St. Michael's Hospital

Nursing Practice With Incarcerated Women

Nurses who practice with criminalized women will recognize this group as profoundly marginalized through multiple, intersecting mechanisms. The number of women imprisoned in North America, Latin America, Australia, and Western Europe continues to rise as it has for the past 20 years or more. As a nurse who has practiced almost exclusively with marginalized people, I have met and cared for many women whose health is made vulnerable by race, poverty, homelessness, mental health issues, and other factors. Many of them have been repeatedly incarcerated, experiencing chronically destabilizing cycles of getting arrested, going to jail, getting out, being homeless, getting arrested again, and repeating the cycle. To better understand the implications for nursing with respect to criminalized women, a focused review of the nursing and feminist scholarly literature on incarcerated women was conducted. The predominant themes and trends from both bodies of literature are presented and cross-compared. An analysis of what each body of scholarly work can offer to the other, including implications for nursing practice, concludes the literature review.