D14 - Workshop: Law and the Carceral State IV - Family as a Site of Social Discipline/Punishment
Date: Jun 3 | Time: 03:45pm to 05:15pm | Location:
Joint Session / Séance conjointe : Canadian Politics; Race, Ethnicity and Indigenous People and Politics
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Alana Cattapan (University of Waterloo)
Intergenerational Criminalization through Canadian Institutions: Linda Mussell (Queen's University)
Abstract: Canadian political structures perpetuate harmful theories on the transmission of crime within families and communities. Assumptions of intergenerational criminality are particularly damaging for Indigenous communities at the intersection of multiple oppressions, and highly criminalized in Canada. The common assumption and focus on parent to child transmission of crime is fraught, yet rarely questioned, and has implications in several areas including but not limited to public stigma, corrections policies, and institutional interventions on families. This paper unpacks this concept, particularly in the western context (centering on Canada), deconstructing the principles and assumptions underlying intergenerational criminalization. These include ideas of the nuclear family, risk and protective factors, and myopic focus on individual responsibility/parenting rather than broader social contexts criminalizing families. In unpacking these perspectives, this paper seeks to create space for improved understandings, policies, and action to support families punished by multiple institutions, including the corrections system. Similarly, this paper aspires to build momentum in countering and resisting damaging conceptions of the transmission of crime. The author’s perspectives are grounded in ongoing experiences volunteering in two federal prisons, and working alongside Indigenous and settler ex-prisoners and advocates in the Prison for Women (P4W) Memorial Collective in the prison capital of Canada, Kingston, Ontario. As an overarching argument, this paper asserts that crime is not passed through families, rather political structures systematically criminalize and marginalize families over generations with impunity.
Manufacturing Scandal: Examining the Emergence of Provincial Child Death Reports and Inquiries in Manitoba, Alberta, and Ontario through Mainstream Media Coverage: Miranda Leibel (Carleton University)
Abstract: This paper examines the emergence of public scandals surrounding the deaths of children receiving welfare services. In particular, I follow three such ‘scandals’ in three different provinces: Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario. Significantly, although the paper does not specifically examine Indigenous child deaths in the welfare system, all child deaths that produced large-scale provincial inquiry processes were Indigenous children, meaning that my analysis is framed by an understanding of settler-colonialism and systemic racism. Ultimately, I argue that mainstream media claims responsibility as a moral arbiter of the state, and that in this process, reproduces a practice of settler benevolence that legitimizes the settler colonial state’s role as the manager of Indigenous families. As Mulgan notes, we all understand that governments should be accountable to “the public,” but who ‘the public’ is takes many forms and is not always clear (2014, 12). I further argue that in the context of neoliberal Canada, settler Canadians are called upon as stake-holders or investors in Indigenous peoples’ welfare: the repeated assertion within the media coverage that all Canadians, Manitobans, Albertans, or Ontarians have a vested interest in the failure of governmental and public systems because we are taxpayers conflates our stakes in the violence as not wanting to be unwitting investors in a corrupt system. As a whole, the paper attempts to explicate the relationship between mainstream media coverage of child deaths, emotive public responses, and calls for governmental transparency and accountability within the context of settler-colonial welfare systems in neoliberal times.
Peoples of Movement: The Democratic Transgression of Borders by Indigenous and Migrant Youth: Toby Rollo (Lakehead University)
Abstract: We find striking parallels in the experiences of child apprehension and detention experienced by peoples who transgress state-claimed territories including Indigenous peoples in North America, Latin American migrants in the United States, and Syrian refugees in Europe. How do we understand these shared experiences across such diverse communities? Why are their children implicated? I argue in this paper that most of these groups do not view movement as an attempt to enter pre-formed democratic spaces housed by states but, rather, as an inherently political act that introduces plurality and difference and thereby establishes the conditions of a genuinely democratic politics. The transgression of state jurisdictions by peoples of movement is a primary source of democracy. And yet, at the same time, their movement is viewed as an immediate spatial threat to state control and security. Children are the inheritors of cultural practices of migration wherein movement is viewed as inherently political and as such children embody both a spatial and temporal threat to the future security the state, an intergenerational problem for the coherence of static statehood and citizenship regimes. I argue that without a general political theory of movement that begins with Indigenous and migrant communities rather than with state sovereignty, as we currently do, theorists and policy-makers have little critical purchase on issues not just of child detention but also of the criminalization of migration, the rise of populist anti-immigration groups and militias, the exploitation of temporary foreign workers, and the scourge of human-trafficking.
Participants: Toby Rollo (University of British Columbia)Miranda Leibel (Carleton University)Linda Mussell (Queen's University)