allowed to have any emotion other than numb in jail. You just, you can’t feel anything. You’re not allowed to be human. They dehumanize you so bad that when you leave jail, you don’t know what normal is (Zaida, FVI).

The emotion culture of COs establishes expectations concerning how prisoners should express their emotions in this setting. Hochschild (1979, pp. 568) contends that when people feel “a gesture is owed to oneself or another… acts of display [are] based on a prior, shared understanding of patterned entitlement.” Inmate responses to staff bullying or antagonism are therefore measured against a sense of what staff believe they are owed, which originates from their dominant position within the power relations that structure this environment.

The antagonistic interactions incarcerees experience with staff are not limited to having their possessions removed or destroyed or to bullying behaviours. Indeed, an inmates’ very liberty and capacity to secure a conditional release through parole can be jeopardized because of these interactions. One long-term incarceree highlighted this abuse of power:

They fuck with you and then try to manipulate you at your parole hearing. They do a lot of fucked up shit. They all work together. But if you pull yourself away from that shit and don’t even chat with the guards, just do your time. Do your programs, you’re supposed to do that are supposed to help you get out of jail. Do what's required. Don’t let them know nothing about you. Because they can access that and use that against you (Corrin, P4 W & GVI).

Corrin's narrative reveals the fear that inmates feel about communicating with staff, the message being that it is wiser to keep your head down and stay quiet. Her point illustrates that even when inmates follow their correctional plans, attend required programming, and seek counselling they feel as though they are walking an ‘emotional tightrope’ (Jewkes & Laws, 2021). Learning and understanding the emotion culture(s) of a carceral space and thus how to act takes time and can be confusing. Like Corrin, other participants maintained that to reveal one's innermost thoughts and feelings to correctional staff was a risky endeavour, because you cannot control how your narrative is documented, nor how these interpretations will be mobilized in the future.

The abuse, the repeat of the abuse and having a psychologist say to you, you need to talk about this and your parole officer saying you need to talk about this. Your correction[al] plan is that you need to talk and get counselling and all that. But you can’t because everything is documented. You’re not free to really talk about your emotions (Zaida, FVI).

As Zaida's point demonstrates, the emotion cultures of carceral spaces are shaped by power imbalances that create tensions for criminalized people to trust correctional authorities with their personal feelings. These power imbalances are highly visible as they are demarcated by different symbols (e.g., staff uniforms), language (e.g., psy-discourse and risk logic), and practices that reinforce hierarchies between different groups (e.g., handcuffing, strip searching). As Koschut (2017, pp. 180) asserts, “emotion cultures reproduce power hierarchies and social inequalities. Inside an emotion culture, members are not treated as approximate equals but are woven together in asymmetrical power relationships”. A recent study of provincial prisons in Canada revealed fragmented social relations among staff members due to “divisive social practices (e.g., gossiping, cliques), normative occupational ideals, labour and work structures that create status differences and fluid work environments, and trying conditions of work” that threatened in-group solidarity between frontline staff and senior management (McKendy & Ricciardelli, 2022, pp. 200). Given these tensions between different groups of correctional staff, it is unsurprising that the asymmetry of power between staff and incarcerated people lead to social inequalities, tension, and disrespectful social relations. FSW found the emotion culture of correctional officers to be marked by an in-group solidarity that supported unjust actions, noting that staff would violate institutional policies without reprimand as the complaint and grievance system offered little recourse. After submitting a grievance, participants often felt targeted by staff, whose antagonism and bullying would become more pronounced. They also reported that it was not uncommon for grievances to suddenly vanish or “be lost”, and that they were frequently coerced to withdraw their formal complaints. As Helena (GVI) stated: “even when your primary worker or someone's in the wrong, you’re filing a grievance, or putting in a complaint, case management will come down and they’ll try to talk you out of proceeding with a grievance”.

The complaint and grievance system is a formal means of challenging human rights violations and abuses of power that can raise public awareness about the injustices that occur in carceral spaces; as a mechanism inmates use to resist carceral power, it also solidifies the asymmetrical power relations between staff and prisoners and reinforces in-group solidarity. When dominant groups feel their power is threatened, they tend to react aggressively or defensively toward subordinate groups, particularly those they oppress.

