Introduction

Police violence, through the killings of civilians and the use of force against Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized populations, is a well-studied topic in the United States, but less so in Canada. There is a substantive amount of formal literature and data which has consistently recognized that Black, Indigenous, and other persons of colour find themselves disproportionately targeted by the police in Canada. Police practices such as carding (sometimes known as “street checks”) and traffic stops disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, and other racialized populations.^[1] To understand the nuances of police violence along racialized, gendered, and class lines, institutions of policing need to be examined at a more general, macro-level and through a systemic lens: away from approaches that fixate on individual and interpersonal explanations that constitute acts of police brutality and injustice into those of a “few bad apples.”^[2]

In broadening the approach, we  can begin to engage in a more systemic analysis that views policing in the context of the state’s racial, settler-colonial project and investigates how institutions of policing reproduce a white, settler-colonial order. Policing needs to  be understood as an extension, expression, and exercise of the political administration of the state itself.^[3] In understanding this, we can understand the larger logics of settler-colonialism at play, and how the state seeks to enforce and exert its authority. The issue at hand is not only the violent conduct of the police officers themselves, but the settler colonial order they reproduce by policing people and spaces.^[4]

In challenging the normative perspective that sees the police as the “thin blue line” preventing society from collapsing into chaos, I adopt a decolonial imperative that situates contemporary policing in the structural context of settler colonialism . The question for exploration in my research primarily concerns the following: In what ways does this law enforcement institution advance and fulfill the settler colonial interests of Canada, and legitimize the reproduction of racial violence against Indigenous and marginalized communities?

Policing and Colonialism

A decolonial prison abolition approach must first recognize the state’s authority as  a settler state. Canada’s national mythologies often illustrate it as a benevolent, peace-loving entity with its hands free of a bloody past. Canada’s claimed non-colonial legacy is a far cry from the truth, as to disregard our colonial past or situate ourselves in a “postcolonial state”  is to also deny our colonial present. Colonialism is not a singular event confined to a particular period of history, but rather, is an ongoing and contemporary societal structure.^[5] While often relegated to the past, colonialism is alive and well in new forms which pervade every aspect of the social, political, cultural, and economic realms.  Settler-colonialism pertains to a formation of colonialism which involves the migration of peoples to land originally inhabited by an Indigenous population and “declare that land to be their new home.”^[6] This particular form of colonialism revolves around “land theft and Indigenous erasure to facilitate the permanent settlement of non-Indigenous ‘exalted subjects.’”^[7]

Settler-colonialism features a pervasive spatialized logic  as a process that is essential to the project of “modernity.”^[8] Order-making requires dispossession  : if there is an identifiable settler order—it is an order that must assert itself as the only order, securing its normative status through “the violent erasures of alternative modes of being, whether physically, culturally, and psychically.”^[9] The consequent, socially produced spatiality is a space constructed on virtues of “whiteness,” its white supremacist origins stemming from French and British colonialisms alongside the “modern liberal epistemology that underpinned their colonial missions and the wealth their empires were able to amass.”^[10] The white settler state was “ideologically entrenched and structurally made possible through the interconnected interests of imperial and private capital’s exploitations of the natural environments and its reliance on the expertise and knowledge of Indigenous peoples.”^[11]

Property is central to the discussion of settler colonial and white suprematist     . European liberal ideologies of property. Property laws were imposed upon Indigenous populations by colonizers and the emergent Canadian state, thus acting as violence “perpetuated by the exercise of power and ratified through the rule of law.”^[12] These conceptions of property not only “motivated the ‘resourificiation’ of Indigenous territories then and now, but also informed the racialization of Indigenous peoples as wasteful, lazy and unable to be productive in the economy or in white settler society more generally.”^[13]

Critical infrastructure (CI), which refers to processes, systems, technologies, networks and services which are considered by the state as “essential” to the functioning of government, has been both a site of structured dispossession of Indigenous peoples and a central mode of organization for national security policing.^[14] The very construction of critical infrastructure requires the removal of Indigenous peoples and theft of Indigenous land, alongside the containment of these communities to “establish, secure, and maintain the settler state.”^[15] Settler state discourse imagines critical infrastructures as “assemblages that serve the Canadian public, need protection and reimagine the social good in terms of the aggregate economy.”^[16] Canada has long had a deep, long-standing relationship with the transnational oil and gas industry.^[17] The resourification and extraction  of Indigenous lands and resources continue to be a means of obtaining resources to “create and distribute wealth for the exclusive benefit of settler society.”^[18] Fossil fuel pipelines, alongside other material “critical infrastructures,” are built across the land without the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples, as oil and gas infrastructures “continue to operate as emblems of national progress and resource wealth.”^[19]

