Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T18:10:58.239Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Transcarceral lawscapes enacted in moments of Aboriginalisation: a case-study of an Indigenous woman released on urban parole

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2021

Joshua David Michael Shaw Open the ORCID record for Joshua David Michael Shaw [Opens in a new window]
Joshua David Michael Shaw*
Affiliation:
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The field of carceral geography was lately developed by critical human geographers grappling with the spatiotemporal modes of social control and coercion particular to institutions of incarceration (Moran et al., 2018; Moran and Schliehe, 2017). This has included – in keeping with Michel Foucault's (1991) genealogy of the carceral as an art of disciplinary power – studying the disparate ways in which carceral techniques proliferate from and beyond the built site of the prison, becoming incorporated into other spatial formations. Carceral geographers have characterised this extension as transcarceral (Moran, 2014) or heterotopic (Gill et al., 2018; Moran and Keinänen, 2012). However, despite frequent references to law and legal institutions, carceral geographers generally do not theorise about law. Through a case-study involving an Indigenous woman paroled in Toronto, the author theorises about how carceral spaces are expressed through legal forms and techniques, affecting how paroled individuals, particularly those Aboriginalised, are emplaced within urban space.

Keywords

prison lawcarceral geographyurban parolelegal geographyTorontotranscarceral spaces
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 422 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alaimo, S (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Allspach, A (2010) Landscapes of (neo-)liberal control: the transcarceral spaces of federally sentenced women in Canada. Gender, Place and Culture 17, 705–723.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baer, LD and Ravneberg, B (2008) The outside and inside in Norwegian and English prisons. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 90, 205–216.10.1111/j.1468-0467.2008.00287.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, O (2016) A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, O (2019) Movement: an homage to legal drips, wobbles and perpetual motion. In Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 129–150.Google Scholar
Belcourt, BR (2018) Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the taste of non-sovereignty. Settler Colonial Studies 8, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, L (2018) Towards a legal psychogeography: pragmatism, affective-materialism and the spatio-legal. Revue Géographique de l'Est 58, 1–18.10.4000/rge.7534CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blagg, H and Anthony, T (2018) ‘Stone walls do not a prison make’: bare life and the carceral archipelago in colonial and postcolonial societies. In Stanley, E (ed.), Human Rights and Incarceration. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 257–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blomley, NK (1994) Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guilford.Google Scholar
Blomley, NK and Bakan, JC (1992) Spacing out: towards a critical geography of law. Osgoode Hall Law Journal 30, 661–690.Google Scholar
Brighenti, AM (2010) Lines, barred lines: movement, territory and the law. International Journal of Law in Context 6, 217–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinkmann, S (2014) Doing without data. Qualitative Inquiry 20, 720–725.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinkmann, S (2017) Humanism after posthumanism: or qualitative psychology after the ‘posts’. Qualitative Research in Psychology 14, 109–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchanan, N and Darian-Smith, E (2011) Introduction: law and the problematics of Indigenous authenticities. Law and Social Inquiry 36, 115–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, C (2012) Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlton, B and Segrave, M (2016) Rethinking women's post-release reintegration and ‘success’. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 49, 281–299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CBC (2013) Idle no more: a protest for Aboriginal rights. Canadian Broadcasting Company, Toronto. Available at https://curio.ca/en/video/idle-no-more-a-protest-for-aboriginal-rights-4118/ (accessed 21 December 2020).Google Scholar
CBC (2018) Cree woman says systemic racism led to wrongful conviction in 1979. Canadian Broadcasting Company, Toronto. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/joey-twins-indigenous-justice-system-canada-1.4603894 (accessed 21 December 2020).Google Scholar
Commissioner of Correctional Service of Canada (2013) Commissioner's Directive 702. Correctional Service of Canada.Google Scholar
Cowan, D and Wincott, D (2016) Exploring the ‘legal’. In Exploring the ‘Legal’ in Socio-legal Studies. London: Palgrave, pp. 1–31.10.1007/978-1-137-34437-3CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delaney, D (2003) Beyond the word: law as a thing of this world. In Holder, J and Harrison, C (eds), Law and Geography: Current Legal Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 67–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delaney, D (2010) The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-making: Nomospheric Investigations. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dirsuweit, T (2005) Bodies, state discipline, and the performance of gender in a South African women's prison. In Nelson, L and Seager, J (eds), A Companion to Feminist Geography. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 350–362.Google Scholar
Doe, J (2015) Affidavit of Applicant. Federal Court of Canada.Google Scholar
Dorries, H, Hugill, D and Tomiak, J (2019) Racial capitalism and the production of settler colonial cities. Geoforum published online 19 August. Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.07.016 (accessed 8 January 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorsett, S (2007) Mapping territories. In McVeigh, S (ed.), Jurisprudence of Jurisdiction. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 137–158.Google Scholar
Dorsett, S and McVeigh, S (2007) Questions of jurisdiction. In McVeigh, S (ed.), Jurisprudence of Jurisdiction. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 3–18.Google Scholar