Members of dominant groups often feel hostile—and inflict harm—when they perceive that they cannot control subordinates. Dominants may then use culturally available rhetorics to assert that members of the subordinate group have wronged them and thus justify their hostile feelings and actions (Fields et al., 2006, pp. 170).

Despite the negative repercussions they faced, FSW resisted systemic oppression and coped with the emotional minefield of prison by standing together in solidarity and creating their own emotion culture within this space.

Supportive-Solidary Emotion Culture of Federally Sentenced Women

While incarcerated men exhibit “masculine bravado” and their anger is commonly interpreted as a form of resistance to the power and authority of prison officials (Crewe et al., 2014,pp. 57), women's emotions are more closely monitored and evaluated (Pollack, 2008, 2009; Schlosser, 2015). As respondents recollected different experiences about their time in prison, their narratives captured a range of emotions, from anger and hatred, to joy, love, and kinship. These feelings were connected to their interactions with other social actors as much as they were to the context of the event they were describing. Expressing emotions authentically inside prison is a precarious exercise as “emotion management” is one of the core features of correctional intervention and programming for women (Pollack, 2008, 2009; Schlosser, 2015). Any emotional expression that correctional staff interpret negatively can be used to portray the individual as maladjusted or as evidence of their ‘riskiness’ (Kilty, 2014), which can jeopardize their freedom (Carlen & Tombs, 2006). For example, it is well-established that the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) uses the vague concept of “deteriorating attitude” as a justification to either deny or revoke parole (Jackson & Graham, 2009).This challenging balancing act of emotion management was also observed by Jewkes and Laws in their study of the emotional liminality of incarcerated women Jewkes and Laws (2021, pp. 407):

The women we talked to learned to hide certain feelings in therapeutic spaces while being cognizant of the need to express other emotions to demonstrate their willing participation in the psychological programmes. Specifically, they had to walk an emotional tightrope wherein disclosure was encouraged, but was subject to psychological scrutiny, which meant that expression of emotions such as anger and frustration, was admonished as being reactionary and defensive.

To cope with these challenges, women often convey an attitude of indifference by expressing a tough exterior, putting up emotional walls, and hiding their true feelings from others. As one woman explained, surviving prison requires that prisoners “navigate the[se] complicated social situations without showing any emotion” (Lynn, GVI). Such strict display rules require incarcerated women to engage in perpetual surface acting, which entails altering their outward display of emotions (Hochschild, 1979, 1990) to mask their feelings from staff. Participants described this process as a coping mechanism. Like correctional officers (Humblet, 2020; McKendy & Ricciardelli, 2022), adjusting to prison culture and coping with the conditions of confinement often requires prisoners to desensitize their emotions. In her autobiographical text, long-term inmate Ann Hansen reflects on her return to prison after 15 years in the community, sharing that she “felt a wall go up around me and my eyes glaze over protectively” Hansen (2018, pp. 260) to avoid revealing her feelings to staff during the admissions process. Indeed, “desensitization is the primary coping method that long-termers use to prove that they are in control so that they are accepted within the culture” (Kilroy, 2005, pp. 287).

While emotion management reflects women's agentic capacities and facilitates survival in prison, stoic performatives and desensitized feelings can also cause harm as repressing emotions can leave one feeling worthless and isolated. Hochschild (2012) describes this as emotive dissonance, which occurs when there is discord between the emotions that one displays, and one's feelings. This leads to emotional strain that can encourage us to either change what we feel or what we display, which risks estranging us from our feelings (Hochschild, 2012, pp. 90).

You just keep a straight face, and you don’t let things get under your skin. I learnt that very young, growing up in the type of culture I had and then jail just reinforced that you don’t show your emotions because your emotions don’t matter… being an Indo-Canadian woman, you don’t really matter. And being a prisoner, an inmate, a criminal, you don’t matter. You don’t have a voice because you’re just a body (Zaida, FVI).

This narrative highlights the harm that inmates experience as they attempt to suppress the expression of their emotions, which, for Zaida, resulted in feeling a loss in identity and voice. Despite living in an institutional space designed to foster an atmosphere of isolation, fear, deprivation, and strict emotion management, participants emphasized that they engaged in acts of kindness and solidarity toward one another. For FSW, solidarity serves two functions – emotional coping and resistance to systemic oppression.

