Fugitive Collective 1AC

Racialized carcerality extends far beyond the prison – carceral space is an ordering
paradigm which marks the geographies of black and indigenous life through
emplacement and displacement. Emplacement maps blackness to geographies of
surveillance and regulation, while displacement marks indigeneity for extermination.
Calling for rule-bound criminal justice reform processes isn’t disruptive, it’s a tool of
the civil rights carceral state to reorganize everyday geographies to facilitate state-
sanctioned containment. Instead of organizing futile calls for democratic collectivity
via the settler state, the 1AC speculates on a radical paradox to disrupt racialized
carcerality; perpetual fugitivity and collective territoriality. Perpetual fugitivity
embraces the liberatory potential of movement against carceral technologies,
cartographies, and imaginaries. Collective territoriality is a pre-requisite to broader
questions of political organization, human survival, and being and becoming of all life
Rifkin, 19 – Mark, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UNC-Greensboro. Fictions of Land and
Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation. Chapter 3: Carceral Space and Fugitive Motion, Duke
University Press. p. 117-122 – KLab2020

The vast intensification and proliferation of apparatuses of imprisonment over the past forty years
suggest a growing experience of emplacement in terms of racialized carcerality for Black subjects in the
United States. While rates of imprisonment hovered at around one per one thousand people in the U.S. population over the course of the twentieth century, in the
1970s the rates began to rise precipitously, becoming one in 107 by the 2000s. Currently, about 3 percent of adults (one in thirty-one) are subjected to criminal
justice supervision, with about 2.2 million people in prisons and jails and 4.8 million on probation or parole. These figures represent a fivefold growth over the past
forty years. With respect to African Americans, the statistics are even more dire. African
Americans stand at about 13 percent of the
U.S. population, but they represent approximately 37 percent of the prison population. In the mid-
2000s, about one in fourteen Black men was incarcerated versus one in 106 white men, and those African
Americans born after 1965 who have not earned <end p 118> a high school diploma are more likely than not to be imprisoned at some point in their lives.1 More

than solely illustrating a sharp rise in incarceration, these statistics index a much wider and intensifying
system of surveillance and regulation that governs Black neighborhoods, particularly in urban areas . If
fungibility and enfleshment provide a frame for conceptualizing Black embodiment, as discussed in the
previous chapter, carcerality speaks to the geographies of Black life in the United States . As Alice Goffman
illustrates, in inner-city African American neighborhoods “the role of law enforcement changes from keeping

communities safe from a few offenders to bringing an entire neighborhood under suspicion and
surveillance.”2 Carceral space, then, extends far beyond the prison per se, offering an ordering paradigm
for blackness in the contemporary United States.

The criminal justice system increasingly insinuates its technologies of mapping and capture into virtually
all aspects of everyday Black life in places deemed criminal largely due to the predominance of people
of color. Lisa Marie Cacho suggests, “[R]ace and racialized spaces are the signifiers that make an unsanctioned
action legible as illicit and recognizable as a crime .”3 The association of particular places with nonwhite
subjects transforms those areas into sites of heightened police scrutiny, regardless of whether criminal
activity of various kinds actually is greater in them .4 Law enforcement presence in Black communities has
been characterized by some as akin to an “occupation ,”5 but since this mounting surveillance and
regulation is not justified in race-explicit terms, instead legitimized as part of a broader need to maintain
“law and order” in putatively high-crime areas, it does not constitute something like a formal apartheid
structure, despite the fact that proportionately more African Americans currently are imprisoned in the
United States than were Blacks in South Africa during the height of the apartheid regime .6 As long as policies are
couched in facially neutral criteria, without directly indicating an intent to target people of color, they do not trigger investigation into the ways they might violate
constitutional principles and laws against racial discrimination. Such
patterns arise out of the history of what Naomi Murakawa
has termed “liberal modernization” and the “civil rights carceral state,” in which putatively antiracist
efforts to reduce racial bias in law enforcement after World War II and through the Civil Rights era gave
rise to the notion that “racial violence could be corrected through the establishment of well-defined,
rule-bound, and rights-laden uniform state processes”: “[L]iberal law-and- order reinforced the common
sense that racism is a ghost in the machine, some immaterial force detached from the institutional
terrain of racialized wealth inequality and the possessive investment in whiteness,” such that “the more
carceral machinery <end p 118> was rights-based and rule-bound, the more racial disparity was
isolatable to ‘real’ black criminality.”7 From this perspective, the problem of racism lies in attitudinal prejudice rather than structural
disadvantage. Therefore, the vast expansion of imprisonment and police power in ways that are directed

toward and that decimate communities of color are not conceptualized as inherently functioning as a
mode of institutionalized racism so long as the rules instituted and followed themselves do not directly
invoke race—or, more specifically, blackness—as an organizing logic. Framed in this way, the
transformation of Black neighborhoods into carceral spaces is not understood as constituting racist
practice, because such practices take shape around apparently racially neutral goals and metrics.

