Releasing Hope: Stories of Transition from Prison to Community

Releasing Hope was born out of the first book Arresting Hope, which describes participatory health research and the experience of women incarcerated inside a British Columbian provincial correctional centre from 2005 to 2007. Readers of Arresting Hope, moved by the stories written by incarcerated women, asked, "What happened next?" And, "How are the women doing, now that they are released from prison?" Starting in 2007, women who were released from prison formed a network called Women in2 Healing because they wished to continue participatory health research in the community. Their overarching research question was, "How can we improve the health of women in prison and following their release?" Releasing Hope describes the journeys of formerly incarcerated women and their encounters with the barriers (financial, emotional, familial, systemic) that they confronted during their reintegration in the community. Releasing Hope touches on the stories of individual women and the learning from participatory health research that made visible their lives, their hopes, their dreams and fears.

Ruth Elwood Martin worked as family physician in Vancouver from 1983 to 2009; she also worked part-time in the medical clinics of BC correctional centres for men and women for seventeen years. She is a Clinical Professor of the School of Population and Public Health, University British Columbia, and an Associate Faculty of the Department of Family Practice. Her experiences as a prison physician participatory health researcher during the time period of Arresting Hope changed her, such that her goal became to foster the improvement of prison health and to engage patients' voices in the process. She co-founded the Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education, which is a group committed to encouraging and facilitating collaborative opportunities for health, education, research, service, and advocacy, to enhance the social well-being and (re)integration of individuals in custody, their families, and communities. From 2011 to 2017, she served as Chair of the Prison Health Communities of Practice Group of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. Ruth continues to live and work in Vancouver, BC.

Since writing Arresting Hope/Releasing Hope, Mo Korchinski is now a proud member of society. She graduated in 2014 from the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology with her Bachelor of Social Work degree and works as a project manager with the project Unlocking the Gates to Health peer health mentor program at the University of British Columbia. She spends most of her spare time helping others in her community and she feels that the key to turning one's life around and keeping it moving in the right direction is to help others turn their lives around. She co-directed several documentary films, which are about individuals' release from prison, and when the prison gate is unlocked, but the doors to society are kept locked. Her passion is to take her experience of addiction and the justice system and show people that changes are needed: to get the voices of women who are still inside prison heard; and, to get policy-makers to understand that change is needed in the prison system and in the communities. She lives in Vancouver and is a proud grandmother to two beautiful granddaughters, who have taught her what unconditional love is.

Lynn Fels is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada, and former Academic Editor of Educational Insights, an open-access journal that reimagines curriculum, research and education. With George Belliveau, she co-authored Exploring Curriculum: Performative Inquiry, Role Drama and Learning (Pacific Educational Press, 2008), and has also authored numerous articles and chapters exploring performative inquiry, arts across the curriculum, and curriculum as lived experience. Alongside Ruth, Carl and Mo, she is co-editor of Arresting Hope: Women Taking Action in Prison Inside Out (2014). She is co-investigator in a five year SSHRC Partnership Grant, researching arts for social change in Canada.