Introduction

Canada as a contemporary settler state is actively engaged in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Throughout this collection, contributions detail Canada’s historical and contemporary treatment of Indigenous peoples and establish the harms of settler colonialism, thus highlighting the urgency of decolonization. In order to reckon with contemporary colonial violences, it is necessary to consider how settler states such as Canada have evolved to continue to target Indigenous peoples as well as other marginalized groups.   The tactics of settler states have recast themselves   over time, finding new targets and disguising themselves as projects of security or statecraft. This chapter will trace the evolving nature of settler colonialism in Canada, focusing on the ways in which colonial logics   are enacted in contemporary carceral spaces. In doing so, incarceration and other forms of carceral containment become legible as forms of colonial violence, demonstrating how carceral abolition can then function as a tool   of decolonization.

Studies of contemporary settler colonialism overlap and intersect with the study and ideas of postcolonialism and neocolonialism. The body of postcolonialism scholarship “maps the connections forged by imperialism(s) across space and time, [and] exposes its contemporary legacies.”^[1]  For some of its critics, the ‘post’ in postcolonialism is a sticking point, a temporal wedge that erroneously suggests colonialism has ended and any contemporary harms are the results of ‘vestiges’ or ‘legacies’ of prior colonial rule.^[2] For others, this temporal wedge does not suggest that colonialism ended. Instead, this period of postcolonialism indicates colonialism’s transformation from empires to nation-states.^[3]

Threaded through these concepts of postcolonialism, neocolonialism, and contemporary colonialism is the recognition that there is a colonial present. The logics of colonialism continue to haunt, displace, and destroy. It is necessary to pay attention to “the durability and distribution of colonial entailments that cling—vitally active and activated—to the present conditions of people’s lives”.^[4] These entailments are attached to everyone’s movements, and immobilities, whether it is crossing a border or crossing a street.^[5] For some, these attachments have little hold, but for others they stick like tar. When and where these entailments might be activated depends greatly on histories and identities. Throughout this chapter I will be attentive to these entailments and consider how they have been activated against those contained by Canada in prisons and immigration detention centres.

This chapter draws from rich and diverse literatures to emphasize that Canada remains an active colonial power. As a colony, the Canadian state is constantly re-settling the stolen lands it occupies. “Colonies, designed as safety nets and havens, are never safe. Such settlements called ‘colonies’ are nodes of anxious, uneasy circulations; settlements that are not settled at all.”^[6]   As a settled-but-never-really-settled place, Canada uses familiar tactics of colonial control to re-assert dominance and control over stolen land and over marginalized bodies.^[7] Settlers, despite benefiting from power and privelege in colonial states like Canada, are anxious about the stability of this power and privilege and rely on colonial forms of containment as one mechanism for maintaining it.

Unpacking Decolonization and Carceral Abolitionism

In order to examine how the efforts of decolonization and carceral abolitionism are related, I will trace the colonial motivations that have driven spatial control, past and present, in Canada. Of central focus is the overincarceration of Indigenous peoples and the detention of migrants. Once these forms of containment are cast as colonial projects, their undoing becomes recognizable as decolonization. To make this point more fulsomely, it is necessary first to contend with what decolonization and abolition are independently, so that the connections between the two can be understood.

Both decolonization and abolition are at once theory and praxis. Here, I am exploring the ways in which abolition can theoretically be understood as a tool of decolonization, simultaneously advocating that this is realized through practice. Decolonization and abolition both offer “continuous creative processes: an imagining of life beyond prisons and the theft of land.”^[8] Central to these projects is the dismantling of white supremacy, which informs the colonial structures that occupy Indigenous land and imprison racialized bodies. Many approaches to social justice have espoused the need to decolonize and have adopted the language of decolonization, but it is fundamentally about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.^[9] Decolonization is highly complex, particularly in settler states like Canada where different forms of colonialism intersect and overlap, making it “a site of contradictory decolonial desires.”^[10] As a tool of decolonization, carceral abolitionism—despite its significant and expansive scope—is necessarily an incomplete method of achieving decolonization, addressing only some sites of enduring colonialism. While both decolonization and abolition are fundamentally commitments to social justice, their desired outcomes are, in some ways, distinct. Across the spectrum of decolonization and abolition there are undoubtedly sites of contradictory desires but, critically, there are also overlapping commitments. Demonstrating how these guiding goals overlap illuminates how carceral abolitionism can act as a tool of decolonization. Developping this understanding allows for important solidarity across these two movements, and advances how these projects are conceptualized theoretically.

