Melissa McLetchie is a doctoral candidate of Caribbean descent in the Department of Sociology. She grew up in the City of Scarborough in Toronto, Ontario and for over 20 years has been in a relationship with a man who has a history of imprisonment. Melissa uses her experiences of supporting her incarcerated loved one to guide her academic research. Her unique social location as an insider/outsider to both street culture and academia gives her work a raw and unique perspective into the collateral consequences of imprisonment and the Canadian “justice” system. Melissa recently completed a Mitacs-funded qualitative research study exploring the experiences of women supporting an imprisoned loved one in Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research keywords: Prison; systemic racism; macro-streaming; Black Canadians; qualitative methods