These dynamics provide the animating context for Walter Mosley’s Futureland: Nine Stories of an
Imminent World (2001), in which he offers a speculative theorization of the principles immanently at play
in such neoliberal modes of captivity while addressing the central function of processes of racialization
in the kinds of datafication on which such social mappings increasingly rely. This collection of linked
stories set a few decades into the future explores the proliferation of carceral mechanisms and
technologies beyond the prison, including the reorganization of everyday geographies in ways that
facilitate state-sanctioned containment separate from punishment for criminal activity per se. Yet while
largely focused on African Americans, the text presents these patterns as expanding to incorporate large
swaths of the population, building on existing racial demarcations while also generating additional and
compounding modes of racialization that arise out of the application of ostensibly race-neutral criteria.
In this way, Mosley sketches the potentials for radically expanding existing carceral topographies while
engaging the ways such captivities reconfigure existing racism(s). In offering this speculative analysis, he
suggests the political futility of collective assertions of place and explores the notion of perpetual
fugitivity as a means of realizing freedom.8 Much of the scholarly work that attends to the racial
dynamics of the criminal justice system focuses on the ways it targets people of color and seeks to
dominate areas associated with such populations, but as Mosley suggests, the matrix of carcerality itself
engenders, intensifies, and disseminates processes of racialization . Michelle Alexander observes, “[T]he ‘negative
credential’ associated with a criminal record represents a unique mechanism of state-sponsored
stratification” that functions as “a form of branding by the government,” later adding that “mass-
incarceration, like Jim Crow, is a ‘race-making institution. ’ ”9 The attribution of differential identity in relation to actual or potential
criminal acts—or violations of existing institutionalized rules and norms—creates a status distinction between those deemed <end p 119> criminal and those not.
While in theory anyone could commit a crime, legal, political, and popular discourses cast inclinations
toward criminality as innate within particular groups in ways that do not appear to follow from race as
such, even as these attributions both implicitly rely on existing racial categories and portray the forms of
belonging they cite as indicative of inherent qualities in ways that function as racial knowledge .10

In Futureland, the possibilities for being consigned to a criminalized status expand exponentially beyond
current racial categories, suggesting a vast extension of the “race-making” capacities of the carceral
state and its geographies of internment .11 While appropriate behavior largely gets defined in terms of gainful employment and conformity to
corporation-driven mandates, the text illustrates how evaluations of the propensity for (non)normativity themselves depend less on individuals’ particular choices
than the ways all aspects of their lives are collated into statistical sets that function as racializing assemblages. 12 As
David Lyon indicates about
current systems of surveillance, “If the category in which your personal data place you renders you
‘suspicious,’ then you are hardly ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ ” adding, “It is a profile that, in many
cases, simply suggests what sort of person is here. The category, not the character, is all-important .” 13 In
the text, to be unemployed itself becomes a quasi-criminalized status, one that leads (absent any judicial process whatsoever) to confinement in a subterranean
space called “Common Ground.” What
emerges in Mosley’s stories is something like a capitalistically oriented
eugenics, in which determinations of fitness less follow from racial identity as conventionally understood
than from population-making calculations driven by statistical models of likely contributions to revenue
and relative costs that take place alongside legally mandated modes of racial neutrality . In addition, options
for residence and mobility are scaled in relation to these actuarial evaluations and their racializing
trajectories; the social landscape is organized around ostensibly objective assessments of employability,
such that the prisonlike structure of Common Ground simply serves as the extreme of tiered layers of
carcerally inflected space in which everyone but the wealthiest are enmeshed. Mosley’s futurist
imaginary, then, highlights the ways the prison functions in the contemporary moment less as anomaly
than paradigm, as a state-organized means of regulating (un)employment in which racializing
attributions of innate ability and aberrance—and aggregations of those potentialities into categorical
identities (especially through forms of dataveillance)—regulate one’s relation to place even, or perhaps
especially, in the absence of explicit race talk and segregation . Futureland lifts off of the present in order to engage in a
speculative redescription of the early twentieth century that traces and highlights <end p 120> patterns of racializing governmentality; thus, the text enables an
engagement with carcerality and fugitivity as ways of figuring the immanent dynamics of contemporary sociopolitical formations.

Communal claims to place play no role in the text, since Mosley offers no sense that they could do
anything other than reiterate extant systems of domination (in ways reminiscent of the Xenogenesis
trilogy). The geographies of everyday life are thoroughly regulated and stratified by political-corporate
interests, apparatuses, and mappings. There is virtually no place that is not owned and controlled by corporations, such that alternative
projects of occupancy and sovereignty appear completely untenable, at best, and, at worst, merely replicate existing modes of governmentality. Given its

focus on questions of collective situatedness, though, Daniel Wilson’s Robopocalypse series can provide
an illuminating counterpoint to Mosley. Wilson’s novels help highlight how Mosley’s work orients away
from questions of territoriality, thereby drawing attention to the potential difficulties of engaging
indigeneity—and place-based peoplehood more broadly—within a frame organized around captivity
and flight. Wilson’s texts imagine how existing, reconfigured, and newly formed peoples might develop forms of located collectivity in the midst of
technologically induced cataclysm. Himself Cherokee, Wilson offers a vision in which connections to territory remain a

durable part of human social life, even—and in some ways especially—in the face of the breakdown of
contemporary social structures and geographies . In becoming conscious, an artificial intelligence, Archos, launches a campaign of mass
murder against humanity in which wireless networks provide the means for conscripting all manner of machines into the aim of decimating the human race.
However, in this dystopian imaginary, modes of peoplehood and placemaking become crucial—to humans, robots, and various kinds of sentient beings that arise
out of human advances in computing. While
not primarily focused on Indigenous peoples’ struggles for self-
determination as such, the novels highlight the existence and emergence of forms of collective
territoriality that not only serve as the basis for human social organization and survival but that are
presented as integral to the being and becoming of all life. In this way, the framework through which
Wilson approaches the violence and possibilities of technology, and futurist speculation more broadly,
can be understood as drawing on the principles and politics of indigeneity, even when not engaging
Indigenous people( s) per se (although the novels do return repeatedly to the Osage Nation in ways that underline Indigenous histories and
contemporary presence, while also largely leaving aside Indigenous mobilities and diaspora ). The centrality of these issues in Wilson’s

work helps draw attention to their absence in Mosley’s—the ways that long-term <end p 121> relations
to particular spaces function for Mosley as an effect of imprisonment rather than a vehicle of liberation
or autonomy.

