“Prison is routine”: Narrating release and reintegration in settler colonial Canada

This article examines how long-term prisoners in Western Canada narrate their anticipated re-entry to a settler-colonial society using a narrative approach to analyze 147 interviews with federally incarcerated people. The great majority of our participants describe experiencing child welfare and other types of state intervention when growing up; many are Indigenous. Instead of treating adaptation and reintegration as structural or behavioral processes, we foreground participant stories about work, health care, technology, and the meaning of “home.” These narratives anticipate employment discrimination, technological changes, and service gaps and translate them into expectations of or prospective justifications for reintegrative failure. Such efforts also recast prison as a more coherent and manageable space than life in “free” society. Considering these perspectives, we argue that re-entry entails a narrated crossing between two symbolic environments: the predictable carceral world and an unequal, surveillant, and often hostile society. This framework contributes to scholarship on institutionalization and the “pains of imprisonment” by showing how carceral habitus and colonial histories shape what release can plausibly mean. We conclude by arguing that approaching reintegration as a narratively mediated process allows for new ways to support both material barriers and the emotional and symbolic landscapes through which people imagine life after prison.