Opportunities for Equitable and Effective Bail Reform: An Annotated Bibliography Exploring Intersecting Inequities in Women’s Bail and Remand Experiences in Canada

Bail law reform has become a highly politicized issue in Canada, reflecting polarizing demands to both lessen and increase restrictions in granting bail. While some scholarly literature assesses and critiques bail and remand law and processes, there is exceptionally limited gender-disaggregated data and research on adult women’s bail and remand experiences. When assessing women’s interactions with the criminal justice system (CJS), most scholarly research and government publications speak about women’s unique offence patterns and gendered pathways to criminalization and then jump to assessing women’s imprisonment experiences, largely excluding any consideration of women’s pre-trial and trial experiences.

In 2023-2024, we gathered and assessed the available literature on women and bail and women and remand in Canada. We engaged with primary data in the form of government-published statistics, select case law and secondary research, reviewing more than 250 sources including some comparative international research. With this literature review, we present our key findings. The annotated bibliography below captures some of what we know about women’s bail and remand experiences within the Canadian context. Our contribution builds on the work we have previously done through the International Center for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy (ICCLR) on the rights of criminal justice-involved parents, especially women and their children.

In brief, the 31 annotations focus attention on the urgent need for primary research on how seemingly neutral bail laws and practices uniquely impact women, especially due to intersecting identities such as race, parenthood, and other social factors. Our contribution is crucial and timely. In Canada, the national remand rate for women now surpasses that of men, with women making up over 75% of provincial and territorial custody admissions in 2022/2023. Our literature review and the annotations illustrate the importance of not only addressing the social determinants of women’s criminal justice involvement but also investing in more effective community-based alternatives for women, with a focus on mental health and substance use services. This is of particular importance when one considers the mainly non-violent offences that women commit and that many justice-involved women have complex, overlapping, and unmet social, economic, parenting, and physical and mental health needs, which are often compounded by trauma.

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