“We take care of each other” – Solidarity as emotional coping

Despite the isolating nature of incarceration, the elusiveness of trust, antagonism from staff, and an emotion culture characterized by stoicism, women formed strong emotional bonds and support networks with one another. Sharing resources, comforting each other during difficult times, and celebrating special occasions together solidified their relationships and enabled women to temporarily drop their guard. One participant serving a life sentence alluded to the challenge of authentic emotional expression in prison while acknowledging the importance of having a trusted confidante:

You’re about the only one I could show my emotions to or talk to about certain things, like if my son was having a hard time or [when] my sister died when I was in prison. I could show my emotions with you, but there wasn’t too many people you could show your emotions to or talk to (Paula, P4 W & GVI).

Similarly, Lynn (GVI) expressed that “you feel really isolated and alone. At least you have people who are going through the same thing you are. I was able to find a good support network”. Some participants described their support network as a sisterhood or family, attributing these relationships to their capacity to survive the trauma of prison together:

I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through my time if I hadn’t built these relationships with these women…that emotional bond you build because you’re completely pure and raw when you make that connection with somebody, you really let your emotions come out. And that's the type of relationship that you can’t make anywhere else (Zaida, FVI).

This narrative demonstrates how the carceral environment acts like a crucible in which supportive bonds between incarcerated women form, catalyzing their solidarity and emotional connections through the shared experience of imprisonment. Building on this point Lexie (GVI) discussed how, despite the efforts of correctional officers to restrict prisoners from supporting one another,

We made an indoor family; I was there for however long and you start to lose touch with the world a little bit. It's literally, you are feeling like you’re on a different planet. You have to adjust and it's human nature to adjust and adapt. And then you have that human inclination to love and want to hang out.

Lexie's narrative speaks to the sense of alienation FSW feel and the basic human need for meaningful social connections. Deakin and Spencer (2011, pp. 246) found that formerly incarcerated women replaced “the lost contact from those outside with informal support gained from new relationships developed with other prisoners. Friendships between female prisoners were a main source of emotional support… [and] a vital social and practical resource”. Former prisoners echo this point, noting that mutually supportive relationships between prisoners are based on an ethic of care, respect, and compassion (Fayter et al., 2021; Hansen, 2018; Kilroy, 2005).

We were civilised people. We respected space. We respected each other. We gave a shit about each other's feelings. You know she might be having a bad day, so [we’d say] ‘hey, you OK? Everything good?’ We took care of each other, right? If somebody was sick or had a bad day or a bad phone call or something bad happened. We would try to cheer each other up. Bring something or laugh, make jokes, or make some food or a dessert (Lexie, GVI).

Echoing previous research, participants discussed providing practical and emotional supports, disclosing personal experiences, engaging in peer support programs (Walby & Cole, 2019), connecting with others through cultural and spiritual practices, and sharing food, celebrations, and laughter (de Graaf & Kilty, 2016), as examples of solidarity that contributed to their emotional wellbeing. The value of laughter and having a sense of humour during difficult times was particularly salient among participants.

People who’ve been through dark shit can laugh and have a dark sense of humour, right? The Indigenous people I’ve known, laugh more than anybody I’ve ever met, you know? Yet they have the most horrific oppression all their lives. Sometimes I think that that's one of the by-products of being oppressed and having no way out is to laugh. It's either that or you go insane. It's either laugh or cry all the time (Janet, P4 W & GVI).

While persistent stress and an absence of social support leads to poor emotion management (Hochschild, 1990, 2012), a sense of camaraderie and the development of intense emotional bonds not only buttressed participants’ efforts to cope with emotional challenges, but they also created space for and supported women's efforts to resist carceral oppression.

“We have to fight for everything inside” – Solidarity as a form of resistance

The challenging social dynamics, arbitrary prison rules, antagonistic emotion culture of security staff, and actively working to repress one's own emotions can, perhaps counterintuitively, facilitate cohesive social bonds among prisoners. Beyond providing an outlet for emotional coping, prisoner solidarity also serves as a site of resistance, which is evidenced by prisoners’ attempts to make life inside more comfortable and to maintain a sense of personal agency (Bosworth & Carrabine, 2001). Respondents described small, everyday acts of resistance, such as sharing limited resources regardless of the prison's no-sharing policy, maintaining a code of silence, and filing grievances against staff. They also shared stories of collaborating in larger, exceptional acts of resistance including hunger strikes, work refusal, and legal advocacy efforts. This context makes it especially difficult for newcomers to find balance as they begin to walk the emotional tightrope upon entry into the penitentiary system:

You have to be careful of what you’re doing constantly and trying to be respectful, without being a pushover and not letting it go too far and still standing up. Like, there's a balance you have to find… if somebody had no reference to that, it would be extremely difficult to navigate (Lexie, GVI).

