Adelina Iftene Punished for Aging: Vulnerability, Rights, and Access to Justice in Canadian Penitentiaries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019, 264 pp.

How are the rights of incarcerated people upheld, or not, in Canada?Which concrete strategies could and should be deployed to improve conditions of confinement or facilitate prisoners' release in the community?As Adelina Iftene concedes, such questions "are not new" (242).But by answering them through a novel and timely case study, specifically the "extreme situation of older prisoners" (32), her book Punished for Aging: Vulnerability, Rights, and Access to Justice in Canadian Penitentiaries makes a valuable intervention into ongoing debates about the promises and perils of prison reform.Iftene is one of a few scholars to have been granted research access by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) in recent years.Her book therefore offers exceptional insights into the realities of 197 older prisoners she recruited and interviewed in seven federal correctional institutions.In Chapter 1, readers are introduced first to Canada's federal prison system with an overview of CSC's organizational structure and then to the problem of aging in prison with a succinct review of prior research.Chapter 2 presents the bulk of the qualitative and quantitative data the author gathered in federal prisons, which underlines older prisoners' many aging-related struggles.Here and in later chapters, the stories of two interviewees, John and Eric, provide a narrative thread for Iftene to weave in other pieces of evidence.They and other interlocutors report experiencing varied and worsening health problems and facing multiple situational, infrastructural, and policy-legitimated barriers to accessing proper care or being released.The book warns that seniors represent a growing population that is both higher-need and more vulnerable than other prisoners, yet whose particularities CSC appears illequipped, if not resistant, to address.Empirical evidence of older prisoners' self-described hardships and of the correctional practices that exacerbate them constitutes a significant contribution to the literature on Canadian imprisonment.But Punished for Aging goes beyond reiterating what numerous critiques have already identified as the federal system's flawed approach to accommodating the needs of older groups of prisoners.Studying the (mis)treatment of older individuals in federal prisons is instead a starting point for Iftene to explore how CSC's practices "may also be against the law" (79).In the rest of the book, the author thus engages in a meticulous analysis of the institutional, administrative, and judicial means that are allegedly within prisoners' reach to rectify instances of neglect or abuse.In Chapter 3, readers learn that health services and accommodations for seniors are deficient in federal prisons, yet that these prisoners are unlikely to be released.Chapter 4 shows that oversight mechanisms may serve to denounce correctional practices but otherwise lack "the power to order meaningful and enforceable remedies" (136).Chapter 5 demonstrates that CSC's internal grievance system is lengthy, bureaucratic, and inept at yielding solutions and, in turn,

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