Looking for Ashley: Re-reading What the Smith Case Reveals about the Governance of Girls, Mothers and Families in Canada

By Jaremko Rebecca Bromwich

The 2007 death by self-induced strangulation in prison of nineteen year old inmate Ashley Smith drew a great deal of public attention. The case gave rise to a shocking verdict of homicide in the 2013 inquest into the cause of her death. In this book, I inquire into questions about of what social problem or phenomenon Ashley Smith is a “case,” and what governmental work is done by prevalent constructions of her as an exemplar. This book performs a critical discourse analysis of figures of Ashley Smith that emerge in her case, looking at those representations as technologies of governance. It argues that the Smith case is read most accurately not as an isolated system failure but an extreme result of routine, everyday brutality, of a society and bureaucracies’ gradual necropolitical successes. It critically analyzes how representations of Ashley in the case leave intact, and even reinforce, logics and systems governing gender, motherhood, security, risk, race thinking and exclusion, in power and knowledge that make it predictable for similar deaths in prison to recur. It argues that, in the logics underlying constructions through which Ashley Smith was celebritized and sacralized, mothers’, girls’ and women’s subjectivities and agencies are made unknowable and even unthinkable while the racialized social boundaries of a white settler society are maintained. This book attempts to intervene in those logics to help make alternative outcomes possible and to take steps towards questioning the raced, classed and heteronormative boundaries of commonly assumed figures of the “noble victim”, “good girl” and “good mother” while supporting the agencies of adolescent girls in actively playing a part in the authoring of their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781772580174

Book preview

LOOKING FOR ASHLEY

LOOKING FOR ASHLEY

Re-reading What the Smith Case Reveals about the Governance of Girls, Mothers and Families in Canada

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

DEMETER PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture Demeter by Maria-Luise Bodirsky <www.keramik-atelier.bodirsky.de>

Cover art: Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich, Looking for Ashley, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

eBook Development: WildElement.ca

Printed and Bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bromwich, Rebecca, author

Looking for Ashley : re-reading what the Smith case reveals about the

governance of girls, mothers and families in Canada / by Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich.

Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 978-1-926452-69-2 (paperback)

1. Smith, Ashley, 1988-2007--Death. 2. Women prisoners--Canada--

Death--Case studies. 3. Mentally ill prisoners--Canada--Death--Case studies.

4. Teenage girls--Canada--Death--Case studies. 5. Suicide--Canada--Case

studies. 6. Prisons--Canada--Case studies. I. Title.

HV9507.B76 2015 365’.60820971 C2015-906710-3

I dedicate this book to the ghosts who were with me as I wrote it.

First, to my much missed friend Deb Shelly because, and she would smile to read this, friendship is magic. She was my longtime colleague in the law, friend in life, and partner in what she called intellectual fierceness. Had she not passed away while I was writing the dissertation that became this book, Deb would have made good on her offer to read it. She would have understood it and no doubt had some excellent criticisms of it.

I also dedicate this to Mary Jo Frug and Ardeth Wood, feminist academics I wish I had met and whose work is missed by the world. Also, I dedicate this to the adolescent girl I once was, whose ghostly presence was with me throughout this work.

And, of course, finally, and most importantly,

I dedicate this book to Ashley Smith.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Acronyms

L. THE PROJECT

Telling Stories

Defining the Project

Commonly Accepted Facts of the Smith Case

Overview

2. FOUNDATIONS OF THE PROJECT: THE PROJECT IN CONVERSATION

Literature Review

The Smith Case and Similar Recent Cases

Girls’ Studies

Governmentality, Security, Risk and the Criminalized Girl

Policy Scholarship

Feminist Legal Studies

Theories and Methods: This Case Study

Power and Representation in Discourse

Governmentality: Risk, Security, and Necropolitics

Agency

Feminist Theory

Methods

Research Design

Notes and Limitations

3. INMATE SMITH: NECROPOLITICAL SUCCESS

Introduction

Three Configurations

What is Lost

The Inquests

Inmate Smith and Macro-Power

4. CHILD ASHLEY: RECUPERATION

Introduction

Trajectory: Sites, Emergence, and Fluorishing

Ashley the Improper and Risky Girl

Ashley the Game-Playing Child

Recuperation: Ashley the Normal Child

Troubling the Normal Child

Discursive Work – Fitting Ashley Smith In

Obesity and Social Exclusion – One Size Does Not Fit All

Child Ashley and the Logic of Exclusion

5. PATIENT SMITH — FROM PROBLEM INMATE TO MENTAL PATIENT: PATHOLOGIZATION, ASSIMILATION, DOMESTICATION

Introduction

Nuisance

Inmate – Patient

Patient Smith: A Sympathetic Victim

6. CONCLUSION: MULTIPLE AGENCIES

Summary: Producing Ashleys

Looking for Ashley’s Agencies: Alternative Imaginings

The Locked Room

Denouement

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Writing is a conversation with life.