Mosley figures freedom not in terms of collective habitation but in/as flight. If Octavia Butler makes the malleability
attributed to blackness into a touchstone for speculatively envisioning antiracist modes of fleshly becoming, Futureland presents the lack of spatial fixity as crucial to
thwarting extant systems of racialization. In
this way, the text articulates a poetics of fugitivity as a positive conception
of open relation that seeks to break from the racializing geographies imposed by the state (largely acting in the
service of corporate interests). This investment in the liberatory potentials of movement, as contrasted with

carceral technologies and cartographies, can generate difficulties in engaging forms of identification
and relation predicated on (a politics of ) collective emplacement. Such an equivocation can be seen at
play in Mosley’s later novel The Wave (2007), with which the chapter closes. In the novel, an entity, the Wave, that has been living
underground for millions of years on lands now claimed by the United States becomes active and is targeted for destruction by the U.S. government as a threat to
national security and sovereignty. The entity itself appears as a pool of blackness, and the fact that the duration of its dwelling dwarfs the history of U.S national
sovereignty becomes an occasion for an implicit meditation on the question of the relation between blackness and indigeneity and the affective dynamics of Black
presence in the Americas. However, the text’s representation of located belonging comes to be oriented around flight (movement away from the Earth) and
imprisonment—capture and torture within the expanding apparatus of internment and state-authorized murder in the wake of 9/11. The
novel’s
exploration of the relation between blackness and indigeneity occurs against the background of mobility
and escape. The novel, then, brings into greater speculative relief the conceptual tensions that arise
when addressing the relations between Black and Indigenous histories and aspirations through the
frame of carcerality and fugitivity.

Our thesis is that carcerality is the site of modernity, underpinned by the colonial
histories of both Black and Indigenous communities, and exists primarily as a site of
racial management and surveillance. The 1AC de-naturalizes the ideological work of
criminal justice reform and carves out spaces of resistance which are prerequisites to
analyzing Black and Indigenous disappearance, incarceration and marginalization.
Thibault, 16 (Katie Thibault; Graduate in Gender Studies from Queen’s University; The Canadian
Carceral State: Violent Colonial Logics of Indigenous Dispossession; April, 2016) – KLab2020-Mahintha

Conceptualizing the prison as a site of racial management and surveillance, I explore the over-
representation of indigenous and racialized incarcerated peoples . I argue that the prison discloses the logics
of white supremacy that are intricately related to histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial violence .2
With this in mind, I posit that the prison is a site of modernity. This is to say that the prison, in many ways, sustains narratives

of colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the racial scripts that emerged during and after
transatlantic slavery; the prison, then, illuminates racial histories which, in turn shed light on how
modern classificatory systems shape nonwhite oppressions, resistances, and struggles (Wynter, 2003; Gilroy,
1993). The theoretical frames that inform my literature review and this thesis as a whole works with the scholarship of Michelle Alexander (2010), Dylan Rodriguez
(2007), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), Andrea Smith (2005), and Katherine McKittrick (2013), among others. These writers differently inform how I am thinking about
the connections between transatlantic slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, colonialism, modernity, and the prison. Much
scholarship in the
field of prison studies has traced the commonalities between the Middle Passage (the slave ship as an
apparatus of containment and punishment), the plantation (a location of racial violence and
surveillance), and the contemporary structure and geography of the prison (Davis 2003; Rodriquez
2007). As well, Michelle Alexander’s scholarship shows the relationship between processes of racialization
and criminality and delineates how mass incarceration in the U.S. context perpetuates a racial caste
system that can be traced to the rhetoric, political environments, and ideologies that emerged during
slave and the Jim Crow eras. While the prison is underwritten by longstanding racial structures—Middle
Passage, the plantation, Jim Crow—Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s geographic analysis of California’s prison
expansion clarifies how the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a response to surpluses of capital land,
labour, and state capacity; she examines how prison expansion is a geo-political maneuver that is this is
wrapped up in what she describes as “catchall solutions to social problems ” (Gilmore 5).3 The work of these scholars has
provided a rich context for me to think about the racial workings of incarceration in Canada. In looking to critical studies on the PIC from the U.S. context I will note
parallels in the Canadian context in order to understand how Canadian prisons are also positioned as “solutions” for disciplining
“problematic” racialized bodies that have been deemed “unmanageable” and “threatening.” I have been
suggesting that much of my thesis engages overlapping histories, which has led me to ask the following questions: How do we talk about the

processes of colonialism and slavery in tandem while recognizing their unique and separate histories?
How does the prison work as a geographic site of modernity, where divergent and mutually constitutive colonial histories meet ? How have the

interconnected displacements of colonialism shaped our historically present moment of mass

incarceration as well as resistances to a range of racial oppressions? What does the prison hide from public knowledge? How
does the institution of the prison work to disavow histories of slavery and colonialism? What narratives of abolition emerge when considering the prison as a site of
modernity? Whatspaces of resistance emerge when de-naturalizing the ideological work that the prison
performs? In the discussion below, I track the different ways in which geography, modernity, race, the law, and
incarceration, together, shape how we understand racism and carceral practices . I examine the colonial histories of
black and indigenous communities in order to demonstrate how racial markers, past and present, help us better understand carceral logics. My conceptual
framework considers how the
prison is a site of modernity, underpinned by the colonial histories of both black
and indigenous communities, to highlight the overlapping, and differential, workings of how white
supremacy shapes incarceration. While my thesis specifically examines the incarceration of indigenous women, reading black and
indigenous histories, together, is necessary for bringing clarity to the disappearance, incarceration and
marginalization of indigenous women—who are my focus in this research project.

