Jennifer M. Kilty

University of Ottawa · Department of Criminology

Social justice activism can be an emotional enterprise. While many people become involved due to feelings of anger and frustration about a particular unjust socio-political issue, we contend that these feelings exist in tandem with those of love and care for others (or for a specific community of belonging) and that it is this combination of emotio...

Prisons are inherently emotional environments where both staff and prisoners engage in a continuous process of emotion management while working and living in carceral spaces. This paper explores how Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) values and norms shape how predominantly nonuniformed staff manage compassion inside the prison environment. This...

Over the past three decades, Canada has expanded its capacity to confine citizens in ways that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities and people grappling with mental health and substance use issues, as well as poverty and homelessness. Carceral expansion, however, is not restricted to increasing instit...

The criminalization of HIV non-disclosure represents a significant issue of concern among people living with HIV, those working across the HIV sector, public health practitioners, and health and human rights advocates around the world. Recently, the government of Canada began a review of the criminal law regarding HIV non-disclosure and invited fee...

Pour la plupart des personnes détenues sous responsabilité fédérale, la zone d’admission et libération (AL) est la première étape lors de l’arrivée dans un pénitencier au Canada. De nombreuses personnes entrent dans l’aire d’admission et de libération avec des sentiments partagés de peur, d’anxiété et d’anticipation, et se traduisant par de puissan...

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 the...

This article explores emotional harm in the context of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in Canada. With the exception of Weait in the UK, few scholars have examined what harm means in cases of HIV nondisclosure. We conceptualize the harm that follows nondisclosure as an affective response to the ‘HIV positive Other’ and argue that law creat...

Anti-feminist backlash has taken on a new form in the past decade with the rise of cyberattacks and the proliferation of Men’s Rights Activist groups, yet scant literature exists on the nature of cyber-harassment against feminist academics. This article uses the authors’ experience of cyber-harassment as a case study to explore the nature of online...

Convict criminology (CC) teaches us that it is essential for critical prison studies to foreground the voices, views and lived experiences of those who have endured criminalization and incarceration, for without access to the experiential, we are unable to accurately conceptualize or understand the pains of imprisonment. Critical criminologists, bo...

The COVID-19 global pandemic spurred unprecedented global lock downs and quarantines. In looking at the response to and the impacts of COVID-19 in Canadian prisons, we show how the global pandemic can illuminate the impacts of imprisonment to make them more tangible and relatable to the wider public who are largely disconnected from the prison expe...

The discipline of public health is generally considered to advance a universal good and is often discussed as a moral and ethical mission that aims to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own health. However, the ardent promotion of public health discourses can also result in the hyper-policing and surveillance of marginalised commu...

Introduction: The growing professionalization of AIDS Service Organizations (ASO) and the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure have reshaped both ASO staff interactions with people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) as well as ASO staff charting practices. Methods: Building on a recent national research project in Canada, we conducted semi-structured int...

Convicted offenders who consent to medical treatment may secure a preferable sentence. They make these decisions within a hybrid medico-legal system that often views offenders as neurobiological subjects and deviant behavior as a medical problem that may be addressed, in part, through biological intervention. In this article, we use Foucault’s conc...

Building on the literature that traces the evolution of carceral feminism back to second wave feminist calls for victims’ rights, legal protections and the professionalization of the anti-violence movement, this chapter unpacks the emotions underlying feminist calls for punitive and carceral state responses to violence and sexual violence against w...

Drawing on interviews with civil society actors in the AIDS Service Organization (ASO) sector in Canada, this article explores how these actors contribute to shaping the illness identities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the shadow of efforts to criminalize exposure to HIV. While the biographically disruptive qualities associated with an HIV diag...

Commentary can be found on https://syndicate.network. Publication is in press. Syndicate Network is "modeled upon conference symposia, these dialogues focus on particular books and provide substantial critical engagement from a group of scholars whose interest intersect with the book being featured." Our work focused on Chloe Taylor's Recent boo...

This paper examines how the judge, defence counsel, and Crown prosecution in R. v. T.S. mobilized feeling and framing rules to assess the credibility of the complainants and accused. T.S. is a former Canadian Football League linebacker who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault for failing to disclose that he is HIV positive to two women. Our a...

