The Struggle over How to Help Incarcerated People: A Field Analysis of the Penal Voluntary Sector

ABSTRACT This paper examines the penal voluntary sector (PVS) in Canada, where (un)paid staff act as “first responders” and “last resorts” for the complex, often intractable problems associated with incarceration. Like many other social problems, there are no single or straightforward solutions for the harms related to imprisonment. As such, the PVS’s work is marked by tensions, uncertainties, and competing visions about what should be done. Moreover, scholarship has provided little guidance on how to make sense of diverse and often conflicting ideas about helping incarcerated people. To conceptualize these efforts collectively, this paper draws on online archival research to characterize the PVS as an interstitial field sitting among the voluntary sector, the academic field, and the penal field. Envisioning the PVS in this way offers a new vantage point from which to understand how its actors position themselves as authorities in the struggle over how to help incarcerated people, as well as to understand the ideas, symbols, and resources they rely on to justify their perspectives. By examining these various claims to authority and their interrelationships, this paper reveals the underlying assumptions, logics, and structures of power that set the boundaries for the PVS’s work with incarcerated people.