Racialized cartographies driven by carceral imperatives come first. The 1AC’s

investment in fugitive collectives is not a fixed telos or the end of some particular
criminal justice technique, but rather modes of being and becoming which resist
surveillance and containment
Rifkin, 19 – Mark, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UNC-Greensboro. Fictions of Land and
Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation. Chapter 3: Carceral Space and Fugitive Motion, Duke
University Press. p. 133-135 – KLab2020

In the face of the global intensity, scale, and intractability of the cartographies enacted by these
racially unmarked forms of racialization, Mosley offers flight as the response. Rather than envisioning
liberation in terms of collective advocacy for changed legal status, secessions, separatisms, or assertions
of autonomous sovereignty, the text invests in fugitivity as a response to the escalating and overlapping
carceral imperatives that govern everyday life. The first story in the collection, “Whispers in the Dark,” features a genius child named
Ptolemy (who will appear again later in the text as the mastermind behind several efforts to outwit corporate systems and thwart white supremacist plots) and his
uncle Chill, a former inmate who “told Popo [Ptolemy] stories of runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad”: “But escape was the real story he wanted to tell. He
had been obsessed with escape ever since the day he was convicted of armed robbery. The only way he could fall asleep in his cell at night was by imagining himself
a slave who had slipped his chains, pried open the bars, and outrun the dogs. . . . The desire for flight burned perpetually in his chest” (9).55 Linking
current
forms of racialized captivity to enslavement, the text presents “escape” as the vehicle for evading the
omnipresent and interlocking dynamics of identification, surveillance, and containment that pervade
everyday life. In “Doctor Kismet,” Akwande, the former congressman and now radical, offers a similar perspective. He seeks to flee off-planet,
as part of the Mars colonization project which one of his fellow movement leaders refers to as “runnin’
away”—a characterization Akwande does not contest (83). Earlier, the text observes of Akwande while he is meditating, “[T]he image of a man thrown from a
ship in the middle of the ocean came to mind. He was swimming minute by minute, year after year. Swimming toward an alien shore or home. . . . He swam over a
deep slumber—exhausted, relaxed, and reprieved all in one” (74). The direction of the “swimming” seems beside the point; rather, the focus lies on the fact of the
movement. Morethan migration toward a particular destination, “flight” or “runnin’ ” appears as itself a
mode of being and becoming, an ethics and politics in itself instead of a transitional state on the <end p.
133> way to what is imagined as the place of true freedom or liberation . The final story in the collection, “The Nig in Me”
returns to a plot from earlier stories: it picks up on the plan by the white supremacist Itsies to commit genocide against Black people, which, in “En Masse,” was
thwarted by a rogue group who contaminate the samples of antiblack contagion; they end up accidentally altering it in ways that make it lethal to everyone who is
not Black, creating a worldwide epidemic that is the focus of “The Nig in Me.” 56 Mosley plays on the idea of biological racial identity transmitted in the blood by
having the mutated virus attack all people who possess less than “12.5 percent African Negro dna” (351).57 “The Nig in Me” concludes with Harold, the African
American main character, fleeing a mob of “white men” (356), who themselves likely have at least some “African Negro dna” in order to have survived the
worldwide virus that has decimated humanity.58 After the apocalypse, Black people still need to flee from the antiblack vigilantism of those asserting their “white”
privilege.

Rather than envisioning emancipation and enfranchisement (into full citizenship) or liberation (to an
autonomous space of collective self-governance) as responses to the neoliberal apartheid it depicts,
Futureland develops a fugitive poetics, inhabiting existing systems in ways that defy the terms and
topographies of legible personhood. Mosley envisions a kind of perpetual flight without a determinate destination.59 In these ways,
Futureland speculatively theorizes what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have referred to as a “fugitive
public.” They suggest, “Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break,” later adding, “This form of
feeling was not collective, not given to decision, not adhering or reattaching to settlement, nation, state, territory or historical story; nor was it repossessed by the
group, which could not now feel as one, reunified in time and space.”60 Drawing
on the history of escape from the confinements
of slavery, fugitivity offers possibilities for conceptualizing the current meanings of blackness and
addressing the ways Black people continue to be consigned to captivity (whether articulated in terms of racial animus or
not and exceeding internment in the prison as such), even as the carceral imaginary and imperatives portrayed in

Futureland extend beyond Black people per se to provide a paradigm of contemporary life .61 The text
engages in what Neil Roberts has termed “fugitive thinking,” in which “those situated on modernity’s
underside craft a detailed system for escaping the state of enslavement ,”62 and such acts of flight
constitute less an evasion of detention in some particular space than a deferral of the broader forms
of identification and territorialization that shape contemporary political economy . Harney and Moten suggest,
“Justice is possible only where it is never asked, in the refuge of bad debt , in the fugitive public of strangers not <end p

134> communities, of undercommons not neighborhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere.”63 As a means of figuring

opposition, the fugitive public neither suggests a moment of direct antagonism, of confrontation, nor a
substitution of existing institutional procedures and principles by a new set of policies.64 It also eschews
the notion of a particular collective or place that serves as the grounds for resistance, the idea that there
could be a privileged subject or site from which change emerges. Aggregate acts of “stealing away” not
only refuse the kinds of moral and legal culpability that attach to theft but highlight the modes of
everyday coercion surrounding putative ownership and consent .65
The settler state uses criminal justice reform as a quick-fix policy tactic to maintain
colonial superiority and indigenous extermination. Our 1AC’s speculations on self via
fugitive collectives in opposition to carcerality can never be captured by liberal savior
efforts, even if they are supposedly designed and led by indigenous groups. Instead of
waiting for the consent of the colonizer for reform, our 1AC works towards radical
indigenous justice which throws the entire legal, political, and economic framework of
settler colonialism into disorder.
McGuire, 20 (Michaela McGuire has a BA in Criminology and Sociology and an MA in Criminology from
Simon Fraser University; “XaaydaGa Tll Yahda TllGuhlGa1 Decolonizing Justice: The formation of a Haida
Justice System”; May 6, 2020, https://summit.sfu.ca/item/20289, p 5-6) KLab2020-Mahintha