—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

While this book is dedicated to ghosts, acknowledgements should also go to the living. One simply does not complete major projects alone. I would be unconscionably remiss if I did not offer thanks to Dr. Andrea O’Reilly for believing in this work, to my Ph.D. examiners Rebecca Johnson and Augustine Park, committee members Lara Karaian and Doris Buss and especially to my extraordinary dissertation supervisor Sheryl Hamilton for brilliance, patience, and sage guidance. I want to thank also Maeve McMahon and many others at the Faculty of the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University for their wonderful support and collegiality.

Also, I want to acknowledge my family. It would have been impossible to do any of this writing without the partnership of Matt, my steady, visionary travelling companion and partner in crime, or my parents, Beverley Smith and Gordon Jaremko, who fought — and still fight — for me in all the ways they can, my brilliant motley crew of siblings, and my wild, beautiful children for whom I want change to come and who teach me so much every day. A shout out should go to my colleagues, supporters, and friends. To Deborah Mervitz, who is brave. Also to Kerri Froc, a better thesis boot camp collaborator than I could have ever hoped for, Gordana Eldjupovic, a strong mentor, Tamra Thomson who knows the power of legality is in its details, to my colleague Sarah Mackenzie for her kindness and support, and generally to my lawyer peeps who keep me company at the Canadian Bar Association, and who make the practice of law into art. Also to Nick Bala, Mark Weisberg, Maria Sowden, Rev. Andrew Johnston, and fitness trainers Tina, Lisa and Lia, who each with their own modalities of care helped me to sustain the (not insignificant) energy and effort necessary to start, re-start and then finish a Ph.D. dissertation, and turn it into a book, while working as a lawyer and mothering four kids.

Finally, I think it is important politically and pedagogically to direct an anonymous nod to all the folks who said I wouldn’t finish high school and couldn’t write a Ph.D. dissertation. In addition to those who supported and believed in me, it is also those who did not that I have to thank for revitalizing my rebellious spirit and inciting anger I could alchemize into this work. Thinking of all of those who are not as well-supported, well-resourced, and lucky as me, I feel I should mention you. May this work be taken as evidence that many people can do what they have been told they are not capable of doing, and what the statistical odds are ostensibly against them doing, and may it encourage others to speak, read, and write.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

— Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

**All comments made herein are my own and do not represent the views of any organization with which I am or have been affiliated.

List of Acronyms

We still have Ashleys, we still have Ashleys being treated in the same tortuous, horrendous ways that Ashley was treated.

—Coralee Smith, mother of Ashley Smith¹

There’s really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

—Arundhati Roy²

[E]yes that fix you in a formulated phrase/ when I am pinned and wriggling on your wall/ then how should I begin?

—T. S. Eliot³

And you, what are you looking for? … I had the dream again. I was looking for something. I was at school, running through the hallways, my heart pounding, tearing up and down the stairs, looking for it: I can’t find the meaning; have you seen it? I asked a group of people by the lockers outside my homeroom, who stared at me blankly. Woke up in a cold sweat.

—Rebecca Jaremko, Journal, March 10, 1993

One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.

—Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices⁴

¹Teen Ashley Smith Inquest Begins Today MSN News,14 Jan. 2013.

²Speech on accepting the Sydney Peace Prize, 2004.

³The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1920.

⁴Margaret McElderry Books, 2013. Print.

1. The Project

TELLING STORIES

Once upon a time, many years ago, I bought a typewriter. It became one of very few things I owned. I also owned a field hockey stick because I played on my high school team. That, my clothes, my winter coat and my journals, were about all I had put on or stuffed into plastic garbage bags and carried off. I hadn’t remembered to take a toothbrush but by then I had bought one. It was winter in Calgary, –30 Celsius, cold enough to take your breath away, so cold there was no point in crying because tears would just freeze on my face. I had ridden the C-Train to Value Village, about an hour’s trip each way, and walked several blocks through blowing dry prairie snow carrying that small black ancient typewriter back to the train. It cost all of my money: $15. I bought it and then I stole food.