In addition to assisting recent arrivals with understanding the dynamics of the different carceral emotion culture(s) and welcoming them with food, participants also worked in solidarity by educating one another about their rights, prison policies, and how to self-advocate, which they described as a necessary precursor to their freedom:

You really, really, really have to fight for yourself in there and they take advantage of the fact that most of us have a literacy level of grade 8, that we don’t even understand the words they’re saying, we don’t know the rules, and we don’t know how to advocate for ourselves. They take advantage of that. You have to learn how to do those things or you’re going to be stuck in that system forever (Helena, GVI).

Becoming a vocal advocate inside and engaging in acts of resistance is not without risk, however; as Jenna (Nova) recalls:

I started to fight everything they say. I started to put in complaint forms and fighting for what was right, and I did a lot of segregation time. I fought everything tooth and nail, and either the guards hated me because I knew the system so well or they liked me because I wouldn’t take shit. I was never fighting any other inmates. I understood what they were going through, so why would I fight with them? I would take my anger out on them [guards], and that's how From the Ground Up⁷ started and my activism/advocacy for criminalized women.

Jenna's narrative reflects Bosworth and Carrabine's (2001) assertion that resistance is exhibited via prisoners’ efforts to maintain a sense of personal self-identity and to defy institutional control. It also reveals how ‘negative’ emotions like anger can be a motivating force for social justice action (Ngai, 2007). While correctional staff (mis)interpreted Jenna's actions as a form of acting out reflective of her “deteriorating attitude” (Jackson & Stewart, 2009), she persisted to negotiate carceral power relations in solidarity with her peers (“I was never fighting any other inmates. I understood what they were going through”), which has the potential to foster collective strategies for resistance.

Solidarity and resistance are not easy to maintain, however, as women risk being punished with time in segregation or other institutional reprimands (e.g., missed family visits) when they defy institutional expectations or direct orders from staff (Crewe, 2005; Kilty, 2014; Moore & Scraton, 2014). FSW described their solidarity as a kind of feeling rule and expectation, where those who ally with staff are looked upon with suspicion. Although they may jeopardize their freedom or even their lives when fighting for their rights, it is precisely because of the overwhelming institutional control over their lives that prisoners are willing to take such risks (Hansen, 2018; Kilroy, 2005; Moore & Scraton, 2014). One woman serving a life sentence reflected on the challenges, implications, and emotional and ethical importance of prisoner solidarity and resistance:

On Prisoners’ Justice Day⁸, people would refuse to work cause they’d want to honour their dead sisters or their dead brothers – that's part of the protest. But they’d threaten to charge you. Prisoners’ Justice Day was very hard in GVI because I felt that most people worked, and that to me is disrespectful to your brothers and sisters who fought to have better things in prison. Cause a lot of them have died by the prison's hands, you know what I mean? The fact that they would starve to death for you to get more mail than once a week. And get boxes [of personal items]. That was all prisoners’ work, that wasn’t guards’ work. The prisoners that came before you are the ones that did all that work, and some of them died over it (Paula,P4 W & GVI).

Despite the intense carceral controls imposed on them and the punitive repercussions they faced by fighting for justice, FSW stood in solidarity to challenge unjust practices and provide emotional support to one another. Cultivated through their shared experiences of carceral power, oppression and trauma, solidarity amongst FSW manifests as a feeling rule that is expressed through an ethic of care, kinship, and emotional support.

