Chris Clarkson and Melissa Munn provide a social history about penal reform in mid-twentieth century Canada that goes beyond official descriptions from the administration. Counter to most narratives that regard this period as penal welfarism, Clarkson and Munn cast doubt on this narrative, instead charting the complicated story of prison reform that unfolded from the late 1930s to 1960s. Throughout the chapters, Clarkson and Munn demonstrate how prisoner writing acts as an effective vehicle for resistance and creates pressure for reform.
Part I of the book, Disrupting the Old Order, outlines the conditions of confinement that triggered the 1932 Kingston penitentiary riot, a key development that highlighted the restrictive and punitive conditions of confinement in Canadian penitentiaries. A royal commission report, best known as the Archambault Report of 1938, was created in response. This marked a major moment Canadian penology, as the prison system was heavily criticized for its punitive agenda. The Archambault report offered extensive criticism of the punitive agenda and poor conditions of penitentiaries while providing promise of extensive reform, including crime prevention, classification, segregation practices, improved vocational and educational programming, expanded recreation and leisure time, and improved health care.
Part II, Disruptive Influences, includes the remaining four chapters. Clarkson and Munn examine the creation of the penal press in Canadian penitentiaries, the role of penal presses in holding the administration accountable and producing public awareness around key issues, outlining the reform process from the perspective of the prisoners and the tensions between the prisoners and the administration throughout the New Deal. While prisoners were happy with changes that allowed some access to education and rehabilitation, as well as sports, recreation, hobbycraft, and some, albeit limited, changes to the parole and remission system, the prisoners' writings also demonstrate disillusionment with the process. Despite some changes, rehabilitation and education were offered to a limited proportion of the prison population while treatments were sometimes used to disguise punishments. Although changes to parole were slow, more prisoners were released as the prisons grappled with the challenges of overcrowding in Canadian penitentiaries. Clarkson and Munn effectively use a mix of government documents, media, and prisoner writings to parse out the stark differences between policy and practice in prison reform. Their history of the penal press demonstrates not only how it was used for advocacy and maintaining accountability throughout the reform but also as an opportunity to humanize prisoners to the public. The addition of prisoner's writing transformed the story of prison reform from one of hopefulness and change to instead suggest that “many reforms were undermined, neglected, or unfinished” (p. 103). Despite many forms of resistance to reform, the combination of prisoners' writing and resistance created a strong pressure for change.
While this book highlights the story of the New Deal and the emergence of a penal press, it also details the dismantling of the penal press, as censorship, criticism from the administration, and other factors led to the demise of all Canadian penal presses by the mid-1960s. Censorship was a tool used by the administration to control the narrative of the New Deal.
Clarkson and Munn conclude that their competing narrative of the New Deal fits well with the theoretical understandings of the prison and reform presented by Michel Foucault, Stanley Cohen, and Thomas Mathiesen. The prison continues to attempt to reinvent itself, though it experiences uneven progress. Ideas about rehabilitation and reform continue to be recycled while institutions co-opt reforms to fit with their mandate. However, new contours may be added, such as the focus on moral re-education and the production of a democratic citizen, both of which were identified by the authors as a focus for the New Deal. When comparing the New Deal to today's discussions of correctional reform, Clarkson and Munn highlight how Canadian penitentiaries continue to deal with criticisms about rehabilitation, overcrowding, prisoner classification, and segregation practices, yet ideologies about improvement are continually discussed by the administration and government. While their conclusions suggest that the prison continues to operate with for their true purpose—the maintenance the capitalist order—the books overall message is to disrupt singular narratives about prison reform and provide voice to the voiceless. While the concluding thoughts of the book begin to consider the role of the prison in (re)producing capitalism, it could be improved by continuing their critique of the broader power relations and forms of governance that continue to constitute the prison-industrial complex.
Clarkson and Munn provide a wonderful contribution to socio-legal studies, where they present a clear methodology for disrupting narratives about progressive penal reform in Canada. Their method emphasizes a “reconstitution and connection” (p. 6), expanding the boundaries of this history through references on prisoners' writing, reformers, politicians, journalists, and active community groups to re-tell the history of the New Deal. By going beyond the traditional reliance on government reports, they rely on wardens' conferences, internal records such as correspondence between colleagues and reports to superiors, petitions from social reform groups, wardens' meetings and meeting minutes, prisoner memoirs, letters from family and interested community members, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes from the margins of official documents, and prisoner's newsletters. This variety of sources helps create connections between the everyday experiences of prisoners and operations of penitentiaries, social structures and power relations that constitute the penitentiary system.
For socio-legal scholars, the book serves as a reminder to include and search for subjugated voices that challenge dominant narratives, as well as internal documents that expand our knowledge on the inner workings of government. While the book does an excellent job of bringing forward prisoner writing, there were some limitations, including limited inclusion of women and francophone prisoners (a limit that the authors identified). In addition, we should consider the limitations of the prison writing as well. The editorial decisions of the press are made by a small circle of prisoners while other prisoners may be excluded due to their literacy skills.
