Marie-Andrée Bertrand facts for kids
Marie-Andrée Bertrand OQ (June 12, 1925 – March 6, 2011) was a French-Canadian criminologist, a feminist and anti-prohibitionist.
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Biography
Bertrand was born in Montreal and started her career as a social worker for female offenders. In 1963, she received a master's degree from the Université de Montréal. She went on to study criminology at the School of Criminology, University of California, Berkeley, where she got her Ph.D. in 1967. She held a professorship in criminology at the School of Criminology, Université de Montréal. She continued to work, until her death, doing research, teaching and publishing. In 1999/2000 and again in 2000/2001, she taught a course on "Gender, Colour and Legal Norms" in the Masters Program at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Onati, Spain. Marie-Andrée Bertrand died on March 6, 2011, in Montreal.
Main areas of research
The focus of Bertrand's research was on three areas: drug policy, the treatment of women by criminal justice agencies, and, more generally, critical, feminist theory concerning criminology and sociology of law. Among her main works is an international comparison of female criminality (1979, 2003) and a comparative analysis of women's prisons(1998).
Activism
Bertrand went beyond mere academic work in several fields. As a young professor, she served as one of 5 Commissioners on the Le Dain Commission. Later, she joined Marco Pannella and his International Antiprohibitionist League, becoming eventually president of the organization. Among her causes was also the abolition of prisons, which goal she called "a necessary utopia". But first and last, she was an untiring feminist. As late as 2007, she is being quoted as saying: "A retired feminist does not easily repose and has no desire to do so".