This paper mobilizes the findings generated from in depth, in person interviews conducted with ten Black, HIV+ transgender women who had previously served time in local jails and prisons in the Atlanta region of the state of Georgia, USA. The paper explores how intersectional stigma emerges in the carceral environment in relation to the women’s mul...

While social media platforms like Twitter can be divisive, this research explores how they contribute to progressive reforms in cases dealing with sexual assault. We found that the Twitter content following the not-guilty Jian Ghomeshi verdict fell into two porous camps - verdict protesters versus verdict supporters - and mapped out the emotional a...

Le nombre de femmes, particulièrement de femmes autochtones, incarcérées dans les pénitenciers fédéraux canadiens et dans des unités d’isolement a augmenté régulièrement au cours de la dernière décennie. Le présent article propose une analyse des politiques fondées sur l’intersectionnalité et utilise l’étude de cas d’une femme autochtone pour exami...

While the social sciences are experiencing narrative and emotional turns that are largely based on exploratory and theoretical qualitative research, the problematic dismissal of qualitative research approaches continues to loom large outside academia. Frequently described as a collection of “anecdotal stories,” qualitative research is dismissed as...

This article considers how emotions shape law through specific consideration of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in Canada. As the majority of these cases involve heterosexual sex, we argue that Canada’s aggressive prosecution is partially driven by carceral feminist attitudes toward protecting women’s sexual purity. We contend that emotion...

The criminalization of HIV nondisclosure is reshaping the landscape of support and care for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). Focusing on Canada, this article examines how criminalization is reshaping the relationships between frontline AIDS Service Organization (ASO) workers and their HIV-positive service users. Using data gleaned through semi-...

This chapter conceptualizes the notion of ‘containment’ in its different capacities and forms, reconsidering what it means to live within an institutional context and to experience institutionalization, taking care to think through how gender intersects with other markers of systemic oppression, including race, Indigeneity, sexuality, and class. In...

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 Ki...

This chapter introduces the concept of containment, expanding its traditional formulation as a kind of physical confinement so as to better consider how containment is practiced and experienced in transcarceral settings. Introducing the book’s goal of investigating the intersection of ‘psy’ interventions, practices, discourses, and gender as they a...

More than 180 people in Canada have faced criminal charges related to HIV nondisclosure. Media coverage is often sensational and commonly portrays people living with HIV as hypersexualized threats to the (inter)national body politic. This article analyzes mainstream news media coverage of four HIV nondisclosure cases to examine how the accused (two...

This collection explores the discursive production and treatment of mental distress as it is mediated by gender and race in different institutional contexts. Featuring analyses of the prison, the psychiatric hospital, immigration detention, and other locales, this book explores the multiple interlocking oppressions that result in the diagnosis and...

This research highlights how frontline workers in the HIV/AIDS sector in Canada mobilize the confessional as a technology of governance to encourage changes in the sexual health and safety and disclosure practices of HIV-positive men and women. The ways in which frontline workers counsel clients are especially important in light of Canada’s aggress...

Introduction: Law, Vulnerability, and Segregation: What Have We Learned from Ashley Smith’s Carceral Death? - Volume 32 Issue 2 - Rebecca Bromwich, Jennifer M. Kilty

This article offers a narrative analysis of the two CBC Fifth Estate investigative documentaries about Ashley Smith (“Behind the Wall,” 2010; “Out of Control,” 2010) and juxtaposes the documentary narratives against claims made by feminist criminologists with respect to women’s corrections. Examining the coherent ‘through narrative’ that is constru...

This article contributes to recent debates about public sociology by considering the potential harmful consequences of seeking legitimacy for committed scholarship within academic institutions. After discussing public scholarship's place within the corporate university, we reflect on how institutionalizing “scholarship with commitment” might create...

Karla Homolka has proven to be a figure of enduring interest to the public and media for the last 20 years. However, despite the widespread Canadian and international public commentary and media frenzy that has encircled this case, Homolka herself remains an enigma to most who write about her. In contrast to much of the contemporary discussion on t...

Based on eight in-depth interviews conducted with security guards who work in the psychiatric units of two hospitals located in Ottawa, Canada, this research found that private security agents unknowingly draw on Sykes and Matza’s five techniques of neutralization to justify their use of violence and coercive force against patients and to overcome...