Decolonization  is dedicated to dismantling colonial structures that continue to harm Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities. I take seriously Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang’s warning that “decolonization is not a metaphor” and recognize that applying decolonization to all injustices and human rights violations dilutes its true purpose and commitment to the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.^[11] While I am extending decolonization by applying it to carceral structures that go beyond the issue of Indigenous overrepresentation, this does not contradict the Indigenous liberation that must be at the heart of decolonization.

It is important to parse out and acknowledge the ways in which justice frameworks can conflict with one another. Indeed, the support of Indigenous sovereignty can be in conflict with ideas across migrant justice and “no borders” movements.   Within these movements ideas of a planetary commons, a global space free from exclusion and constraints on mobility, can be difficult to reconcile with land back efforts. Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination are necessarily reliant on membership and borders, which do not neatly align with the goals of a planetary commons.^[12] Although both political agendas are committed to the dismantling of colonial oppression, the parameters of how that can be achieved may be viewed differently. This is not to suggest that all those involved in either of these struggles view them the same way, there is great diversity across these movements, nor is it to suggest that these movements do not already demonstrate solidarity with one another (see statements of solidarity from No One is Illegal and the Canadian Council for Refugees as examples).^[13] Krista R. Johnston’s dissertation offers an attentive exploration of how migrant justice and Indigenous sovereignty might merge in my home city of Toronto.^[14] While these frameworks may not always align, there are meaningful ways to connect and fortify struggles against the common oppressor, the colonial state. Tuck & Yang demonstrate how these struggles may be incommensurable, but it may not necessarily mean they are incompatible.^[15]

Carceral abolitionism is more than simply the closure of prisons and other carceral institutions. Abolitionists are advocating for the creation of a world that makes it possible to imagine carceral spaces as unnecessary: “in other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death.”^[16] Understanding these goals of abolitionism demonstrates its expansive scope which reaches into numerous structures that contribute to violence and injustice. Tracey McIntosh, a Māori scholar, offers a compelling and thoughtful articulation of what abolition is:

Abolition is about what it is to be human and what our responsibilities are to each other. That is a really important element of abolition, particularly anti-colonial abolition, that allows us to really think much more closely and much more strongly about our relationship with each other, with our lands, with our waters and with our people – people that we love, people that we protect, and those people who have been harmed and who have gone on and harmed others. An important element of abolition is thinking about ways of creating a space where everyone can flourish. Abolition sits in a space, that does not ignore harm, but recognizes what produces and reproduces harm. Abolition is an emancipatory project.^[17]

Decolonization, too, is an emancipatory project. In the case of Canada (and other settler states), carceral spaces remain producers of harm and places through which the colonial state can exert control. Abolishing these spaces is a meaningful tool towards the larger project of decolonization.

Sometimes presented as creating a new world, abolitionism that functions as a tool of decolonization recognizes the Indigenous wisdom and knowledge that already exists that teaches us how to live freely and communally while simultaneously stewarding the Earth. Therefore abolition functioning as a tool of decolonization invites the creation of a new world on the basis of learning from exisiting knowledge.^[18] More narrowly than this project of world building, the dismantling of prisons and other carceral structures serves the decolonial goal of the repatriation of Indigenous lives and offers a pathway to dismantling structures that are animated by colonial logics, which is to say structures created to further the projects of white supremacy that exclude certain bodies while occupying Indigenous lands.