Despite the fact Canadian courts have secured what is considered an “unprecedented degree of protection for certain “cultural practices within the state,” as Coulthard (2014) points out, “they have nonetheless repeatedly refused to challenge the racist origin of Canada’s assumed sovereign authority over Indigenous peoples and their territories.”^[20] Indigenous people’s grievances pertaining to land rights have been relegated to a secondary level of concerns, and have been framed by the state in the terms of “minority rights,” “accommodation,” and “recognition. ”^[21] The creation of the terms, values, and conditions remain under the discretion of the Canadian state. Canadian sovereignty continues to be at the forefront, resting on claims that amoung to legal fictions, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius. Furthermore, Coulthard adds, the collective rights and identities of Indigenous peoples are indeed recognized by the state, but only insofar as “this recognition does not throw into question the background legal, political, and economic framework of the colonial relationship itself.”^[22] Canada seems to “recognize” Indigenous peoples, yet not its nationhood, as such would contend with the sovereignty of Canada as a nation-state.  To maintain its status as sovereign, Canada utilizes its criminal justice institutions, including the police and prisons.

Prisons and Genocidal Carcerality

Woolford and Gacek (2016) have utilized the term “genocidal carcerality” within their analysis of residential schools to describe “spaces enlisted towards the elimination of a targeted group, either for purposes of exterminating or transforming the group so that it no longer persists.”^[23] Genocide does not occur through “coordinated human action” alone, but as Cole (2003) suggests, through a process of transformation in which: “space is transformed into a destructive place to target fundamental aspects of group life.”^[24] I argue prisons  fall under this definition of genocidal carcerality as well. Prisons are sites where Indigenous peoples, Black people, the poor, and other marginalized groups disappear from the public eye by being relegatedto cages.

The carceral system is a system that sorts and identifies who can exist in and belong to society and those who are not—those whose membership is mediated, suspended, or removed entirely.^[25] Under settler-colonialism, as Evans (2021) describes, “criminal justice systems have always performed dual functions of erasure and creation. The criminal justice system not only erases, displaces, and objectifies BIPOC communities, it also actively constructs ideas of racial whiteness.”^[26]

Mass incarceration within Canada is a continuation of settler colonial practices alongside mass criminalization, both stemming from the creation of the Indian Act (1876).^[27] The Indian Act consolidated and systematized early attempts at managing indigeneity  and was part of a larger project of colonialism which both rejected Indigeneity and sought to assimilate Indigenous peoples into Canada’s white European culture. The Indian Act serves to construct categories of the “citizen” legible in ways that reflected an anti-Indigenous vision of such “across multiple spheres of social and political life.”^[28]

To this day, the Indian Act continues to regulate Indigeneity “as a legal status and in doing so also limits community membership and undermines the principles which have customarily formed the basis for community membership and belonging.”^[29] The Indian Act recognized and codified racial group identity as an instrument of exclusion, but as Harris (1993) emphasizes, this exclusion was a negative one in which the law still refused to recognize group identity when asserted by racially oppressed groups as a basis for affirming or claiming rights.^[30]

Under the Indian Act, it is difficult for many First Nations to keep a land claim and keep their status as “Indian,” which gives them access to services and benefits. The Indian Act simultaneously homogenized Indigenous peoples into a singular “Indian category,” despite groups being in possession of distinct cultures, languages, laws, and practices and traditions.^[31] After moving Indigenous peoples onto smaller tracts of land, the state sought to “re-educate” them through the colonial, totalizing institution of the Indian Residential School System.

While a number of social actors in these communities  were federal government agencies represented by  the Department of Indian Affairs (the Indian Agent and the Indian Commissioner), the clergy in schools and churches, and so forth—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was “the main and only agency spread throughout the country, including reserves, which could administer laws, by-laws and regulations.”^[32]

The RCMP  provided policing services for all Indians on reserves, including those in Ontario and Quebec, the Inuit of the Northwest Territories and most Indian and Métis settlements off reserves.^[33] The RCMP began as the North West Mounted Police (NWMP), which consolidated the assertation of dominance of white public authority through liberal order-making during the settlement of the West. The NWMP acted as the reinforcers of “civilization” and “civility” in what was portrayed as the “uncivilized” and “ruly” wilderness “lacking” order.

