Punishment and waste

Family meals in Correctional Services of Canada’s Private Family Visits

Abstract

While families of prisoners in Canada are often allowed to visit their loved one inside, they can face significant challenges in accessing and navigating the conditions of these visits. One such challenge is the food available to them as they seek to take part in a key aspect of family life and relationship, the family meal. Families’ experiences of the limited options, poor quality, and high costs of food echo those of the prisoners living in the institution. The prized Private Family Visit (PFV), during which family members spend a weekend with a prisoner in a small house on the grounds of a CSC institutions, do present a rare opportunity for a true family meal. However, institutional policies render the costs and waste of the food so high that partners in this study (primarily women living in poverty) experience this as yet another ‘painful’ penal power.  While these policies are minor in scope, impact, and importance to all but a few hundred Canadian families a year, I argue that families’ experiences of carceral food systems contribute insights into the way food is used as a tool of penal power and as one of the mechanism through which families of prisoners become carceral subjects.