Recognizing the ways in which carceral abolitionism is committed to dismantling key outposts of colonial control illustrates why abolition is available as a tool of decolonization. Writing about the United States, Carl Lindskoog arrives at the same conclusion: “Recognizing immigration detention and incarceration as an expression of settler colonialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries should also make clear, however, that those who are working to end mass incarceration today are also carrying forward the tradition of Indigenous resistance.”^[19] The next section will trace how colonialism contained, and continues to contain, racialized ‘others’ in Canada, exemplifying why ending carceral imprisonment is similarly carrying forward Indigenous resistance.

Incarceration and Immigration Detention as Colonial Sites of Control

Colonial control has long relied on the spatialized control of land and bodies, something clear in both historical and contemporary practices in Canada. This control is evident in numerous ways but perhaps most overtly through the establishment of colonial borders, many of which bifurcated Indigenous ones, and through extensive control over Indigenous bodies. In addition to the lethal violence levied against Indigenous peoples, Canada controlled their bodies through the establishment of reserves, the pass system, residential schools, forcible relocations, forced sterilizations,   and numerous other policies and practices that constrained their mobility and agency. These practices proved lethal in their own right. As of May 2022, the confirmed number of children who died while in the residential school system is 4,130, a figure that is likely continue to grow as more graves are discovered through ground penetrating radar  .^[20]  In an attempt to contend with the magnitude of the loss of Indigenous life following the arrival of settlers in North America, James Daschuk pays close attention to the spread of disease and instances of severe malnutrition. Although Daschuk is not expressly focused on spatialized control, he traces multiple, significant outbreaks of infectious disease amongst Indigenous populations that were made substantially worse through such forms of control, namely through confinement on reserves.^[21] Additionally, he finds that starvation was a tactic of the colonial government, who allowed people to die of starvation as a means of compelling those who were near-death onto reserves with the promise of food. This connection between colonialism, infectious diseases, and bodily control has been explored in numerous contexts and has been found to be a repeated tactic of Empires.^[22]

Some contemporary deaths, including those of First Nations people   on reserves, may be less obviously the result of spatialized state control, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be inextricably tied to colonial violence and state neglect. The life expectancy of Indigenous peoples is shorter than the Canadian average.^[23] This is especially true for First Nations people who live on reserves. The mortality rate of First Nations girls between the ages of 15 and 19 who have Indian Status and live on a reserve is almost five times the national average.^[24] These individual deaths may not initially appear to be the result of colonialism, but when the trends lay bare the discrepancies between Indigenous peoples (both on and off reserves) and the averages across the country, these deaths collectively are legible as the result of a deliberate culture of oppression and neglect.

Indigenous Incarceration

Histories of spatialized control are often antecedents to contemporary forms of containment that have keenly evolved and hidden themselves in the fabric of everyday policies and practices. Cindy Blackstock and others have argued that residential schools never really closed and instead morphed into the so-called child ‘welfare’ system.^[25] Indigenous children are overrepresented in the child welfare system in Canada, the continuation of “a history of government policies that have separated Indigenous families over the course of many generations.”^[26] Incarceration is similarly recognized as a new iteration of old patterns of colonial violence. Prisons are frequently referred to as the ‘new’ or ‘adult’ residential schools.^[27] As Robert Nichols notes, the settler colonial state has not gone away, “it has merely shifted its site of operation, perhaps most symbolically from the residential school to the prison.”^[28] These systems of containment that have replaced the role of residential schools, child welfare and incarceration, not only share similar features, but are themselves connected. Many Indigenous peoples who encounter the criminal justice system in Canada have also been a part of the child welfare system.^[29] The Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission has characterized this connection as child welfare being a pipeline to prison.^[30] The settler colonial state has constructed a society that funnels Indigenous peoples into various forms of containment, including prison  .

