“I’m in a Federal Prison, and I’ve Never Felt More Free”

Abstract Gresham Sykes famously identified five key deprivations of imprisonment, understood as characteristic of prison life. Recent work has extended this analysis to the distinctive pains endured by female prisoners, although little consideration has been given to the question of how incarcerated women relate to prison vis-à-vis their past traumatic experiences. This chapter foregrounds the experiences of Indigenous women serving sentences in a women’s federal prison in Alberta, Canada. We ask: How do our participants experience prison in the context of their life histories in a settler-colonial society, and how might Sykes’s five pains of imprisonment map onto their experiences? Our findings suggest that Sykes’s formulation is certainly part of the story relating to their distinctive pains, but often only a small part. The women we interviewed consistently offered countervailing narratives about their relationship to prison, and to pain more generally, that need to be understood in the context of settler colonialism. We offer cautions about the generalizability of Sykes’s “pains” framing while also contributing to our evolving understanding of the experiential dimension of settler colonialism in Canada.

“I’m in a Federal Prison, and I’ve Never Felt More Free” Chapters