Punished for Aging: Vulnerability, Rights, and Access to Justice in Canadian Penitentiaries

by Adeline Iftene

Built around the experiences of older prisoners, Punished for Aging looks at the challenges individuals face in Canadian penitentiaries and their struggles for justice. Through firsthand accounts and quantitative data drawn from extensive interviews, this book brings forward the experiences of federally incarcerated people living their "golden years" behind bars. These experiences show the limited ability of the system to respond to heightened needs, while also raising questions about how international and national laws and policies are applied, and why they fail to ensure the safety and well-being of incarcerated individuals. In so doing, Adelina Iftene explores the shortcomings of institutional processes, prison-monitoring mechanisms, and legal remedies available in courts and tribunals, which leave prisoners vulnerable to rights abuses. Some of the problems addressed in this book are not new; however, the demographic shift and the increase in people dying in prisons after long, inadequately addressed illnesses, with few release options, adds a renewed sense of urgency to reform. Working from the interview data, contextualized by participants’ lived experiences, and building on previous work, Iftene seeks solutions for such reform, which would constitute a significant step forward not only in protecting older prisoners, but in consolidating the status of incarcerated individuals as holders of substantive rights.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published July 26, 2019

Reviews

[Pavel]

Eye opener!

A thorough look at the Canadian federal penal system, Correction Service Canada (CSC) and its historic and continued blatant violation of human rights in the context of a rapidly increasing population of offenders over the age of fifty. If you think you know what’s going on in Canadian prisons, think again ... or simply read this book. Though scholarly sound and well researched, it also has many anecdotes and interviews with inmates. This book is very accessible and quite capable of moving your heart to action. Canada can do better.

[Margaret Anne]

The stories will ring your heart out. If the state is going to keep people locked up - they need to have the ability to appropriately look after" those in their care. They do a bad job with everyone (punishment based system masquerading as "rehabilitative) but there is no excuse for not accommodating those with physical disabilities and with dementia etc. They do not. It should be labeled criminal - the actions of the state, I mean!