The connection between incarceration and colonialism is readily apparent when examining the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in Canada’s criminal justice system, a pattern that unfortunately repeats in comparable settler states   like Australia and New Zealand.^[31]  In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people constitute 2% of the Australian adult population, but make up 27% of the national adult prison population.^[32] In New Zealand, Māori are only 15% of the population but make up 52% of the prison population.^[33] While Indigenous peoples make up approximately 5% of the total population of Canada, in 2001 Indigenous peoples accounted for 17.6% of the federal incarcerated population.^[34] By 2020, that figure had swelled to more than 30%.^[35] Overrepresentation is even worse for Indigenous women, who make up 48% of the population in women’s prisons. ^[36] When examining the data from specific provinces and municipalities, the figures can be even more harrowing. In November 2022, it was reported that 80% of people in province-run jails in Saskatchewan are Indigenous. ^[37]

The issue of Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system has long been acknowledged by Canadian policy-makers, and indeed efforts to address it have been ongoing since at least the 1970s.^[38] In 1996, the Sentencing Reform Act added section 718.2(e) to the Canadian Criminal Code, directing judges to consider alternatives to imprisonment when sentencing an Indigenous person. In the 1999 judgement of R v Gladue, a landmark Supreme Court case,  it was held “that widespread discrimination and adverse socio-economic factors serve as the source of Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system and that alternatives need to be fully considered in sentencing.”^[39] Lawyers and other advocates can now make Gladue submissions where they detail the specific challenges their client has faced because of systemic racism and colonialism, and judges must consider alternatives to incarceration.^[40] While the precedent of Gladue has benefited some, it is applied with varying effect   across different jurisdictions, and judges encounter conflicting mandatory minimums and other sentencing rules “that betray the purpose and principles of Gladue.”^[41] As a result, many Indigenous people who are convincted of a crime should have the principles of Gladue applied to their sentencing, but judges are unable to do so. In addition to Gladue, community-based programming and reforms within prisons have sought to lower rates of overincarceration, reduce instances of recidivism, and address the trauma of incarceration for Indigenous peoples, yet none have proven successful at reducing overrepresentation, or indeed even stymieing its growth.^[42]

While the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples clearly demonstrates that there is a connection between colonialism and the Canadian criminal justice system, ‘solving’ overrepresentation would not equate to decolonization   . If prisons and jails suddenly reflected the racial makeup of Canada and no longer had disproportionate representation of Indigenous and Black people, this would not mean that prisons are no longer spaces of harm.    In Canada, the federal prison population is approximately 54% white.^[43] While it is important to pay attention to the overrepresentation of racialized people, because it does not just innately happen, it is important to resist perpetuating the myth that prisons are filled only with Black and Indigenous people, and thus that prisons are only harming these populations. Evidently, even those who meet the racial criteria may not meet other criteria that warrants them protection from the settler state.

Overrepresentation and the ineffectiveness of targeted reforms are instead instructional, demonstrating   that the criminal justice system was designed and continues to operate as a means of punishing ‘others.’ It is useful to pay attention to overrepresentation not because it is the only issue with the criminal justice system—it clearly is not—but rather because overrepresentation betrays the true intentions of this system.  Decolonization must be a project of Indigenous liberation, but just as colonialism has evolved to target other categories of people, so too must the projects dedicated to undoing these harms. For this reason, when it comes to carceral spaces the project of decolonization must go further than correcting rates of Indigenous incarceration. Contemporary colonialism targets people along racial lines, immigration status, gender and sexual identity, level of ableness, and class status, among others.^[44] To truly meet the goals of decolonization, which would see harmful colonial structures eradicated, carceral spaces must be abolished    .

Incarceration is not the only form of colonial containment in settler states. Child welfare, long-term care facilities, and psychiatric facilities are just some examples of how the state continues to control bodies, especially those bodies that are further removed from the imagined ideal citizen of the settler state (i.e. white, cisgendered, heterosexual, male, able-bodied, wealthy).    This colonial sorting of people is not new, nor should it be understood “as contra to liberal western values, but as the logical contemporary expression of historically embedded colonial/modern, racially hierarchal worldviews which have their roots in colonial enterprise.”^[45] Incarceration and other forms of spatial containment are one mechanism through which this sorting is achieved.

