March 2025
Spaces of Struggle sessions in radical planning at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. Detroit MI

May 2025
Capillary Critical Geographies Network Conference. Montreal QC.

Housing insecurity is increasingly recognized as having a bi-directional relationship with criminalization, acting both as a pathway into, and revolving door with the criminal (in)justice system. In addition to the direct criminalization of houselessness, there are a multiple intersecting and concomitant criminalized experiences of social and economic marginalization and related survival strategies that perpetuate this pathway. People exiting prison experience multiple barriers to accessing and retaining housing. Many post-release housing options, including halfway houses, operate as institutionalized carceral environments beyond the prison walls frequently reproducing the relationships and routines of prison life. The existing literature on housing and criminalization generally focusses on housing insecurity at these distinct moments directly proceeding and/or follow incarceration, expanding but still maintaining a boundary between prison and free society.

In this paper, I draw on abolition geography and feminist criminological literature on transcarceration to locate carceral practices, relationships, and spaces that invade and structure the often invisibilized forms of housing insecurity experienced by women. This paper offers preliminary reflections on this social co-production of carceral/housing injustice and the interdependence of the prison industrial complex with neoliberal, financialized housing systems. This work is part of my postdoctoral project mapping collective housing journeys of gender and criminalization. Through a series of storytelling and countermapping workshops co-designed with women with lived experience of housing insecurity and criminalization this project aims to better understand and represent the complexity of the role housing, or lack thereof, plays across the lives of women impacted by criminalization in so-called Canada.