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Katharine Dunbar is a sociologist whose research examines how gender, health inequities, substance use, and criminalization shape everyday life in Atlantic Canada and beyond. Working through community-engaged and mixed-methods projects, she foregrounds the emotional and ethical complexities of community work in supporting criminalized women and families, with a focus on harm reduction and FASD-informed practice. 

She holds a PhD in social and cultural analysis from Concordia University. 

For issue #196 of The Internationalist, we feature an excerpt from Dunbar's book, Heart Work and Hard Choices. In this excerpt, she explains that the rising incarceration of Canadian women—especially Indigenous, Black, and racialized women—is driven not by dangerousness but by neoliberal policies that cut social supports, criminalize poverty-driven survival strategies, and then punish women for systemic failures they did not create.

In recent years, women have become one of the fastest-growing prisoner populations in Canada (Balfour, 2006; Sapers, 2015; Zinger, 2021, 2022). This rise is attributed to several factors, including what Balfour (2006) and others describe as the neoliberal criminalization of poverty, whereby cuts to social services like income assistance, social housing, mental health services, and violence-prevention programs leave women with fewer viable options for survival and then punish the strategies they use to get by, including survival sex work, shoplifting essentials, or breaching conditions tied to unstable housing. Economically margi- nalized women experience criminalization and incarceration in higher numbers, resulting in segregation from their communities and families (Comack, 2018).

On a broader level, the increase in the number of incarcerated women has also indirectly diverted community program funding toward the prison system (Chesney-Lind & Mauer, 2003). Criminalized women in Canada (i.e., those charged with a criminal offence who may or may not have served a custodial sentence) are likely to be under age forty and have experienced poor socioeconomic conditions and disadvantaged backgrounds (Balfour, 2006; Comack, 2018). The life histories of these women are heavily intertwined with their involvement in the legal system (Comack, 2018; Sapers, 2015).

Women’s entry into the legal system is often related to property crime, substance use, and other non-violent offences (Belknap, 2014; Covington & Bloom, 2007). Once released, women face additional challenges, including parole or probation conditions, employment barriers, access to community supports, and rebuilding relationships with family, particularly their children (O’Brien, 2000; Thumath et al., 2020). They often face these challenges having been exposed to respon- sibilization techniques applied through neoliberal governance strategies in Canadian penal systems (Hannah-Moffat, 2000; 2006). Thus, questions of responsibility, rehabilitation, and resilience remain associated with their criminalization.

Of the women in federal custody in Canada, researchers estimate that over two-thirds are mothers, and they often have histories of trauma, mental health complications, and struggles with substance use (Balfour & Comack, 2014; Cowie, 2017). Criminalized women are also much more likely to have experienced physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, low levels of formal education, poverty, and reliance on welfare, as well as formal diagnoses of mental health conditions compared to non-incarcerated women and incarcerated men (Hannah-Moffat & Shaw, 2000; Sapers, 2016).

Incarceration disproportionately impacts racialized individuals, including Indigenous, Black, and South Asian women in Canada (Department of Justice 2024, 2025; Sapers, 2015). This overrepresentation is tied to the criminalization of survival strategies due to colonial histories of land dispossession, laws, policies, and practices — including residential schools — that fractured Indigenous families, ongoing surveillance through child welfare apprehensions and police patrols in under-resourced communities, as well as state abandonment via cuts to housing and health services (Gebhard et al., 2022. Relative to their representation in the general population, Indigenous peoples are significantly overrepresented in Canadian prisons. Further, visible minority women (excluding Indigenous women) accounted for 12 percent of women in federal institutions in 2019 (Zinger, 2019). In 2015, Black prisoners in Canada were likewise incarcerated at a rate three times higher than their general population representation rate (Department of Justice, 2025; Sapers, 2015).

Many criminalized women are separated from their children either due to incarceration or by child protection intervention, with higher occurrences of loss of custody for Indigenous women (Lockwood & Raikes, 2016; Ritland et al., 2021). Although men are also separated from their children while incarcerated, women prisoners were often primary or sole caregivers before their detention (Covington & Bloom, 2007). Thus, women’s incarceration often carries a “double sentence” by disrupting their child(ren)’s primary caregiver, custody, and living arrangements.

Unlike criminalized men, women commonly have less extensive criminal histories and are less likely to be reconvicted (Belknap, 2014). However, they may face reincarceration due to breaches of parole or probation conditions (Comack, 2018; Balfour & Comack, 2014). Women are also assessed as a lower risk to the community than their male counterparts (Belknap, 2014; Covington & Bloom, 2007). For example, the bulk of crimes committed by women in Canada are non-violent, property-based offences (theft under $5,000 and fraud) (Comack, 2018; Pate, 2011). This trend is also evident elsewhere, and researchers have found strong relationships between the criminalization of women and economic inequality, cuts to welfare, and social programming (Ferraro & Moe, 2006; Mosher, 2014).

In short, criminalized women’s experiences are unique and differ from those of criminalized men (Belknap, 2014). Furthermore, their crimes are commonly survival-based and shaped by early life experiences and traumas. Despite the commonalities across criminalized women’s experiences, their circumstances are typically understood as individual rather than systemic issues because neoliberal discourses frame poverty-driven survival strategies such as shoplifting food or trading sex for shelter as personal moral failings rather than predictable responses to an absence of housing, childcare, or violence prevention supports. This mischaracterization matters because it justifies punitive interventions over structural investment, perpetuates cycles of criminalization for women already managing disproportionate caregiving responsibilities, and obscures the policy failures that community service providers witness daily as they support women navigating these compounded disadvantages.

Excerpted with permission from Heart Work and Hard Choices by Katharine Dunbar. Forthcoming September 2026.

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