I had a plan. I bought a typewriter so I could tell my story. I wanted to tell a story about my interactions with health, child welfare, education, family and criminal legal systems and how angry I was about them, how disappointed I was in everyone. In a dark rented basement room, hunched over that typewriter with my field hockey stick near me for protection against any possible intruders, clothes folded on the floor as I had no hangers, at sixteen I promised to write. I clacked away, hammering out the first pages that I promised myself would be a transformative story about what it was like to be limited, restrained and oppressed as an adolescent girl in Canada. It was slow going. The a stuck. Every time I typed an a I had to pull the key back up.

There are a lot of years between the writing of this book and that promise. I have tried to fulfill it in a number of ways. I became a lawyer to large extent to remedy what I experienced and perceived as injustice. I did criminal defense work and represented young mothers in child protection and domestic violence proceedings. Now, I do law reform work, attempting to make changes to the formal discourses of legislative and regulatory provisions. When I did my ll.m., I was actively involved (in a very junior capacity) in advocacy accepted in the crafting of Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act (ycja) in 2001. I have a lot for which to be very grateful. I have a lot to be happy about. Many of the legislative changes I sought to include in the ycja have been made. Now, ironically, I am, to a very large extent, someone else: not an adolescent girl but the lawyer mother of three girls (and a boy) soon to enter adolescence. I can’t really write the story I wanted to tell. I have the pages I wrote, somewhere. I don’t know what became of that typewriter. We all use computers now.

I am worried in light of recent cases and in particular the case of an adolescent girl who died in prison named Ashley Smith, that the law reform work in which I have been engaged is not getting to the heart of the problems I experienced. Feminist theorists have contended that hegemonic discourses in late modern liberal discourse define and socialize adolescent young women as something less than we are: they move us from an experience of ourselves as agents to a relegation in a particular space defined by our relationships with men. I wonder how contemporary discursive figurations of the girl, how we talk about adolescent young women, continue to affect the agencies of variously situated adolescent young women in their experiences with criminal and quasi-criminal legality. Restlessly, I wonder how the conditions of possibility for young people in Canada could be transformed; I feel a sense of growing urgency as time passes; how might changes be effected before my own children enter adolescence?

Maybe I shouldn’t be quite so literal in remembering my plan. Maybe the central question for me to consider is my longing, the longing that led me with my last few dollars to go to Value Village on the C-Train and walk those long cold blocks carrying the black typewriter back, enjoying seeing in my breath like smoke over it — a confirmation of my existence — my hands burning from the cold despite the gloves over them. More than anything else maybe what I felt was a desire to speak, to talk back, to have a role in authoring my own story, not just on paper but to actively, agentically, find and make meanings in, be actively involved in constructing and narrating my own life.

DEFINING THE PROJECT

We now ask you to speak for Ashley.

—Dr. John Carlisle, Coroner for Ontario,

Charge to the Jury in the Inquest of Ashley Smith,

December 2, 2013

Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, wrote that there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. (Angelou) Probably because, many years ago, when an adolescent girl, I was in a great deal of trouble with various systems, I was not surprised to learn that it was as a result of minor disciplinary infractions that she was found to have committed while in prison that Ashley Smith accumulated hundreds of criminal charges. However, what struck me about Ashley Smith’s case is one fact in particular: shortly before her 2007 death at age 19 in solitary confinement in Grand Valley Prison, guards took away her access to paper and a pen.¹ Because she was divested of her ability to otherwise tell her story, I wondered whether it could be that Ashley Smith subsequently used self-harm, at least sometimes and partially, meaningfully, either communicatively, or as political resistance, or both. I wonder what Ashley Smith’s own story about her case might have been had she been accorded an opportunity to tell it, and what she might have contributed to authoring in dialogue with other systems, agents and forces in constructing her life had she been able to live it.

The very first of the recommendations of jury in the verdict in the Inquest into the death of Ashley Smith is that her death should be reviewed by Corrections Canada management and staff and used as a case study.² However, not a lot of energy has been expended on asking, not assuming, of what type Ashley Smith is a case. Further, it doesn’t seem that the question of what Ashley might have wanted, let alone wanted to say was particularly bothersome, or even thinkable, for experts engaged in writing, arguing, commenting or otherwise speaking of Ashley Smith as her inquest progressed. Also given very little consideration are ways in which being a particular type of girl might have been relevant to how she was governed, disciplined and punished. In a variety of interlinked social sites, figurations of Ashley Smith have become symbols and representations used to suit various agendas. Almost without exception, she is pathologized while various forms of expertise retrench their power and individuals working in the justice and correctional systems are condemned.

