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"...allowing our experiences and analysis to be added to the forum that will constitute public opinion could help halt the disastrous trend toward building more fortresses of fear which will become in the 21st century this generation's monuments to failure."
-Jo-Ann Mayhew, from JPP Vol. 1:1 (1988)
General Information
The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) is a prisoner written, academically oriented and peer reviewed, non-profit journal, based on the tradition of the penal press. It brings the knowledge produced by prison writers together with academic arguments to enlighten public discourse about the current state of carceral institutions. This is particularly important because with few exceptions, definitions of deviance and constructions of those participating in these defined acts are incompletely created by social scientists, media representatives, politicians and those in the legal community. These analyses most often promote self-serving interests, omit the voices of those most affected, and facilitate repressive and reactionary penal policies and practices. As a result, the JPP attempts to acknowledge the accounts, experiences, and criticisms of the criminalized by providing an educational forum that allows women and men to participate in the development of research that concerns them directly. In an age where `crime` has become lucrative and exploitable, the JPP exists as an important alternate source of information that competes with popularly held stereotypes and misconceptions about those who are currently, or those who have in the past, faced the deprivation of liberty.
Current Issues


Volume 20, Number 1 is edited by Jennifer M. Kilty (University of Ottawa). The issue is devoted to exploring the myriad of concerns related to women's experiences of incarceration. Article and poetry topics include: self-injurious behaviour; mothering in prison; substance use and overcoming addiction through the healing journey; criminalized women, labour and employment/ability; the ongoing failures of Canadian corrections for women; institutional practices of segregation; women's place in the larger prison industrial complex; and experiences of reintegration. The Prisoners' Struggles section includes material from CFAD (Continuité-Famille Auprès des Détenues/ Family Continuity for Female Inmates) and the Crossing Communities Art Project - two community-based organizations that strive to work with at-risk and criminalized women and girls. The issue also contains a Book Review of the Mean Girl Motive by Nicole E. R. Landry. This important and special issue is beautifully book ended with paintings by Ojibway artist Jackie Traverse.

Table of Contents for Volume 20, Number 1

Forthcoming Issue

Volume 20, Number 2 promises to be a rich and wide-ranging text. It will include both a general section and two short special sections - one based on the discussions arising from the June 2010 13th International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and one on 'summit detention' and the mass arrests and detentions that occurred during the June 2010 G20 protests in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.