Building on Thomas Ugelvik’s (2011) work, this article seeks to capture the food-related experiences and challenges faced by provincially and federally incarcerated women in Canada. This research shows that criminalized women engage with food in different ways than Ugelvik’s sample of men did while in prison. We consider how prison fare operates as...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the fusion of psy-correctional discourse with the dominant risk logic to consider the implication this nexus can have on how self-injurious behaviour committed by women in prison is interpreted and responded to by the Correctional Service Canada (CSC). Design/methodology/approach – The central focu...

Résumé Les femmes qui sortent de prison continuent de faire face à des épreuves provenant de leur emprisonnement. Dans cet article, nous abordons les façons dont la prison, et par extension l'État, suivent les femmes à l'extérieur de la prison jusque dans leurs communautés. Tandis que l'État tente d'assurer une réintégration réussie des ex-prisonni...

This qualitative research explores the complex and dynamic ways in which eight hospital security men engage in hegemonic masculine practices that subordinate the gender identities of security women and marginalized men. These intensive, in-depth interviews reveal that alpha male status is accomplished through routine demonstrations of physicality a...

The authors problematize essentialized notions of motherhood both ideologically and through criminalized women's accounts of correctional programming discourses that engage these notions as a way to foster "motherhood as praxis." Using data from interviews conducted with former female prisoners, we analyze how substance using mothers invoke the con...

This article illustrates how the Aboriginal female drug user is responded to as an expected offender based on the intersection of her gender, race, and class. Drawing on the findings of a national Canadian study documenting the lived experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit female drug users, we argue that the strengthening of cultural identi...

This article examines how women incarcerated in provincial and federal prisons in Canada experience medicalization as the predominant form of correctional psy intervention. In order to privilege the oft ignored and typically silenced voices of incarcerated women, this article draws on life history interviews with 22 formerly incarcerated women who...

This research note begins by situating some of the major areas of inquiry within social-science research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS non-disclosure. The evolution of the use of this criminal justice measure in the attempt to regulate HIV/AIDS transmission illustrates what has been termed "criminalization creep," whereby steadily increasing n...

The intentional misuse of psychotropic drugs is recognized as a significant public health concern in Canada, although there is a lack of empirical research detailing this. Even less research has been documented on the misuse of prescription drugs among First Nations in Canada. In the past, Western biomedical and individual-based approaches to resea...

Le présent article s’appuie sur une enquête qualitative qui porte sur les expériences de 48 femmes honduriennes à la suite du coup d’État qui a frappé leur pays le 28 juin 2009. Il souligne en particulier leurs expériences de la répression étatique et de la résistance citoyenne. C’est donc dans le contexte d’une insécurité humaine nourrie par la vi...

Our research identifies key skills and traits for service providers working with Aboriginal women that assists them with re-claiming their cultural identity. The "Turtle Finding Fact Sheet: The Role of the Treatment Provider in Aboriginal Women's Healing from Illicit Drug Abuse" was created to disseminate and commence discussion on this initial fin...

Fourteen year old Reena Virk was beaten by a group of teenagers and then drowned by two members of the group (Kelly Ellard and Warren Glowatski) on 14 November 1997, in Saanich British Columbia, Canada. While there has been much public, media and academic commentary on Kelly Ellard, no gendered analysis of the role Warren Glowatski played in this m...

The decade of the 1990s can be marked as one of major dissension, conflict, and change within federal corrections for women in Canada. In this article, the authors reflect back on this period of time by examining the correctional ideologies, policies, and practices that were operating in the Canadian federal prison for women. Finding these policies...

In Canada in 1993, Karla Homolka was convicted of two counts of manslaughter in an Ontario court after entering into a plea bargain, which led to a reduced charge and sentence in return for her testimony against her husband, Paul Bernardo. Following her highly publicized trial, Karla Homolka was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Two years later,...

Research Summary This article examines a chain of policy directives concerning self‐injury inside federal correctional facilities in Canada. Specific attention is paid to the impact of these policies on federally sentenced women. I argue that the Correctional Service of Canada's focus on risk assessment fails to address the needs of the women they...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Ottawa, 2003. Includes bibliographical references.