Conclusion

Spaces and places shape our senses of self and thus our identities, as well as our affects, moods, and emotions (Jewkes & Laws, 2021, pp. 395). This article examines this process as it occurs for FSW in Canada in relation to how they experience solidarity in prison –among themselves and with respect to the carceral emotion culture of security staff. We focused on the experiences of FSW to problematize the notion that women in prison are “passive or disempowered figures with limited emotional responses” and to demonstrate how they are “agents who exert control over space to regulate their feelings” (Jewkes & Laws, 2021,pp. 408–9).The existing literature on solidarity in carceral spaces tends to examine how it is felt, experienced, or expressed amongst one population, notably correctional officers (Crawley, 2004a; McKendy & Ricciardelli, 2022)or criminalized men (Crewe, 2005); very few studies have considered this for incarcerated women (Deakin & Spencer, 2011; Jewkes & Laws, 2021). This article makes a unique contribution to the literature by outlining two, often conflictual, emotion cultures operating in Canadian federal prisons for women and exploring how these distinctive emotion cultures are rooted in the interpersonal relationship dynamics between correctional officers and FSW. Criminalized women experience a range of emotions while incarcerated; however, the gendered nature of their confinement, monitoring, and appraisal often leads to institutional assessments that situate their emotions as somehow problematic, out of control, disregulated, or as a contributing ‘pathways’ factor into their criminalization (Carlen & Tombs, 2006; Law, 2012; Kilty, 2014; Pollack, 2008, 2009).Emotional assessments are notoriously tricky, and criminalized women have long been interpreted as delivering inauthentic emotional performatives to manipulate those in positions of authority (Kilty, 2014; Schlosser, 2015).

Despite institutional efforts to prevent them from organizing collectively, participants found ways to support one another and to foster a sense of solidarity. By doing so, FSW found strength in this sense of ‘sisterhood’ (Kilroy, 2005), which helped them to cope with the stressors of imprisonment–whether these be related to the material conditions of their confinement, or to the pains of imprisonment born from their isolation, family separation, and criminalization. This sense of solidarity also manifested as a form of resistance that enabled women to challenge different aspects of their incarceration and to, for but one example, engage the complaint and grievance system to push back against the institutional authorities that made their experience of incarceration “deeper” and “tighter” (Crewe et al., 2014).

As emotion cultures relay emotional feeling and display rules that outline what the appropriate expression of emotions is within a given social, cultural, and spatial context, they have the power to facilitate the development of different communities with distinct emotional vocabularies, norms, and beliefs (Hochschild, 1979, 1990, 2012; Koschut, 2017). Reflecting the competing cultural arrangements that structure the various emotion cultures inside prisons, FSW identified the distinct emotion culture of correctional officers as antagonistic toward, and skeptical of them. Crawley (2004b, pp. 424; see also 2004a) argues that occupational norms “place significant emotional and psychological pressures on prison officers, since a failure to display the ‘right’ emotions is to risk the acquisition of a deviant identity–someone who is either not ‘one of us’ or not ‘up to the job’”. Such norms promote in-group solidarity amongst correctional officers, who, at least at times, disregard or antagonize the feelings, emotions, and needs of criminalized women, who respond to staff hostility by repressing their emotions. Just as correctional officers engage in depersonalization and detachment to desensitize themselves from the harmful actions they perform as part of their work (Crawley, 2004a, 2004b), FSW distance themselves from their feelings to cope with the pains of imprisonment, including their treatment by correctional officers and other staff members.

More than their individual efforts to cope with the conditions of their confinement, FSW actively resist aspects of their treatment through solidarity, which was a key feature of their emotion culture. Their solidarity was a source of emotional support that enabled their resistance to the carceral power dynamics and systemic oppression they faced while incarcerated. These cultural arrangements are structured by the hierarchical power-relations that exist between the two groups. In this way, the carceral emotion cultures of FSW and Cos are shaped by the interactions between and within these communities, meaning they facilitate group cohesion and reproduce power relationships. Solidarity therefore functions as both a resistance mechanism for incarcerees and a way of maintaining power dominance for prison staff. The next phase of this research will be to delve deeper into which emotions are felt and expressed in specific carceral spaces to map the emotional geography of Canadian federal prisons, taking care to note differences according to the gender and security level of the institution.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant, funding reference number 435-2019-1152.

Notes

Author Biographies

Jennifer M. Kilty, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa. A critical prison studies scholar, her research examines conditions of confinement, carceral segregation practices, the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure, prison education, pedagogy, and the incarceration experiences of criminalized people.

Rachel Fayter, MA, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research examines the strengths and resiliencies of criminalized women and is partially based on her own history of criminalization and incarceration in Canada.

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