Book Review: Surviving incarceration: Inside Canadian prisons

• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Author: Greg Newbold
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567714555001
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Ricciardelli, R. (2014).

Surviving incarceration: Inside Canadian prisons. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xi, 245 pp.

CDN$ 27.99, ISBN 978-1-77112-053-1.

Reviewed by: Greg Newbold, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

DOI: 10.1177/1057567714555001

Surviving Incarceration takes a comprehensive look at the Canadian prison system, with much of the

information deriving from interviews undertaken with federal prisoners. The title of the book I

thought was misleading. The book is not so much about surviving in prison, as about some aspects

of prison life and the prison system of Canada. Anyone who has not read about the Canadian system

will find the book interesting for that fact alone, although I must admit to being a little frustrated

about the lack of information relating to the actual numbers of Canadian incarcerated, the numbers

in provincial versus federal prisons, the number of prisons Canada has, and the size range of Cana-

dian correctional institutions. How has the Canadian prison population changed over the past 20

years? Has it grown? If it has, by how much and what steps have been taken to accommodate the

extra numbers? How many prisoners are doubled up, tripled up, and so on, in Canadian prison cells?

Are there dormitories? What is the male/female inmate ratio? And so on. I think an early chapter

spelling these things out would have provided interesting contextual information for the reader.

Prison size and prison crowding have a huge effect on prisoner culture and organization.

The original data for the book are drawn from in-depth interviews with almost 60 male ex-federal

prisoners from Ontario, Canada, most of whom were on parole at the time of interview. As federal

prisoners, all had served sentences of at least 2 years. The bulk of the author’s data come from these

interviews and there is no indication in the book that she had ever visited or spent any significant

amount of time in Canadian prisons. This is a weakness of the book—if the author had personal

experience of prison life itself, the validity of her results would have been enhanced. In this regard,

I question her finding that a prisoner’s index crime is an important factor in the prisoner status hier-

archy. Having lived as an inmate myself in New Zealand prisons, including several years in maxi-

mum security, and having conducted comparative research on New Zealand and American prison

culture, I have never come across such a distinction. Apart from the well-known low status of sex

offenders, prisoners in my experience seldom talk about the crimes of others or even about their own

crimes, except to close friends. In fact, it is considered extremely rude to ask a prisoner about his

offending. These things are seen as irrelevant and people tend to be judged on the basis of their con-

duct inside, not on what they may have done outside.

Apart from this, I found the study’s findings largely compelling. The author has read most of the

relevant literature on prison social organization, in fact the depth of her knowledge of recent and

historical research into her field is highly impressive. Much of what she reports about the culture

of Canadian prisons will not be new to those familiar with prisoner society; there is little that is really

unusual here. I was interested in her finding about prisoners avoiding eye contact with one another—

this is a very strong principle in my experience which is seldom referred to in the literature. I also

found interesting her finding that—contrary to much of the reported U.S. material—homosexual

rape is rare in Canadian prisons. So it is in New Zealand. Homosexual activity in New Zealand,

as it appears to be in Canada, is frowned upon by the prisoner fraternity.

The book consists of seven chapters and each begins with a lengthy narrative from one of her

interviews. While perhaps interesting, these were often little more than semidisconnected streams

of consciousness and did not seem to add much to the substance of the book itself. A lot of the inter-

view analysis within the chapters was quite precise and detailed, perhaps a little too much so, making

the book read a little bit like a PhD thesis, where each point must be laboriously substantiated.

422 International Criminal Justice Review 24(4)