Coming Back to Jail

Elizabeth Comack is a professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. Over the past three decades she has written and conducted research on a variety of social justice topics. Her most recent work is Coming Back to Jail: Women, Trauma, and Criminalization. Elizabeth’s current research projects stem from her involvement in the Manitoba Research Alliance’s SSHRC Partnership project, “Partnering for Change: Community-Based Solutions for Aboriginal and Inner-City Poverty.” Elizabeth leads the Justice, Safety, and Security stream of the project.

• CONTENTS: Women in Trouble; Understanding Trauma; Colonialism, Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Trauma; The Lived Experience of Trauma; Involvement with the Criminal Justice System; The Prisoning of Women; Making Change; Appendix: The Research Process; References; Index

“This is a superb book. At the theoretical level it breaks new ground in linking aboriginality, gender and incarceration. Empirically, through in-depth interviews with forty-two female prisoners, Comack shows how the womens’ traumatic experiences — abuse, racism, misogyny — framed their lives. This book should be required reading for politicians, activists, scholars and students.” — Laureen Snider, Queen’s University // “Elizabeth Comack has produced yet another insightful book. The women’s personal stories and Comack’s feminist anti-colonial analysis illuminate the `justice’ system as an institutional apparatus of the colonial state that is thoroughly infused with biases toward Indigenous and impoverished people and with patriarchal biases towards women — a system that individualizes the experiences of its captives so as to avoid addressing systemic inequalities. It is no wonder that once enmeshed in this system, women are likely to keep coming back to jail.”— Joyce Green, University of Regina