Canadian Journal of Sociology
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“In this line of work, boundaries are important”: Occupational Stress and the Well-being of Community Parole Officers During the COVID-19 Pandemic
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how correctional systems, including parole processes, work and function. As essential workers, parole officers continued to work through the pandemic, despite the upheaval to their typical occupational routines. Through these challenging times, they worked to meet the needs of parolees; yet, the challenges brought on by the pandemic caused considerable stress and created new occupational risks and vulnerabilities. Drawing on interviews with 54 community parole officers in Canada, this paper identifes these challenges and stressors. Specifically, we identify three COVID-19 related occupational stressors salient across interviewees’ narratives: (1) Changes to workload, routines, and work-life boundaries; (2) Effects of decarceration policies; and (3) Navigating support and supervision in the face of added health risks and reduced ability to interact with clients. Drawing on studies of occupational stress in community correctional work, we make several recommendations for correctional services in building a resilient (post) pandemic parole system
Policing Criminological Knowledge on Imprisonment in Pandemic Times: Confronting Opacity and Navigating Corporatization in Prison Research
No full textThousands of prisoners and prison staff have been infected by COVID-19 across Canada. Deteriorating conditions of confinement have become commonplace, with segregation-like measures imposed in the name of preventing COVID-19 transmission. While prisoners, their loved ones, advocates, and researchers have discussed trends regarding infection, public health restrictions, and even vaccination behind bars, less explored is the deterioration of government transparency related to incarceration during this pandemic. Engaging with literatures on the policing of criminological knowledge, access to information, and state corporatization, this article examines how Canadian government authorities have limited access to records about imprisonment during the pandemic. We examine how the recent centralization of freedom of information request processing, which reshapes government services to mirror corporate entities, has altered what can be known about penitentiary, prison, and jail policies, practices, and outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the need for social science researchers to contest information blockades and create pathways to promote state transparency
Huey, Laura, Jennifer L. Schulenberg, and Jacek Koziarski, Policing Mental Health: Public Safety and Crime Prevention in Canada.
No full textBook Review of Huey, Laura, Jennifer L. Schulenberg, and Jacek Koziarski, Policing Mental Health: Public Safety and Crime Prevention in Canada. 
Kis, Oksana, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag.
No full textBook Review of Kis, Oksana, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag
Understanding the Shift: A Grounded Theory Examination of Police Retirement as Role Exit
No full textAlthough we know a great deal about the process of becoming and being a police officer, we know comparatively little about how officers leave the police service at the end of their careers. Drawing primarily on 45 interviews with retired Ontario police officers and while using a grounded theory approach, we identify and examine four significant components of the police retirement process: (1) structural precipitates, (2) disengagement, (3) symbolic decoupling, and (4) retirement celebrations. Our findings demonstrate that police retirement is not merely a decision made at a given point in time, but rather a complex social process in its own right that speaks to the ongoing significance of role exit (Ebaugh, 1988) as a generic social process
A Path-Dependent Approach to Communal Transformation: Reconciling Cognitive and Structural Views of Collective Community
No full textCognitive views claim that ethnic, national, and racial communities are malleable and constantly transforming, while more structural accounts consider these collective communities highly static. This article considers communal transformations at the population level, combines aspects of cognitive and structural perspectives, and uses path dependence to explain why collective communities are transformative in some instances but much more rigid in others. It claims that communal boundaries are usually relatively static because communal structures reinforce them through three main mechanism of reproduction, all of which can reproduce communal frameworks through inclusion and exclusion: cost, power, and socialization. In turn, the article describes how two types of critical juncture create openings for more punctuated and extensive communal transformations. Constructive critical junctures occur prior to the existence of powerful mechanisms of communal reproduction and make possible the construction of new communal frameworks. Alternatively, transformative critical junctures are openings for change that result from the weakening or breakdown of extant mechanisms of reproduction and generally promote transformations in preexisting communal frameworks. To clarify and support the argument, the article provides a variety of examples and an analysis of transformations in the Quebecois collective community
Celebrating the Contingent: The Modern Lottery as Collective Representation in Late Capitalism
No full textLotteries have become the most popular form of gambling worldwide since (re-)legalization and expansion began in the 1960s and 70s. Lottery jackpots have increased significantly in national lotteries in the last twenty years, and large lottery jackpots stimulate greater ticket purchases. The discussion locates contemporary state lotteries in relation to economic structures and ideologies in which the state itself participates, while providing justification for the lottery form. The (re-)distributional and circulatory form of lotteries is theorized as in tension with (neo-)liberal economic ideology and an individualist imaginary. The analysis draws upon the work of Emile Durkheim and other classical sociologists. In particular, lotteries are treated as examples of what Durkheim termed “institutions” and “collective representations.