The settler state seems to only allow a certain amount of progress towards Indigenous self-
determination while maintaining its imposed superiority. It is important to keep in mind that the colonial “criminal
justice system [CJS] operates to uphold existing power structures, and these were initially set up to
eliminate Indigenous peoples” (Monchalin, 2016, p. 144) through processes of extermination and assimilation. The
Canadian government and its CJS opt for one-size-fits-all solutions instead of supporting true Indigenous self-determination. The Canadian CJS and Correctional
Services Canada (CSC) prefer quick-fix,
pan-Indigenous programming and policies that do not adequately account
for the varied Indigenous Nations, peoples, cultural practices and notions of self among incarcerated
persons (Martel & Brassard, 2008; Martel, Brassard & Jaccoud, 2011; Monchalin, 2016). These so-called Indigenous-led initiatives
are still under some level of colonial control in that the majority of their funding is obtained through
the Canadian government and thus subject to their approval (Monchalin, 2016; Palys, 2004). The Canadian government seems to
develop policies that move the minimal amount that allows it to acknowledge deficiencies and appear to be forwardthinking and sensitive to the justice needs of
Indigenous peoples. Stopping
short of Indigenous control over Indigenous justice, it opts for the Indigenization
of existing systems, i.e., by hiring Indigenous staff and providing pan-Indigenous programming such as
the use of sentencing circles (Palys, 1993). The colonial construction of Indigenous peoples as the ‘other’
operates in the CJS and CSC’s favour as they swoop in as the saviour and effectively ‘heal’ unruly
criminal Indigenous peoples. The colonial state opts to not support Indigenous self-determination in any
meaningful way. Instead, the Canadian government supports smaller, less disruptive initiatives that do not “pose any immediate threat to its decision-
making supremacy or, calls into question its authority” over Indigenous peoples (Palys, 1993, p. 4). The colonial state opts for the path of least. disruption or as Palys
(1993) notes it pursues “assimilation instead of [supporting Indigenous] self-determination” (p. 6), and never questions its authority to incarcerate, criminalize and
regulate Indigenous peoples. 2.1.1. When will recognition turn to Action? The suppression of our strength, pride, and power as first peoples
was purposeful as it limits our ability to resist the colonial state and garner support from settlers as we attempt to reclaim our rightful space as Nations. Recognition
is not unimportant, but it cannot be a substitute for substantive change. Waiting
for the consent of our colonizer to take the
necessary steps to establish our sovereignty is not necessary. The recognition that Canada is willing to give has a limit. Coulthard
(2014) suggests that this recognition of Indigenous rights is accepted as long as it “does not throw into

question the…legal, political and economic framework” that is embedded in the colonial system (p. 103).
In other words, the Canadian government will recognize but not act, because recognition does not require the forfeiture of colonial dominance or disruption of its
imposed superiority. This colonial rhetoric makes it seem as if Nation-to-Nation relationships and independence are impossible dreams despite the fact these
relations have already existed “both historically and legally” (Alfred, 2015, p. 4). Instead of recognizing preexisting relationships, Canada constructs the Indigenous
other as unable to adapt with the times and incapable of progress in order to solidify its dominant position. Alfred (2015) further suggests that this construction
results in Indigenous peoples falsely believing they need their colonizer’s permission to plan for and take steps towards their sovereign futures. Strength,

resilience, and resistance provide the framework from which we can and should disrupt and contest our
colonizer’s construction. Deconstructing state power over Indigenous Nations is no small feat when one considers how ingrained this hierarchical
relationship is within laws, institutions and society at large. The Indigenous ‘other’ serves the role of scapegoat, blamed for

societal wrongs, subjected to racist policies and brought under the wardship of the state.
Indigenous conceptions of criminology and justice should be prioritized. Discounting
Indigenous solutions in favor of policy solutions replicates the violence of
incarceration, a force which exponentially enhances violence and denigration of the
Indigenous life-world. We should instead do the opposite by refusing the invitation to
legitimize criminal justice reform through the settler state
Marcellus, 14 – Juan, University of Wollongong, "Criminal Justice as a Colonial Project in
Contemporary Settler Colonialism." African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, vol. 8, no. S1,
2014 -KLab2020-AlexJones

The challenge of ‘being Indigenous’, in a psychic and cultural sense, forms the crucial question
Introduction

facing Indigenous peoples today in the era of contemporary colonialism – a form of post-modern
imperialism in which domination is still the Settler imperative but where colonizers have designed and
practiced more subtle means (in contrast to the earlier forms of missionary and militaristic colonial enterprises) of accomplishing their objectives (Alfred & Corntassel,
2005: 297-289). The quote from Alfred and Corntassel that starts this paper marks out the problem-field in which the notes assembled in the following pages are to be inserted. What follows
are ‘notes’ inasmuch as they represent the tentative explorations of a working paper on a criminological question that has only recently been explored seriously by ‘western’ criminology: what
role, if any, does criminal justice play in the Settler Colonial states subjugation of Indigenous peoples (for recent, Indigenous examples see Agozino, 2003; Tauri, 2012)? This paper offers an
Indigenous-centred, critical perspective on the Colonial Projects (Thomas, 1994) employed in settler-colonial contexts to negate, or at the very least 20 African Journal of Criminology and
Justice Studies: AJCJS, Vol.8, Special Issue 1: Indigenous Perspectives and Counter Colonial Criminology November 2014 ISSN 1554-3897 nullify, the negative impact of two inter-related ‘wicked
problems’ that are deemed peculiar to these jurisdictions: the high levels of Indigenous subjugation within and by the criminal justice system, and the impact of Indigenous resistance to the
hegemony of the criminal justice systems imposed by settler-colonial states. The paper is comprised of three inter-related parts; the first two outline the construction and deployment of
Colonial Projects in the colonial and neo-colonial contexts, wherein it is argued that the matrix of criminal justice was foundational to the state’s attempted eradication, and eventual socio-
economic marginalisation, of Indigenous peoples. The final section offers an argument that the continued success of criminal justice as a (neo)colonial project, stems from its parasitic
relationship with the discipline of criminology. Together, the continued deployment of these mutually supportive colonial projects against Indigenous peoples demonstrates that structural
violence (Galtung, 1969) continues to be a significant component of social control in the neo-liberal, settler-colonial context.