They were involved in many activities pertaining to the social control of Indigenous peoples. They provided assistance in enforcing the Pass System (1885-1951), a system in which First Nations peoples were restricted in their movements and unable to leave the reserve without the permission and/or permit from Indian Agents.^[34] This system was utilized to not only restrict but in addition, control movement and prohibit activities such as hunting, fishing, and visiting other communities without permission.^[35] Aside from the Pass System, the police also upheld the criminalization of various cultural and spiritual practices which were banned, and carried out the abduction of Indigenous children from their homes and delivered them into residential schools.^[36] They would also serve notices to parents who did not deliver their children to the schools, and searched for truants.^[37]

When it comes to the discussion of identity-making and settler violence, the hegemonic understanding of private property becomes central. Police protect private property, as policing “determines finally who requires discipline so that others can be secure enough to pursue their self-interest.”^[38] Policing is an institution which makes white valuation  both realizable and concrete, in which they ensure the maintenance of racially valorized and devalorized spaces.^[39] White valuation dictates who has value and who doesn’t.

Property has always been central to the racializing projects and racial terror of colonialism and slavery.^[40] The modern liberal subject is understood as an idea predicated on freedom, rights, and self-possession. European definitions of property constituted who and what was considered “human,” and who was considered “non-human.” For example, Locke believed “every man has a property in his own person” in which the individual is considered both owned and owner.^[41] This idea of property thus serves dual functions: it is both something to be possessed and something which possesses, to which can be understood when we understand possession as the foundation of property, as possession requires physical occupation and the will and desire to possess.^[42]

While the Pass System has been abolished, some scholars argue that this system has merely evolved, and that prisons are the “new reserves.”^[43] Prisons incapacitate people the same way reserves do : taking away their livelihood, limiting their freedom, and making them dependent on the state. Throughout colonization, Indigenous peoples and their practices have been deemed “uncivilized,” and henceforth “claimless” to their lands, to raise their children, in part because “they did not practice “proper” patriarchal kinship, sexual, and gender relations.”^[44] The Canadian prison system is one such mechanism that serves to manage and “civilize” Indigenous communities. Similar to how reserves are stipulated in law, the prison is a space, particularly for those identified as deviant and dangerous and in need of containment or even extermination—“the effects of which function to guard colonial sovereignty.”^[45]

Indigenous mass imprisonment is intentional , and operates in favour of the prison industrial complex in the way it is meant to, as the issues that burden various marginalized groups in society as well as challenges to state sovereignty “disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”^[46] The Canadian state purposely seeks to incarcerate Indigenous peoples, to facilitate “genocidal spaces” that assimilate or make these groups disappear.

Corrections Canada’s own statistics assert that Indigenous adults are “incarcerated over six times more  than anyone else.”^[47] The federal Canadian prisoner population demonstrates a relative consistency in numbers while the Indigenous federal prisoner population has increased by 50%, in which Indigenous women constitute the fastest growing prison population. ^[48] There is also a gendered dimension, as the annual rates of federally incarcerated Indigenous women are also on the rise: a statement from the Office of the Correctional Investigator reports that the proportion of Indigenous women in federal custody has neared 50% of all federally sentenced women.^[49]  The way that Indigenous women are criminalized must be  linked to processes of colonialism, as the Canadian state deploys efforts to destroy, assimilate, and control Indigenous women through genocidal carcerality. Research also finds that Indigenous peoples are overrepresented as victims of criminal offenses, particularly Indigenous women.^[50] Brennan (2011) reports that in 2009 Indigenous women “were almost three times more likely than non-Aboriginal women to report having been a victim of a violent crime.”^[51] In addition, Indigenous women have also reported having experienced proportionally more emotional or financial abuse within their spousal relationships than non-Indigenous women.^[52] Criminality can be understood as manifesting within the modes of orientation and survival. Women’s criminal behavior continues to take on different forms, and criminalized women’s choices continue to be constrained by systemic forces.

