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

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.

Constructing Risk through Jurisdictional Talk: The Ontario Review Board Process under Part XX.1 of the Criminal Code

“…As Mariana Valverde (2015) reminds us, though, the spatiotemporal and affective inflections of social life mediated by the techniques of jurisdiction are intertextual; each is the producteffect of heterogeneous, and potentially conflictual, practices brought into relation with each other. While that move by critical legal theorists potentially radically reimagines jurisdiction with respect of social and physical forms not commonly treated as the proper subject of law, and with respect of practices distant from text or talk (e.g., Barr 2016;Davies 2022;Shaw 2020a), the approach has also been applied to make sense of the effects of legal forms on judicial or quasi-judicial reasoning, as well as in policy settings where text and talk dominate (see, e.g., Dietz 2020; Garland and Travis 2020;Pasternak 2014;Shaw 2020b). Drawing on theories of jurisdiction, we see the citational work done in the NCR process as a form of jurisdictional talk-"stretches of talk" (Smith 2005, 166), written and oral, that take on a metastable, replicable form, and accordingly authorize particular ways of encountering NCR individuals.…”

“…The performances of text favour a certain chronotope or space-time (Valverde 2015) that prioritizes internment and institutionalization (see, e.g., Garland and Travis 2020; Shaw 2020b). Internment and institutionalization are prioritized, in part, as an effect of the ORB’s, the hospitals’, and physicians’ jurisdictional talk that complete and reify the envelope of the NCR disposition as an all-encompassing and inevitable frame for assessments of risk.…”

“… 3 While institutional ethnography puts emphasis on the standpoint of those affected by the textual work of institutions, critical legal theorists of jurisdiction tend to abandon standpoint, or critically de-centre it, with new materialist and post-phenomenological approaches that assist with their study of non-texts in addition to texts (see e.g., Shaw 2020b). …”