Life on The Outside

This book seeks to understand how women's experiences both within and outside prisons shape their ability to engage in crime-free living after the experience of prison. It uses women's stories to examine their cognitive shifts toward desistance as well as the structural services that may help with the desistance process. It also examines the impacts of addiction and stigma on the desistance processes and develops the theories of desistance. Written by a practitioner, this book includes the voices of service providers who are rarely heard from to provide unique insight into how criminalized women's desistance processes can be supported. It offers intersectional, feminist perspectives and anti-carceral/ abolitionist perspectives.

Amy Sheppard is a social worker and a per-course instructor at Memorial University, Canada, teaching teaching criminology, sociology and social work. She researches and works with women involved in the legal system, focussing on the impacts of gender, substance use and systemic barriers on women’s desistance from crime.