Colonial Projects and Settler Colonialism The civilising process is not about the uprooting, but about the redistribution of violence Zgmunt Baumann (1995: 141) In his critical commentary on the role of the discipline of Anthropology in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples, Nicholas

colonial projects were fundamental to the successful establishment of a

Thomas identified a set of processes of social control, which he refers to as that

settler colony and disenfranchisement of the Indigenous inhabitants. “socially Thomas (1994: 105) describes these projects as

transformative endeavour(s) that [are] localised, politicised and partial, yet also engendered by longer
historical developments and ways of narrating them”. Furthermore, they are: often projected rather than realized; because of their confrontations with indigenous interests, alternating

European colonisers
civilizing missions and their internal inconsistences, colonial [and neo-colonial] intentions are frequently deflected, or enacted farcically and incompletely (Thomas, 1994: 106). Thomas argues that from the moment of first contact

utilized colonial projects to expedite the eradication, or failing this, the subjugation of the Indigenous
peoples they encountered in new territories. During the initial phases of colonization, mutual benefit from trade in goods and religion were key projects for advancing the ‘civilizing’ mission of colonialism
(Cassidy, 2003). Religious conversion in particular, was considered vital for transforming Indigenous peoples from savage beings into ‘proper Christian subjects’ (Kidd, 1997) and better enable them to participate in the post-colonial society to come. Later, the impact of Enlightenment 21

Through these projects the ideological

Criminal Justice in Contemporary Settler Colonialism: Tauri thinking saw science and education displace religion as key colonial projects in the colonising endeavour (Lynch, 2000).

and practical focus of settler colonial strategy changed from saving our souls, toward policies and
interventions that facilitated our removal from our lands , and preparing us to participate in the
emerging capitalist economy. Underpinning these policies was the development of social Darwinian-
inspired ideological rationales that presented Indigenes as inherently inferior - biologically, genetically
and intellectually - to Europeans. Malik (1996) and Wolfe (2010) refer to this change in ideological construction of Aboriginality as the racialization of colonialism. A key colonial project that arose from the racialization of colonial
ideology was the establishment of identity categories (Maddison, 2013). These included the introduction of measurements of indigeneity based on blood quantum (for example ‘full’, ‘3/4’, ‘halfMaori’ and so forth: see Meredith, 2006). Relatedly, a raft of projects arose aimed specifically
at ‘breeding out’ the Indigenous, exemplified in a range of eugenics programmes, such as forced sterilisation, that were deployed across Canada, Australia and the U.S in the latter half of the 19th, and early part of the 20th centuries (Grekul et al, 2004; Lawrence, 2000). These eugenics
programmes were in turn supported by a range of projects focused on eradicating Indigenous peoples ability to practice their culture, most notably in the form of child removal programmes and residential/native schools, especially in the Canadian, U.S and Australian contexts (see
Bartrop, 2001; Trocme, Knoke & Blackstock, 2004; Woolford, 2013). The eradication of Indigenous culture through education policy was supported by the introduction of legislation in all settler colonial jurisdictions aimed specifically at banning or criminalising the practice of Indigenous

And lastly, there are

ritual and culture. Notable examples include legislation banning the potlatch ceremony in Canada (Jonaitis, 1991), the Sun Dance in the U.S (Jorgensen, 1972), and Maori religious practice in New Zealand (Stephens, 2001).