Immigration detention is particularly suited to a comparative analysis alongside incarceration in Canada, as migrants are often kept in prisons and other carceral spaces that mirror them. The practice of immigration detention is an administrative measure, and therefore not intended to be punitive, and people held under migration controls have not necessarily committed a crime. The fact that  migrants may not have committed a crime, however, should not make their detention in a prison any more shocking than the incarceration of criminals.^[46] By the conclusion of this chapter, I will have demonstrated that both incarceration and detention are harmful and largely ineffective practices, thus necessitating their abolition. As a result, whether or not someone has committed a crime, carceral abolitionism rejects the premise that any person should be subject to the maltreatment that these spaces impose.

Immigration Detention

Scholars have increasingly been attuned to the ways in which incarceration and immigration detention, as well as other forms of carceral containment, overlap.^[47] Any non-citizen can be held in immigration detention, regardless of immigration status. I use the term ”migrant” throughout this paper, a term that is necessarily expansive, to capture the large category of people who are targeted by this form of detention. While no immigration status precludes a non-citizen from detention, those who are detained are frequently part of the most vulnerable classes of migrants, incusive of refugee claimants and survivors of armed conflict and torture.^[48]

Migrants held under immigration holds in Canada are either held in an Immigration Holding Centre (IHC) or in a provincial prison. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) reports on detention quarterly. According to the last available reports from 2021-2022, the percentage of migrants held in provincial facilities, i.e. prisons, has ranged from 41% to 22%.^[49] Both prisons and IHCs act as carceral spaces, outfitted with the familiar features of a punitive, highly securitized environment. Immigration detention in Canada is indefinite, meaning migrants are detained with no restrictions on how long they will be held and no way of knowing when they might be released.^[50] Between 2016 and 2021, Canada held more than 300 migrants for a period longer than a year.^[51]

As in the case of incarceration, Canada has employed a number of reforms in an effort to address the major criticisms levied against the immigration detention system. In 2017, CBSA introduced the National Immigration Detention Framework with the stated goal of creating “a better, fairer immigration detention system that supports the humane and dignified treatment of individuals while protecting public safety.”^[52] While the framework did appear to initially reduce the average length of detention and the total number of children in detention, its effectiveness has subsequently waned. In 2019-2020 the number of children in detention rose by 17%, and detention lengths subsequently increased over the COVID-19 pandemic.^[53]

The language of the framework is darkly telling. The emphasis on protecting public safety continues the work of criminalizing migrants, suggesting their detention is necessary because migrants are a danger from which the public needs protection. While this the framing is so often used to justify immigration detention, only 5 to 7% of people held in immigration detention between April 2016 and March 2020 were detained because they were deemed a risk to public safety.^[54]   During that same period, 83% of migrants who were detained were held on the grounds of being a ‘flight risk,’ a broad and highly subjective reason for detention.^[55] In a detailed report about Canadian immigration detention from the University of Toronto, one lawyer deftly summarized how problematic this category is:

Basically anybody can be seen as a flight risk. If you are a refugee claimant, you’re a flight risk because you’re scared to return somewhere. If you’re a failed refugee claimant you are seen as a flight risk because maybe you are not reliable or are trying to get into Canada. If you have family here you are seen as a flight risk because obviously you want to stay with your family. If you don’t have family here, you are a flight risk because you have no ties. Anybody can be seen as a flight risk.^[56]

Despite the vast majority of migrants being held because they are considered unlikely to appear for an immigration proceeding, the broader practice of immigration detention continues to framed as necessary for public safety.