There is very little attention paid in explanations of Ashley’s case to constructions of the girl and to gender. This study looks critically at why and how is there is such a dearth of interest in to what extent and in what ways it mattered that Ashley Smith was a specifically embodied as a particular female adolescent in corrections custody. Also missing from arguments in, policy analyses of, as well as media narratives about her case is an accounting for Ashley Smith’s agency. This study looks at how, and posits analyses as to why, she is not being portrayed as a meaning-maker. This critical discourse analysis looks at why and how it is that very few texts say much, if anything, about what meanings Ashley Smith was agentically engaged in making through her actions.

This book studies figurations of Ashley Smith as girl as technologies of power that emerge in three discursive sites: formal legal documents, docudramas and print media texts. In this book, I conduct a critical discourse analysis that unpacks what stories were told about Ashley, what stories are still being told about her and how these stories engage discourses of the girl. I look critically at how Ashley Smith’s case is constructed, what Ashley Smith is a case of, and at what alternative imaginings of Ashley Smith’s case are possible. I cannot reasonably or realistically offer a book that tells the true story of Ashley Smith. Were I to try to tell Ashley’s story, I would just create another representation of her that would be problematic in many of the ways existing representations are problematic. Ashley Smith’s internal self will be forever unknown and unknowable. Rather, what I can know and examine and what readers can understand better through this project is a reading, a history, a genealogy of her representation within her case. I look at when and how certain representations of Ashley Smith are constructed and certain figurations emerge while others, which are supportable and plausible, do not. Each figure of Ashley Smith analyzed in this book enacts power in discourse and is deployed in the construction of the Smith case as a case of a particular sort of social problem. Multiple stories are told about Ashley Smith. I seek to critically examine these tellings.

COMMONLY ACCEPTED FACTS OF THE SMITH CASE

In this book, I work from an understanding of the Smith case as a unit of inquiry in the social sciences that constitutes an enactment of governmental power. I am relying on the definition of caseness advanced by Lauren Berlant. (2007) Caseness is a state in which the singular is both individual and marked as an exemplar: the case can incite an opening, an altered way of feeling things out, of falling out of line. (Berlant, 666) The Ashley Smith case is a site where discourses and forms of expertise intersect, collide and otherwise meet. In this case, power is negotiated at a variety of levels: between agents in spaces designated as correctional facilities, between discourses, and, at the macro level, between interlocking systems of power. In the discursive formations generated by the texts that comprise the Smith case, a variety of representations of Ashley Smith overlap, oppose one another, smash together, and compete for dominance. Imaginings of Ashley Smith can be analyzed as producing certain figures of Ashley Smith. These figures construct the caseness of Ashley Smith: they set her out as an example of a particular type and, in so doing, they define social problems, call for particular treatment, militate for particular remedies and thereby do governmental work.

Below, without claiming these facts to be true, I summarize a standard narrative of what have come to be the commonly accepted and widely understood facts of the Smith case. In the rest of this book, I look closely at the assumptions and truth claims in this widely accepted narrative, paying close attention to the assumptions on which the claims are based and to the sources to which the truth claims are attributed.³

Ashley Smith was a middle class, Canadian white girl who died from self-strangulation in prison on October 19, 2007 at age 19. She died while several prison guards watched and videotaped her last moments, not intervening for 45 minutes as she lay dying then dead. Ashley Smith was born January 29, 1988, in New Brunswick. She was adopted when she was five days old. It is widely accepted that she had a normal childhood in Moncton, New Brunswick.

However, immediately upon passing into adolescence, Ashley started to get into trouble with various authorities and questions began to be raised about her mental health. She was tall and overweight. At age 13 or 14, her parents report that they saw distinct behavioural changes in her. By age 15, she had been before juvenile court 14 times for various minor offences such as trespassing and causing a disturbance. In March 2002, Smith was assessed by a psychologist who found no evidence of mental illness. However, her behavioural problems continued and she was suspended from school numerous times in the fall of 2002. In March 2003, after a series of court appearances, Ashley was admitted to a mental health centre for assessment. She was diagnosed with various mental conditions, including adhd, learning disorder, borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality traits. Ashley was discharged early from the Centre for unruly and disruptive behaviour.