the colonial projects that can be collectivized under the heading of ‘structural violence’, exemplified
by direct military action, forced removal of children, and the policies and actions emanating from the
developing criminal justice system, much of which was imported intact from the jurisdictions of the
European colonisers (Merry, 2000; see discussion below on structural violence). The numerous colonial projects that littered the settler colonial
landscape formed a complex ‘web’ of subjugating strategies across a range of social and economic policy platforms. Underpinning these were colonial states’ judicious deployment of structural violence (Churchill, 1997). It was a web from which a single colonial project could be deployed
discretely to overcome ‘wicked problems’ that evolve from state-Indigenous interactions; wicked problems being those social issues that arise, at least in the eyes of the state, as exclusive to problem populations and, as a result, define them as such. Or, as often happened, the state
combined projects in co-ordinated campaigns of subjugation, such as the combined strategies of police deployment, child removals and reservations schools deployed in the American, Canadian and Australian jurisdictions throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
sophistication of the web and in particular, its co-ordination, is beautifully captured by Strakosch and Macoun (2012: 45) who write that: 22 African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: AJCJS, Vol.8, Special Issue 1: Indigenous Perspectives and Counter Colonial Criminology
November 2014 ISSN 1554-3897 There are a number of ways to eliminate Indigenous political difference: by physically eliminating Indigenous peoples; by severing their physical connections to lands that lie at the heart of their political systems; by breaking down families and
communities; by drawing Indigenous polities into the state and reforming them; and by entering into explicit, contractual exchanges (such as treaties) which publicly erase the political distinctions between coloniser and colonised. Furthermore, the centrality of structural violence to the
pursuit of ‘colonialist’ justice (or perhaps more accurately, social control), and the interconnected nature of its deployment is exemplified in Fanon’s (1963: 38) statement that: The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police
stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.... [i]n the colonial countries.... the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action
maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force (Fanon, 1963: 38). Colonial Projects in the Neo-Colonial Context Our respective geographical locations are
framed by nation states such as the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand where colonization has not ceased to exist; it has only changed in form from that which our ancestors encountered (Moreton-Robinson, 2009b: 11). How are we to contextualise the ground upon which the neo-
colonial marginalization of Indigenous peoples within Settler Colonialism is constructed and maintained? Some perceive it as a figuration (see Powell, 2011) or, as discussed above, a structure (Galtung, 1969; Strakosch and Macoun, 2012) that is supported by both real and symbolic
violence against Indigenous peoples that has, over time, become ‘cultural’; evolving from a process to a permanence within the body politic of settler colonial societies (Galtung, 1990). As postulated recently by Woolford (2013: 172-173; 174, see further discussion below), these various
modes of epistemic violence (Kitossa, 2014) exist within an overarching web that facilitates the colonial subjugation of Indigenous peoples, via a “mesh that stretches itself across the content, operating through various nodes or sites that change, or take different shape, across time and
space” (see also Stoler, 2008). Structurally, settler colonialism is visualised by Woolford (2013: 172) as a “series of nets that operate to constrain [Indigenous] agency”, and are inter-linked at the macro, 23 Criminal Justice in Contemporary Settler Colonialism: Tauri meso and micro levels.
The first (macro)-level net spreads across the entire sociocultural realm of a Settler Colonial society and involves the dominant subjugating processes of social activity, including the economy, government (including the development of laws and subscription of the right to use violence) and
religion. Woolford (2013: 172) contends that “[i]t is at this broad level that dominant visions of the colonial order are negotiated: for example, the formulation of the so-called Indian problem in Canada”, and by extension the ‘Aboriginal problem’ in Australia, the ‘Indian problem’ in the
U.S, and the ‘Maori problem’ in New Zealand. In the context of criminal justice, we have the wicked problem of Maori/Indigenous over-representation, represented in governmental discourse as a ‘fact of (criminal justice) life’ that poses a significant social problem, and threat to social
order that requires significant intervention. The ‘Maori problem’ is described in governmental and media discourse as being so significant that New Zealand’s crime problem would likely disappear if not for the high level and ongoing nature of Maori offending, because we are ‘full of
crime’ (Otago Daily Times, 2012). At this level of netting significant ideological and policyrelated resource is concentrated at the ‘Maori problem’. This comes various forms, including high rates of surveillance of Maori by the institutions of social control, and political attention to the vote
winning potentialities of addressing the wicked problem of Indigenous crime. Supporting the macro-level is what Woolford (2013: 172) described as the upper-meso level, namely the bureaucratic field of government, where “one finds the institutional netting that brings together various
state and state-sponsored agencies that are essential to the operations of contemporary settler colonialism, namely policing, the legal system, the military and health, education and welfare policy sectors. Supporting the upper-meso institutions is a layer that features the service delivery
mechanisms that enable the practice of settler colonialism to be facilitated. In the education sphere this includes: a variety of schools (e.g., reservation and non-reservation; federal and mission, day and boarding) form a network of interactions, as they cooperate and compete with one
another, depending on various circumstances (Ibid: 172). At the upper-meso level of criminal justice we observe the strategic deployment of militaristic-style policing of Indigenous protest, the significant focusing of policing resources and power in the form of stop-and search powers and
3-strikes legislation against Indigenous individuals and communities (Cunneen, 2006). Policing, corrections, child care and protection services, the policy industry and the courts all provide avenues through which Indigenous peoples are governed ‘differently’ in terms of the depth, form
and effects of ‘policing’. This ‘project’ represents a contemporary manifestation of the racialized policies of ‘policing’ developed during the colonial context (Auger, Doob, Auger & Driben, 1992; Cunneen, 2006; Harding, 1991; Moyle, 2013; Tauri, 2009; 2014). Finally we arrive at the micro-
level layer of netting where the structural violence of Settler Colonialism is operationalised and delivered on the ground. In the education 24 African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: AJCJS, Vol.8, Special Issue 1: Indigenous Perspectives and Counter Colonial Criminology
November 2014 ISSN 1554-3897 sphere this occurs via the implementation of repressive policies by specific schools (Woolford, 2013: 172): [W]hich connects parents, children, teachers, principals, and communities in interactions defined by regionally-adapted techniques of governance
and control, and a local actor-network that involved not just humans, but also non-human actors like disease, poverty, animals, and territory in local experiences of assimilative schooling. Within the criminal justice sector the micro-level net is operationalised through, amongst many
possible examples, the targeted stratagem’s of police district commanders against problem populations, the purposeful targeting of Indigenous individuals and communities by racist (or poorly trained) police officers, the uneven application of discretionary powers. Other practices include
individual departments choosing to ignore existing Indigenous practices and programmes, preferring instead imported western, Eurocentric crime control initiatives (see Tauri, 2011 and further discussion later in this paper). We contend that, similar to Woolford’s education-focused case
study, the criminal justice system is a key colonial project within the armoury of the settler colonial state. It is a project built around a sophisticated web across the macro, meso and micro levels of settler colonial society or more particularly, settler-colonial ‘government’. Furthermore, we
argue that the criminal justice system’s importance as a colonial project has intensified in the last century because of the supposed diminished ability of the contemporary neo-liberal state to legitimately deploy direct violence (for example, military operations), or hard-line assimilatory
policies that characterised previous colonialist attempts to subjugate Indigenous peoples. In other words, the killing times are over, but epistemic and structural violence are still essential colonial projects in the on-going, contested process of settler colonization, and its form, more often
than not, manifests through the application of crime control policies, legislation and practices (Churchill, 1997; Cribben, 1984). Following the post-war internationalization of human rights, the planned use of violence as a social policy tool for controlling problem populations, was deemed
unacceptable (Bauman, 1995). Similarly, the racist assimilatory policies that had sought the eradication of our Indigenous souls, rather than the destruction of our physical bodies, were also challenged and, rhetorically at least, replaced with more acceptable policy discourses, such as
‘integration’ and ‘reconciliation’. In the context of contemporary settler colonialism, structural violence is expressed much differently in practice when compared to its deployment during the colonial era. Today the structural violence of the colonizing project is perpetrated against
Indigenes in the form of militaristic-style policing strategies, the biased application of public disorder offences and discretionary powers, and the criminal justice-led large-scale removal of 25 Criminal Justice in Contemporary Settler Colonialism: Tauri Indigenous children and youth to
detention centres, and Indigenous adults to the prison system (Cunneen, 2006)i . The colonial projects that enable the deployment of structural violence by the developing colonial state, supported by the ideology of (genocidal) eradication, have become, at least at the surface of practice
rather than intent, bio-political inasmuch as the state now seeks to govern and contain Indigenous peoples through ever more sophisticated projects that focus on administering life, rather than eradicating it in order to “[R]ationalise problems posed to governmental practice by
phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birth rate, life expectancy, race” (Dean, 2010: 118-119). Doing Imperialism Quietly? Criminal Justice and Structural Violence and Settler Colonialism Around the turn of the century there emerges a
mythic, masterful silence in the narratives of empire, what Sir Alfred Lyall called ‘doing our Imperialism quietly’ Bhabha (1994: 177 – emphasis added). Importantly, for the arguments made in this paper, Settler colonialism is not defined or constructed through a “moment of
transformative restructuring” that leads to the context moving to a decolonising moment, or for that matter, ‘post’ the subjugation of resident Indigenous peoples. As Strakosch and Macoun (2012: 43) contend: [This] has not occurred in settler colonies such as Australia, Canada and New
Zealand. This [post-colonialism] locates ‘real’ colonialism in the past, and assumes that now policy must deal with the ‘legacies’, ‘heritage’ or ‘reverberating aftermath’ of colonialism in today’s world. In all settler-colonial societies crises are regularly projected ‘out from’ Indigenous
communities, on to the state, whose task it is to fix whatever is ailing its Indigenes at a particular socio-historical moment. As Moreton-Robinson (2009a: 61) describes it, these crises are “constructed as something extraordinary and aberrant requiring new governmental measures” (such
as the Australian Federal governments Northern Territory Emergency Response, see Altman & Hinkson, 2007). This process, which Moreton-Robinson describes as the ‘state-of-exception thesis’ and Boulden and Morton (2007: 163) as ‘emergencies’, are managed as events that have “…. a
political style, one that we have become increasingly use to since September 11”. It is an alarming world, alerting people to immediate dangers to life, health and property. Sometimes the dangers are real, sometimes they are imagined; and sometimes they are a complete red herring.
These (often contrived) emergencies employed in part to rationalise the state’s exceptional interference in the lives of Indigenous peoples, have a long colonialist history. They serve both an ideological and functional role in colonial and neo-colonial contexts, including rationalizing the
use of structural violence to support the ongoing subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Nowhere is this more evident than in the structural violence of the criminal justice systems of settler-colonial state, especially the role the sector plays in sequestering 26 African Journal of Criminology
and Justice Studies: AJCJS, Vol.8, Special Issue 1: Indigenous Perspectives and Counter Colonial Criminology November 2014 ISSN 1554-3897 Indigenous peoples within state-controlled, closed institutions. The role of criminal justice system in the modern European state is well established
as reflective of the desire for internal control of populations and of their labouring capacity (Wacquant, 2009), characterised by the workings of the sequestering institutions so powerfully identified by Foucault (2000) – most notably prisons, asylums and workhouses. In the settler society
context, we might add to this list of closed institutions: youth borstals, residential schools and the penal reserves and reservations of North America and Australia (such as Palm Island, see Anthony, 2009. See also Churchill, 1997; Harris, 2004; van Krieken, 1999), which were used as