In 2022 and 2023, the landscape of detention in Canada saw some noteworthy changes. Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Québec, and New Brunswick all announced they would cancel contracts with the CBSA to detain migrants in provincial prisons.^[57] In June 2023, Ontario, the provice which detains the greatest number of migrants, announced that they will also end contracts with CBSA. Moving away from detaining migrants in prison will prevent many migrants from being exposed to the unique and particular forms of violence that have been documented in prisons, but does not offer an abolition of the violent pratice of immigration detention. While this change is positive, the implementation has proven slow, and these provinces will continue to detain migrants in purpose-built Immigration Holding Centres. Indeed, a new holding centre opened in Surrey, British Columbia in 2020.^[58]

Just as incarceration is the continuation of containing Indigenous bodies, immigration detention is the continuation of Canada’s history of rejecting and containing    “undesirable, foreign others in the name of nation-building while endeavouring to maintain its character as a white settler colony.”^[59] These practices of rejection and containment manifested in a number of cruel ways. In the late 1800s, Canada enacted exclusionary immigration policies and ”head taxes” which were aimed particularly at Chinese migrants.^[60] In World War I, Canada interred those they deemed “enemy aliens,” mainly Ukranians and Germans.^[61] In World War II this containment in camps repeated, this time against Japanese Canadians.^[62] Countless other examples continue to haunt Canadian memories, including the rejection of the Komagata Maru, a ship filled with Indian migrants. The passangers on board the Komagata Maru were denied entry into Canada when the ship arrived in 1914. Forced back to India, the passengers were met with violence upon their return, resulting in the deaths of 20 passengers.^[63] Across these instances of rejection and containment, Canada repeatedly exposed migrants to death.

The abhorrent treatment of migrants both in the past, but also in the present such as the treatment of those in detention, or of temporary foreign workers,    are at odds with the portrait of Canada as a diverse and welcoming country to migrants. The reality is that Canada does admit large numbers of migrants, including refugees , but nonetheless exerts colonial dominance and control over them all. The extent to which that control is exerted is heavily mediated by race, class, immigration status, among other identity markers. Daiva Stasiulis deftly explores low-wage temporary migrant labour “through the lens of disposability, an analytical framework that frequently informs Indigenous scholarship on the continuous and devastating violence and neglect of Indigenous lives, health and well-being under white settler colonialism.”^[64] She finds that migrants are indispensable to the settler colonial state, which requires their cheap labour and their physical bodies that furthers the settler claims to the land, yet individual migrants are simultaneously disposable, not worthy of citizenship and deemed a replenishing resource that can be replaced   .^[65]

It is necessary to reckon with these colonial practices in Canada, as both incarceration and immigration detention are proven to be extremely harmful to those who experience them. The deprivation of liberty that incarceration and detention impose is understood to be one of the most serious forms of harms that can be inflicted on human beings .^[66] Across both criminal incarceration and immigration detention, solitary confinement is used, despite the practice being widely criticized and labelled as a form of torture.^[67]   The experience of incarceration and immigration detention can cause severe effects on mental health: “scientific research has also shown that even brief periods of immigration detention caused significant deterioration of mental health in refugee claimants.”^[68] The harms of incarceration and immigration detention also reverberate beyond those who are detained. The effects on the families and the communities of people who are contained are also severe, causing significant stress, anxiety, and trauma.^[69]

Who Counts? Protecting the “Public”

Evidence demonstrates that immigration detention and criminal incarceration are ineffective at meeting their stated objectives. Detention has not been shown to contribute to increased community safety or migration deterrence,^[70] nor do prisons effectively rehabilitate those incarcerated or protect the public.^[71] The harms rendered in these spaces are not accidental outcomes of systems that are otherwise functioning as intended. The walls of prisons and immigration detention centres act as borders, containing within them sites that separate “useful product from waste.”^[72] People are deliberately categorized, subject to a    cruel sorting that deems some worthy of inclusion and others as waste to be expelled.^[73] When Indigenous peoples are evicted from the public, contained in prisons, shelters, foster homes, etc., it “signals that the city belongs to the settlers.”^[74] Public space supposedly belongs to the public, yet, the unhoused, the mentally-ill, the poor, and the racialized are frequently cast as intruders.^[75] In this way, it becomes clear that the ‘public’ primarily means settlers. The settler colonial state is invested in the construction of the ‘other’ as less injurable, and thus less grievable .^[76]  By casting some people as less grievable, the Canadian state is able to maintain its image as a progressive, liberal democracy, while simultaneously practicing harmful and lethal forms of sorting, containment, and expulsion.