Ashley Smith was first incarcerated as a youth at age fifteen in 2003. Smith was initially sent to custody for a single offence: throwing apples at a postal carrier. There is no indication that anyone was injured by the apples, but the target was an agent of the state, so the apple throwing incident was taken very seriously. Ashley had been in trouble for minor things before, like disobeying teachers and stealing a cd. Her initial sentence for throwing the apples was to a period of one month in custody. However, she ended up in solitary confinement for what corrections officers determined to be disruptive behaviour on her part on her first day in custody. While the original sentence was a short one, as a result of the accumulation of hundreds of further convictions against her arising from disciplinary incidents that took place while she was in youth prison, she remained in custody.

In January 2006, Ashley Smith turned 18. On the same day, a motion was made under the ycja by the Crown to transfer her to an adult facility. Ashley retained a lawyer to fight the transfer, but was unsuccessful. On October 5, Ashley was transferred to adult prison. Ashley spent most of her time there in segregation. While there, she was also subjected to repeat cavity and strip searches, tasered and pepper-sprayed. After being transferred to adult custody, Ashley was transferred a total of 17 times between eight institutions over a period of eleven months. She was under the care of a series of psychiatrists, several of whom prescribed psychtropic drugs for her. She was sometimes given these drugs by force. Smith was also periodically given an opportunity to speak with a series of psychologists, but only through the food slot in her cell. It is widely understood that Ashley Smith had very serious issues with mental illness that were never properly assessed and went untreated.

Although she was initially sentenced to one month in prison, Ashley was involved in more than 800 reported incidents while in custody. She was also charged for new offences as a result of situations that arose while she was in open custody foster homes. Corrections officers also documented at least 150 attempts by Ashley to physically harm herself, some of which were treated as disciplinary infractions. She was never released. She was held in prison on a series of accumulating charges for four years. For long periods of her time in solitary confinement, Smith was not given soap, deodorant, adequate sanitary supplies, clean underwear and was prohibited from having writing material or paper.

While in adult prison, she died by self-induced strangulation while being videotaped by guards who stood outside her cell and watched.

In 2011, Ashley Smith’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Corrections Canada for $11 million. The suit was settled confidentially in May of 2011 for an undisclosed amount. The warden of the prison where she died was fired.

Ashley Smith’s death has been the subject of two inquests, or investigations, by the coroner in Ontario. The first was complex and involved many legal challenges as well as a change of coroner before it finally ended as a mistrial in September 2011. A new inquest into Ashley Smith’s death began in September 2012 and concluded in December 2013 with a surprise verdict of homicide.

In response to this homicide verdict, government actors and social reformers have been looking at how the mentally ill, and in particular mentally ill women, can be better addressed by the prison system and at how to limit use of solitary confinement in prisons. The Correctional Service of Canada (csc) released a report in December of 2014 that essentially claimed it had already addressed the concerns raised by the recommendations of the Smith inquest. In this report, csc rejected the recommendation that they place limits on the use of solitary confinement and rejected the further inquest recommendation that their management be independently overseen. The Ashley Smith case remains unresolved in that a homicide verdict has been entered but no one and nothing in particular have been officially blamed or held accountable for her death.

OVERVIEW

This book explores governmental work done by figures of Ashley Smith as a case of three types: an inmate, a child and a patient. It analyzes how configurations of power relations are maintained, retrenched or challenged by these figures. It critically evaluates what is gained, and what is lost, in discursive processes through which Ashley Smith is turned into an exemplar of different social problems. In Chapter 2, I review literatures in existing academic works with which this research is in conversation. I explicate the theoretical foundations of the project, the methodology employed in the research and the specific methods and research design used. Then, I move on to my analysis. In Chapter 3, I look at discursive figures of Ashley Smith that foreground her status as a carceral subject or inmate. In Chapter 4, I look at figures of Ashley Smith that give pre-eminence to her status as a child. The last analytical chapter concerns what have come to be the commonly accepted discursive figures of Ashley Smith: these representations foreground her mental health as the most significant aspect of her beingness and treat her as a patient. In the final chapter, I then present my conclusions. I summarize the research and my analysis and make the following set of claims.

In this book, I demonstrate how dominant constructions of Ashley Smith — as inmate, child and mentally ill person (patient) — allow for certain understandings of her case while they make opaque, unimaginable and unthinkable others.