If we were to follow the colourblind or “race-neutral” logics and rhetorics, the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system is an unfortunate result of disproportionate rates due to their participation in crime. The justification for prisons is that people are confined as a consequence of certain actions, and therefore the loss of their freedoms due to their own fault. Prisons therefore exist, simply because there are “criminals.” There is no issue of race or racism, but only an issue of “crime.”  Contrary to this “race-neutral” and “colour-blind” perspective, we must consider the fact what is defined as “crime” and who is a “criminal” varies, as laws change “depending on what, in a social order, counts as stability, and who, in a social order, needs to be controlled.”^[53] Racial oppression and the essentialist racism in law did not disappear in 1865 when chattel slavery legally ended. Criminal law and policy in liberal states such as Canada have been framed within the parameters of ideas and discourses about sameness and difference.^[54]

Following the end of legalized racial discrimination, as Brewer and Heitzeg (2015) describe, there was a “concentrated effort” to escalate the control of Black peoples  via the criminal justice system. Whiteness is normalized, while non-whiteness is “abnormalized.”^[55] In order to participate in the surveillance of marginalized communities, abnormality is identified by “what it looks like rather than what it does. Abnormality is thus defined by visible social category, not by social behavior.”^[56] Black male youths continue to remain the focus of heightened police attention, while refugees and migrants have been perceived as “illegals,” and Arabs and Muslims have become targets of suspicion and concern in issues of national security in the post 9/11 era.^[57] Historically, criminality and moral deviance have long been associated with Indigeneity and Blackness as negative racial stereotypes in the construction of the “other” in a “we/they” polarization, the “we” representing “the values and norms of the White dominant culture […], they refer to those who are the ‘other,’ and who possess ‘different’ (read ‘questionable’) values, beliefs, and behaviors.”^[58] It is in this way, for example, that Indigenous peoples become ‘suspect,’ and subject to the stigmatization that views them as part of a criminal group “likely to ‘threaten the social order, safety and security of citizens turns them into racialized subjects that are “always under suspicion.”’^[59]

Foundational to this carceral system is the idea of retributive justice, a form of justice which is inadequate in enacting a system that can implement “socially significant behavior change for those it deems criminal.”^[60] We must truly consider how far an “eye for an eye” logic under the retributive system can carry us forward—particularly if we wish to address social harms within communities, such as poverty and domestic violence, for example. What sort of justice arises out of locking somebody up in a cage and leaving them to rot? Instead, as Friedenberg (1980) argues: “Prisons maintain political and economic advantages at the expense of those they contain.”^[61] They are merely “storage dumps,” which present themselves to the public as “rational organizations designed consciously … as effective machines for producing a few officially avowed and officially approved ends.”^[62]

The penal system has been located within the broader context of colonialism. The incarceration of Black peoples within the United States, for example, has been linked by scholars such as Michelle Alexander (2019) to practices of slavery and segregation as legitimated through “Jim Crow laws and prison privatization.”^[63] Alexander argues that the racial caste system in the US had never been demolished, therefore there is no such thing as a post-racial state in which there is no racism or discrimination.^[64] The US racial caste system was merely redesigned and repackaged in the new form of the penal system.^[65] Colour-neutral laws act as a smokescreen: while race is a formal vector of discrimination, left untouched are the social organizations that continue racial discrimination, segregation, and the imprisonment of BIPOC.^[66]

Canadian prisons are subject to similar problems encountered within American jails: overcrowding, decreased programming, and overall, deteriorating conditions of confinement.^[67] There is a lack of resources to respond to higher rates of substance abuse and mental health disorders, all of which contribute to self-injury and suicide in Canadian prisons.^[68] Per the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules), prisoners are entitled to the same level of health care as any other citizen within the state.^[69] However, it has been demonstrated repeatedly   that they do not enjoy the same levels of health care they are worse.^[70] As Scallan et al. (2021) note, “a number of determinants place persons in prison at higher risk of disease, including imprisonment itself.”^[71] For example, the problem of overcrowding has contributed to high tuberculosis rates among the prison population in comparison to the general community.^[72] Massive outbreaks of COVID-19 within prisons have also been attributed to overcrowding, inadequate control measures, and the shortage of basic supplies.^[73] COVID-19 disproportionately affected the prison population, as highly susceptible inmates are often interlinked with vulnerable and disadvantaged populations.^[74]

Within Canada and the United States, prisons operate as a tool of racial capitalism to maintain power over subjugated groups: it is an effective tool of domination. In the words of Chantrand (2019), prisons have been used to spatialize and control populations in accordance with modern systems of governance and sovereignty. As Calathes (2016) describes, a dominant political order establishes punishment practices as social control weapons that “neatly fit into the inherently exploitative paradigm of racial capitalism.”^[75] Prisons are “unequivocally” about punishment, and it must be understood that both their existence and purpose is political.^[76] It is linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime.^[77] Victims are exposed to the “normalization” of a “premature death,” which is a defining feature of both slave and more recent colonial regimes.^[78]

