Psychological Barriers Women Experience During Reintegration After Incarceration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the fastest-growing prison population worldwide, women face distinct barriers to successful community reintegration after incarceration. In Canada, the number of females sentenced to federal institutions has increased by over 44% for non-Indigenous women and 76.4% for Indigenous women between 2006 and 2016, a substantially higher proportion than males (Department of Justice, 2018). Mental and emotional wellness is substantially impacted by social inequalities and gender disparities that women experience at significantly higher rates than males, such as abuse, poverty, systemic oppression, and substance use (Nicholls et al., 2009; Yu, 2018). Transitioning from incarceration to the community can initiate a phase of emotional turmoil due to the need to adapt quickly and learn from others (Pettus-Davis & Kennedy, 2019). With a higher likelihood of women experiencing victimization and social inequalities compared to men, there is a substantial overlap in women’s negative coping strategies (e.g., substance use, self-harm) and involvement with the legal system (Canadian Women’s Foundation, 2014). Despite having established goals, risk management strategies, and regulations that may be in place for individuals leaving incarceration, women often enter the community in survival mode, acutely aware of the need to quickly create a vastly different lifestyle to live a law-abiding life (Tyagi, 2016). With 59% of females reoffending within six months after incarceration (a higher proportion than males), identifying women’s needs and barriers to support their success in a prosocial life upon release could be foundational to developing needed change in ending the cycle of reincarceration (Department of Justice, 2020). Despite having unique pathways to criminal behaviour and being the fastest-growing population to commit crimes, gender-responsive research is lacking (Yu, 2018). While risk assessment tools speak to the likelihood of future criminal behaviour based on the individual or past behaviour, the barriers women experience when making decisions at such a critical juncture are essential to understand to prevent the cyclical nature of incarceration. By determining and understanding the psychological barriers women experience, such as stigma, loneliness, and self-esteem issues, we can contribute to a positive reintegration upon prison re-entry in the future by targeting and focusing on addressing those barriers upon release. Through conducting surveys and semi-structured interviews with women who have previously been incarcerated in a Canadian Correctional Facility, this study examined how psychological barriers may impact women’s reintegration after incarceration. Within the surveys, participants responded to questionnaires on specific psychological factors, whereas during the interviews, women will be provided the opportunity to share their experiences, advice, and perspectives about reintegration after incarceration. If the findings of this study indicate an association between specific psychological barriers with women’s community connectedness and prosocial reintegration, a need for further resources and inclusive services may be suggested to contribute to a decrease in recidivism upon release.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.023 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".