Contesting Women’s Incarceration

Feminist Prison Activists and British Columbia’s Proudfoot Inquiry, 1978-1980

Abstract

The 1970s were a particularly turbulent period for prison revolts and anti-prison activism in Canada and internationally. This was especially true in British Columbia, where social and political factors nurtured a plethora of new groups highly critical of prisons. The Proudfoot inquiry, sparked by sexual “scandal” in the women’s section of Oakalla prison in Burnaby, reflected a new concern with women’s carceral institutions, but it also revealed important differences in the emerging feminist critique of prisons, indicating fissures between feminist reformers and more radical abolitionists. This article explores the Proudfoot inquiry in light of these changes in the 1970s, especially the contending views of women’s incarceration that vied for political support at the time.