Abolition: A New Direction into the Future

Abolition has a long history that goes back to anti-slavery movements and to anti-colonial movements “embedded in a Black history of resistance.”^[79] It has crossed multiple academic disciplines, historical periods, and social movements. Prison abolition draws inspiration from earlier ideas of the early Abolitionist Movement in the United States during the 1700s, and echoes the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois on the abolition of slavery.^[80] For abolition to be meaningful, Du Bois argued, it required more than the eradication of slavery—abolition required a “positive project” as opposed to a negative one.^[81] Oppressive conditions that produced and maintained the institution cannot be eliminated by legal reform alone.

Angela Davis (2005) elaborates upon this idea, as she argues the process is not merely the “tearing down” of institutions but also one of collectively “re-imagining institutions, ideas, and strategies, and creating new institutions… that render prisons obsolete.”^[82] There is the refusal to accept any surface-level reforms, and instead an aim to shift power into impacted communities and “fundamentally transforming the relationship among state, market, and society.”^[83] The process through which imprisonment became the norm and primary mode of state-inflicted punishment had much to do with the rise of capitalism and the “new set of ideological conditions” as Davis (2003) describes them.^[84] Eliminating prisons and police will not eliminate capitalism, but to get beyond capitalism: “special attention must be paid to the prison system, and to the culture that it accepts as normal.”^[85]

An abolitionist framework requires positive forms of collective social interaction, integration, and security that is not organized around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive policing, or punishment.^[86] As important as it is to combat and dismantle racist and violent institutions, it is also important to build conditions of safety in order to dismantle racial violence in all its forms. The conventional justice system views crime as a behavior that violates the law, a view which discourages offenders from understanding the impact of their crime on the victim. It is more concerned with punishing criminals for their transgressions by forcing them to undergo transgressions themselves, as the core of incarceration is a “revenge ethic.”^[87] However, as Martinot (2014) describes, this revenge ethic cannot be used to respond to or diminish the violence in our society, because “it is in itself an act of violence. ”^[88]

Ultimately, the criminal justice system is a “race-making” institution and was created at least in part  to uphold whiteness. These carceral spaces, as mentioned prior, are those of a “genocidal carcerality” which seeks to either transform or destroy a group through multiple destructive strategies.^[89] In the essentializing of certain groups (e.g. Black and Indigenous) as “criminal” or “guilty,” race is conflated with crime and contemporary stereotypes about these groups are readily invoked as they are dehumanized. Dehumanization is the process which allows for these groups to be relegated to “sub-human” status, marking them for death or assimilation. There is no evidence that harsher or more intensive punishments has led to greater public safety and peace.^[90] Rather, as Walgrave (2008) describes: “the more the public policy relies exclusively on repression and punishment, the more this will lead to more imprisonment, more humane and financial costs, less ethics, less public safety, and a lower quality of social life.”^[91]

In contrast, restorative justice is often presented as an alternative to the retributive approach of the court system. There are a variety of definitions and understandings as to what restorative justice is, though it generally is described as a “process whereby all parties with a stake in a particular offence come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence.”^[92] Under the restorative perspective, crime is viewed as a violation of the relationship between offender and victim. Thus, this approach is an alternative to the liberal approach to crime, which merely sees punishment of the offender as the “one-size fits all” solution. Through the relational approach, the restorative perspective encourages offenders to repair the harm. The participation of the community in this process is also “central to the effectiveness and uniqueness of restorative justice,” as it gives any crime a “social context” and stresses viewing the incident as “an issue to be fixed collectively.”^[93] Examples of specific approaches to restorative justice include victim-offender reconciliation (or mediation) programs, conferencing, victim impact panels, victim-offender panels (or surrogate RJ), and peacemaking circles.^[94]

We can take some elements of restorative justice into consideration while being mindful of the role of the state, as the state is not a static entity. Ideally, we’d like to get to a point where there is no reliance on the state at all in the implementation of justice and completely reduce the state’s role in crime control. Most social conflicts cannot be solved by justice institutions.^[95] To decolonize justice means a cultural revitalization. A decolonial approach to abolition “means land return and redress, as well as decarceration and cancellation of colonial courts, cops, and corrections.”^[96] As Tynetta Muhammad from Black Youth Project 100^[97] asserts: “Indigenous resistance is created through wellness, community healing, liberation movements and abolition of political prisons.”^[98]

