In many respects, gender has been missing from the enormous literature on the form and focus of state systems of punishment. This is true in both the historical accounts on shifts in penal practices and the scholarship on the contemporary emergence of mass incarceration. Gender is absent as a category of analysis and as an explanatory variable in these scholarly debates. At the same time, while there is a large literature on women in the criminal justice and penal systems, it rarely addresses broader questions of how and why the penal system has grown in size, deepened in scope, and broadened in reach over the last few decades. There have been three major approaches to the study of gender and punishment. The first inserted women into accounts of the criminal justice and penal systems, which had historically concentrated on male offenders. Some of this early work used a historical lens to analyze shifts in women’s confinement practices, particularly the evolution of the reformatory in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by debates in feminist legal theory about sameness and difference, one major line of inquiry sought to determine whether women were treated more leniently than men, particularly with regard to sentencing. A second approach, gaining momentum in the 2000s, shifted the focus from gender differences in outcomes to the gendered dynamics of penal control. More qualitative in nature, this scholarship conceptualized gender as a process that was both transformed and harnessed in penal institutions. Drawing on a broader movement in gender studies, this work focused less on women per se than on how gender was socially constituted. The third and final approach takes seriously the call of critical legal scholars of race and gender to examine the intersections of disadvantage. While academic analyses of intersectionality came to the fore in the 1990s, this perspective made few inroads into penology and criminology until relatively recently. Recent work on the intersection of racialization, masculinity and punishment, and the sexual politics of the prison point to promising new directions that transcend common understandings of criminalization and punishment.

The juvenile court movement began at the turn of the twentieth century, with juvenile court reformers calling for the confidentiality of juvenile records, to prevent stigmatization and further rehabilitation. The juvenile court's founders sought to close juvenile courts to the public and restrict access to delinquency records created by police and courts. The proponents of juvenile criminal record confidentiality achieved substantial success in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, beginning in the 1960s, confidentiality came under attack by liberals concerned with the court's lack of accountability and by conservatives concerned with controlling crime. Today, there are some signs of renewed support for juvenile record confidentiality, but existing precedents and information technology make significant and effective confidentiality unlikely.

Roughly, 13% of Canada’s adult population has some kind of criminal record. Collateral consequences stemming from a criminal record are wide-ranging, from formal restrictions to more informal forms of exclusions. In this article, I argue that Canada exhibits a distinct and dual approach with regard to collateral consequences. A commitment to principles, such as human dignity, rehabilitation, proportionality and individualisation in sentencing, especially by the courts, has increasingly mitigated the impact of collateral consequences in many areas. Yet, these interventions to limit collateral consequences have been far more uncommon for immigration-related collateral consequences, where the impact of a criminal conviction has only expanded in the last decades. This suggests the centrality of the criminalisation of migration in Canada’s bordering regime and its role in drawing boundaries between desirable and undesirable migrants. This dual nature of collateral consequences also sends a message about who is, and who is not, deserving of second chances.