Dissertation Title
The Inertia of the Prison: A Socio-Legal Inquiry into the Persistence of Canadian Carcerality
Dissertation Topic
The prison, both as idea and institution, has become inseparable from the modern Canadian social democratic state. It has also become a perpetual source of intolerable abuses and violations of basic norms of human decency. Yet it endures, even amid renewed questions about its utility raised by COVID-19 and intense scrutiny of the racial injustices of the criminal legal system. In this project, I ask: what does the prison serve and what accounts for its resilience? This research project seeks to explain the apparent inextricability of the prison from the prevailing social democratic order through a close examination of its history, and its relation to legal, political, social and economic orders. The project will consist of three elements: (1) a legal history of penal institutions, theory & reform in Canada from 1835 to present; (2) a case study looking closely at debates around prison construction and expansion in Ontario from 1980 to the present; and (3) a critical analysis of the prison’s place in present day Canada and the insights the history offers for disentangling the democratic state from carceral punishment.