In this vision of the future, we must recognize Indigenous sovereignty and the ability of Indigenous communities to carry out their own practices in justice. Each nation possesses its respective, complex legal orders, all of which have been described by Barmaki (2022) as the following: a) being sophisticated enough to deal with conflict and deviance, and to hold individuals accountable; b) give the accused the right to defend themselves, c) possess mechanisms for changing old norms or instituting new ones, d) are based on collective reasoning processes, e) deal with injustice and oppression, and e) enjoy communal legitimacy.^[99]

Generally, according to Barmaki (2022), the aim of the legal order is to arrive at the “truth.” The process in which truth and honesty are sought is revealed with the help of the Creator. Barmaki writes: “It is only that faithful performance of proper rituals and processes is of great importance in this regard.”^[100] At the core of this view rests a moral belief, in which “the problem of crime is due to offenders’ loss of belief in sacred communal values.”^[101] Consequently, what is necessary is not punishment and retribution but a “compassionate moral re-education” and “sincere recommitment to these values.”^[102] These values serve as objective standards of justice (right belief and conduct) that are to be respected and observed by everyone which in turn ensures communal authority and peace. Again, within the retributive approach to justice employed by the Canadian state, the state’s version of rehabilitation is far from a “compassionate moral education.”

There is the opportunity here to center voices from people who have been harmed and shaped by “organized abandonment,” and in doing so, allow us to hear the “ones that locate the particular event that led them to be criminalized in the context of state and structural violence, including experiences of trauma, poverty, racism, abuse at the hands of authority, and abandonment to deal with all of this individually.”^[103]

While my primary argument concerned primarily the RCMP and policing, prisons are an extension of the carceral continuum we must also consider when it comes to the discussion of abolishing oppressive institutions under settler-colonialism. From the very beginning, the police have served the state in this process of colonization, particularly the North-West Mounted Police as they enforced laws under the Indian Act. Contemporary police continue to carry on this violent work, through the surveillance of Indigenous and Black communities as well as with their arrest and consequent funneling into the prison system where they are dramatically overrepresented. The surveillance and racial profiling of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color are and have “historically been used for control, domination, and continued settler colonial hierarchy.”^[104] By removing populations considered “deviant” and needing to be controlled, the state can continue carving out a space of whiteness. Whiteness is the basis of the norm in institutions, a product carved out by settler-spaces.

Conclusion

I argue that prison abolitionism is required if we wish for a world that consists of more just and ethical communities. At the root of its analysis, prison abolitionism pushes for a deep structural change that dismantles old systems of subjugation. Since marginalized groups continue to face police violence and are subject to mass incarceration, we must examine the institutions that keep these phenomena alive. Reform does need to occur, but we must confront a larger truth about policing. None of the current reforms are working, because they do not replace the foundational imperative of modern policing: the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and management of Black peoples. We cannot rely on civil justice or macro-level remedies alone, as the call for social justice requires more.

Abolishing prisons, detentions, and policing requires moving away from our antiquated system of punishment. It also necessitates decolonization in order to re-imagine our current institutions away from state-imposed orders. It is only recently that abolitionism has begun to include Indigenous perspectives and be taken seriously in scholarly analysis. Abolition needs to continue to grow by building on the recognition of Indigenous self-determination, the contributions of Black women, and intersectional analyses of interlocking oppressions, in addition to its grounding in a long tradition of Black abolitionists. Future research should continue to integrate and feature these perspectives while also challenging dominant scholarly analysis on crime, policing and prisons. At the time of writing, the academic literature which centers on abolitionist voices, is nascent and marginal. There are many abolitionist resources outside of academic articles, their value should not be underestimated when it comes to research.

Much of the work is still in progress, yet there are a number of movements and grassroots groups such as Winnipeg Police Cause Harm, Anti-Police Power Surrey, the Defund 604 Network, No Pride in Policing Coalition (Toronto) and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)  who gather to carry out abolitionist, anti-racist action. Of course, there are also unnamed individuals and known activists from all walks of life who are partaking in the work and bringing real change to their communities. These communities are full of resilience and hope. We must mirror their resilience and hope in our politics as we strive for a better world.

Bibliography