Not only are claims that incarceration and immigration detention contributing to public safety found wanting, these systems are known to expose vulnerable people to increased risks to their safety. In this way it becomes clear that ‘public’ safety does not apply to them. Prisons in Canada are dangerous ; the homicide rate within prisons is 20 times higher than in the city of Toronto .^[77] Since 2000, at least 16 people have died while being held in immigration detention, frequently with little information released about the individual or the cause of death.^[78] Other deaths occur on the edges of these spaces, at risk of being excluded from the ledger of deaths at the hands of the colonial state. In Vancouver   , Frank Paul, a member of the Mi’kmaq nation and unhoused, was picked up by police for being intoxicated and later dropped by police in an alleyway leading to a detox centre.^[79] A few hours later, his body was discovered in that same alley; Paul had frozen to death.^[80] Prisons and policing, inclusive of immigration detention and border agents, knowing and unknowingly, deliberately and accidentally, dispose of those made disposable  . Carceral spaces in Canada act as an example of what Achille Mbembe calls death-worlds  , spaces where “vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.”^[81] As living dead, prisoners and migrant detainees become spectral figures, no longer retaining sovereignty over their own bodies.   The colonial state is invested in this removal of sovereignty, conferring it sparingly   only to those who can reinforce the state’s own sovereignty over stolen lands.

Abolishing Prisons, Towards a Decolonial Future

Carceral abolitionism calls for the dismantling of carceral spaces and the oppressive forces that prop up these systems, including policing. Yet, abolition is not a negative project, interested only in what must be torn down. Carceral abolition “is a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it.”^[82]    It is “a call to create a society based in care rather than in carceral conditions.”^[83] It is not the absence of prisons that is central to abolitionism, but instead the creation of life-affirming institutions. Those less familiar with the ideas of abolition can often be overwhelmed by this concept of building a new world, and are understandably nervous about what a world without cages might look like. While abolition does not have all the answers, collective organizing around carceral abolition is not new, and activists, scholars, those who have experienced incarceration, and many others have contributed to vast and exciting projects that explore how we can build a safer, more humane society. We can, and we must, refuse de-humanizing logics of colonialism   that render some people disposable.

Throughout this chapter, I have endeavoured to capture that incarceration and immigration detention, which are only two of numerous forms of carceral containment, are unforgivably cruel and harmful. Rather than serving legitimate projects of public safety, I argue instead that these are contemporary iterations of familiar histories of colonial exclusion that prioritize a narrow subset of the ‘public.’ Colonies and settler states have long engaged in the containment of the ‘other’ to further the aims of empire. From the reserve system and residential schools, to exclusionary immigration policies and internment camps, Canada’s history offers multiple examples of how the containment of ‘others’ has been engaged to serve the colonial interests of occupying Indigenous lands and white supremacy. In the present, incarceration and immigration detention continue this work of containing the ‘other.’

Carceral abolitionism calls for the end of these practices and the dismantling of the systems that enable them. If we understand these practices to be driven by colonial logics, in service of colonial goals, their undoing can then be understood as decolonization. Abolition offers one tool, of which there must be many, to realize decolonization. By abolishing systems that target those which the colonial state deliberately casts out as ‘other,’ as disposable, and as less grievable, we resist those categorizations that seek to diminish the value of human life. By building a world in which those same people are instead supported through care and life-affirming institutions, it ensures all lives are understood as valuable. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers, “where life is precious, life is precious”.^[84] Apprehending life as precious is critical to the emancipatory projects of decolonization and abolition. When life is precious, the cruel warehousing of people can no longer be justified. As abolition provides mechanisms for finding life precious, it offers a pathway towards the fundamental goals of decolonization, the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Recognizing life as precious allows for the creation of a world that is precious too.