Dorsett, S and McVeigh, S (2012) Jurisdiction. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisen, J, Mykitiuk, R and Scott, DN (2018) Constituting bodies into the future: toward a relational theory of intergenerational justice. UBC Law Review 51, 1–53.Google Scholar
Estrada, G (2016) Ojibwe lesbian visual AIDS: on the Red Road with Carole LaFavor, Her Giveaway (1988), and Native LGBTQ2 film history. Journal of Lesbian Studies 20, 388–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fennell, T (1995) Jailhouse shock. Macleans, 6 March. Available at https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1995/3/6/jailhouse-shock (accessed 21 December 2020).Google Scholar
Foucault, M (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Fox, NJ and Alldred, P (2015) New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 18, 399–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedland, HL (2018) The Wetiko Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Gill, N et al. (2018) Carceral circuitry: new directions in carceral geography. Progress in Human Geography 42, 183–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gone, JP (2011) The Red Road to wellness: cultural reclamation in a Native First Nations community treatment center. American Journal of Community Psychology 47, 187–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grear, A (2017) Foregrounding vulnerability: materiality's porous affectability as methodological platform. In Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A and Brooks, V (eds), Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook. London: Elgar, pp. 3–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosz, E (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Grosz, E (1995) Bodies-cities. In Grosz, E (ed.), Space, Time, and Perversion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 103–110.Google Scholar
Hannah-Moffat, K (2000) Prisons that empower: neo-liberal governance in Canadian women's prisons. British Journal of Criminology 40, 510–531.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Isin, E (2007) City.state: critique of scalar thought. Citizenship Studies 11, 211–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kang, HY and Kendall, S (2019) Legal materiality. In Stern, S, Del Mar, M and Meyler, B (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–37.Google Scholar
Keenan, S (2009) Australian legal geography and the search for postcolonial space in Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island. Australian Feminist Law Journal 30, 173–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, S (2010) Subversive property: reshaping malleable spaces of belonging. Social and Legal Studies 19, 423–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, S (2014) Moments of decolonization: Indigenous Australia in the here and now. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 29, 163–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, S (2017) Smoke, curtains and mirrors: the production of race through time and title registration. Law and Critique 28, 87–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, S (2019) A prison around your ankle and a border in every street: theorising law, space and the subject. In Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 71–90.Google Scholar
Lambert, L (2019) Becoming teacher, becoming researcher: reconsidering data analysis in post-qualitative practitioner research. Practice 1, 151–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lefebvre, H (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Marx, K (1973) Gundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Massey, D (2004) Geographies of responsibility. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86, 5–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massey, D (2006) Landscape as a provocation: reflections on moving mountains. Journal of Material Culture 11, 33–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maurutto, P and Hannah-Moffat, K (2016) Aboriginal knowledges in specialized courts: emerging practices in Gladue courts. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 31, 451–471.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mawani, R (2002) In between and out of place: mixed-race identity, liquor, and the law in British Columbia, 1850–1913. In Razack, S (ed.), Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, pp. 47–70.Google Scholar
Mawani, R (2010) ‘Half-breeds,’ racial opacity, and geographies of crime: law's search for the ‘original’ Indian. Cultural Geographies 17, 487–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mbembe, A (2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture 15, 11–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merry, SE (2001) Spatial governmentality and the new urban social order: controlling gender violence through law. American Anthropologist 103, 16–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, LL (2015) The use of case studies in law and social science research. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 14, 381–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mommersteeg, B (2014) Space, territory, occupy: towards a non-phenomenological dwelling. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. Available at https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2510/ (accessed 21 December 2020).Google Scholar
Montford, KS and Moore, D (2018) The prison as reserve: governmentality, phenomenology, and Indigenizing the prison (studies). New Criminal Law Review 21, 640–663.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monture-Angus, P (1999) Women and risk: Aboriginal women, colonialism. Canadian Women's Studies 19, 24–29.Google Scholar
Moran, D (2012) ‘Doing time’ in carceral space: timespace and carceral geography. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 94, 305–316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, D (2014) Leaving behind the ‘total institution’? Teeth, transcarceral spaces and (re)inscription of the formerly incarcerated body. Gender, Place and Culture 21, 35–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, D and Keinänen, A (2012) The ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and home visits for prisoners in Finland. Fennia – International Journal of Geography 190, 62–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, D and Schliehe, AK (2017) ‘Introduction: co-production and carceral spatiality. In Moran, D and Schliehe, AK (eds), Carceral Spatiality: Dialogues between Geography and Criminology. London: Palgrave, pp. 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, D, Turner, J and Schliehe, AK (2018) Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography. Progress in Human Geography 42, 666–686.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mussawir, E (2011) Jurisdiction in Deleuze: The Expression and Representation of Law. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mussawir, E (2017) Justice ‘from room to room’: toward a concept of procedural space in Kafka's The Trial and the fictional work of Western jurisprudence. In Butler, C and Mussawir, E (eds), Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 37–53.Google Scholar
Mykitiuk, R (1994) Fragmenting the body. Australian Feminist Law Journal 2, 63–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nedelsky, J (1990) Law, boundaries, and the bounded self. Representations 30, 162–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nedelsky, J (2012) Law's Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parole Board of Canada (2014) Parole Board of Canada decision, 890138A. Parole Board of Canada, from Federal Court of Canada Court File T-1341-15, Exhibit B to Applicant's Affidavit.Google Scholar
Parole Board of Canada (2015) Parole Board of Canada Appeal Division decision, 890138A. Parole Board of Canada, from Federal Court of Canada Court File T-1341-15, Exhibit C to Applicant's Affidavit.Google Scholar
Pasternak, S (2014) Jurisdiction and settler colonialism: where do laws meet. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 29, 145–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pasternak, S (2020) Wet'suwet’en: why are Indigenous rights being defined by an energy corporation. Yellowhead Institute. Available at https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/02/07/why-are-indigenous-rights-being-defined-by-an-energy-corporation/ (accessed 21 December 2020).Google Scholar
Pasternak, S, Collis, S and Dafnos, T (2013) Criminalization at Tyendinaga: securing Canada's colonial property regime through specific land claims. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 28, 65–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pavoni, A (2017) Abstracting method: taking legal abstractions seriously. In Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A and Brooks, V (eds), Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook. London: Elgar, pp. 51–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (2007) Fear in the lawscape. In Přibáň, J (ed), Bauman's Liquid Law and Society. Oxford: Hart.Google Scholar
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (2010) Spatial justice: law and the geography of withdrawal. International Journal of Law in Context 6, 201–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (2013) Atmospheres of law: senses, affects, lawscapes. Emotion, Space and Society 7, 35–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (2015) Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (2016a) Conclusions: a socio-legal metatheory. In Cowan, D and Wincott, D (eds), Exploring the ‘Legal’ in Socio-Legal Studies. London: Palgrave, pp. 245–257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (2016b) Flesh of the law: material legal metaphors. Journal of Law and Society 43, 45–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pile, S (1996) The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pottage, A (2012) The materiality of what? Journal of Law and Society 39, 167–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Povinelli, EA (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Razack, S (2002) When place becomes race. In Razack, S (ed.), Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, pp. 1–20.Google Scholar
Schwandt, TA and Gates, EF (2018) Case study methodology. In Denzin, NK and Lincoln, YS (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Shaw, JDM (2020a) Confronting jurisdiction with antinomian bodies. Law, Culture and the Humanities published online 20 July. Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872120942770 (accessed 8 January 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, JDM (2020b) The spatio-legal production of bodies through the legal fiction of death. Law and Critique published online 2 June. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09269-5 (accessed 15 January 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shildrick, M (1997) Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sylvestre, ME, Blomley, N and Bellot, C (2019) Red Zones: Criminal Law and the Territorial Governance of Marginalized People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, GE, Cameron, RE and Fuller-Thomson, E (2013) Walking the Red Road: the role of First Nations grandparents in promoting cultural well-being. International Journal of Aging and Human Development 76, 55–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomiak, J (2017) Contesting the settler city: Indigenous self-determination, new urban reserves, and the neoliberalization of colonialism. Antipode 49, 928–945.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toronto Women's Supervision Unit (2014a) Assessment for Decision, 10 September. Correctional Service of Canada, from Federal Court of Canada Court File T-1341-15, Exhibit D to Applicant's Affidavit.Google Scholar
Toronto Women's Supervision Unit (2014b) Assessment for Decision, 10 October. Correctional Service of Canada, from Federal Court of Canada Court File T-1341-15, Exhibit E to Applicant's Affidavit.Google Scholar
Toronto Women's Supervision Unit (2014c) Correctional Plan Updated, 17 September. Correctional Service of Canada, from Federal Court of Canada Court File T-1341-15, Exhibit F to Applicant's Affidavit.Google Scholar
Tuck, E and Yang, KW (2012) Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, 1–40.Google Scholar
Turnbull, S (2014) Aboriginalising the parole process: ‘culturally appropriate’ adaptations and the Canadian federal parole system. Punishment & Society 16, 385–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, J (2016) The Prison Boundary: Between Society and Carceral Space. London: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, J and Moran, D (2019) Careful control: the infrastructure of water in carceral space. Area 51, 208–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valverde, M (2009) Jurisdiction and scale: legal ‘technicalities’ as resources for theory. Social and Legal Studies 18, 139–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valverde, M (2014) Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Weaver, HN (2002) Perspectives on wellness: journeys on the Red Road. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 29, 5–15.Google Scholar
Whatmore, S (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: SAGE.Google Scholar