More recently, the

‘camps’ for concentrating large groups of Indigenous individuals, and sometimes entire Indigenous communities who were deemed surplus to the developing capitalist mode of production (Rombough and Keithly, 2005).

significant, and consistent over-representation of Indigenous peoples in youth detention centres and
adult prisons, has been referred to by O’Connor (1994) as the ‘new removals’ and by Cunneen (1997:
2) as the ‘new stolen generations’ where “[t]he high levels of criminalization and subsequent
incarceration of Indigenous young people in Australia effectively amounts to a new practice of forced
separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people from their families”. When
taken together these examples of sequestration correspond with what Harris (2004) calls the management of dispossession, a slowly evolving set of colonial projects located principally at the meso-level of Woolford’s schema due to their primary purpose - the removal of the Indigenous
individual from his or her cultural context. These projects evolved within the settler colonial contexts as primary sites for disciplining Indigenes at the point where “physical power moved into the background (while remaining crucial), and the disciplinary strategies associated with the
management of people, nature, and space, came to the fore” (Harris, 2004: 174). Arguably, the settler-colonial state has become much more subtle and manoeuvrable in terms of the development and employment of Colonial Projects. No longer able to maintain legitimacy by deploying
racist, assimilationist strategies, such as the forced removal of our children under targeted policiesii, or specific legislation banning language and cultural practices, or indeed replicating the physical genocide of the Indian Wars carried out in Canada and the U.S, or the killing times in
Australia (Barkan, 2003; Neu, 2000; Riethmuller, 2006), the neo-liberal settler state nonetheless deploys structural/epistemic violence as a colonial project against Indigenous communities. In the guise of youth detention, prison, and child care and protection processes (O’Connor, 1994),
the colonial projects of removal and sequestration remain significant structural violent strategies deployed by the settler-colonial state in its ongoing ‘war of manoeuvre’ against Indigenous resistance to assimilation (and arguably, annihilation). The Interconnectivity of the Criminal Justice
Web 27 Criminal Justice in Contemporary Settler Colonialism: Tauri Colonial projects intertwine and overlap, continuously morphing into new ‘technologies of control’ that enable the settler-colonial state to control populations that are deemed a ‘problem’. Thus, in the Canadian context,
we can trace the residential school morphing into the prison industrial complex, which is arguably now a primary site through which the colonial policies of integration and assimilation are perpetuated in the neo(liberal)colonial context (Cunneen, 2006; Proulx, 2002). In relation to
criminal justice, we see the silent yet nonetheless ‘violent’ imperialism of settler-colonialism present in Mallea’s (2000: 27) description of service delivery in Canadian prisons where: European culture dominates in the prison system and there is racism among the staff... Prisons provide the
same extreme form of isolation which was the experience by children in the residential schools... One program called Teen Challenge is now operating within some Manitoba prisons. Teen Challenge is a drug rehabilitation program based on fundamentalist Christianity. It bans the practice
of Native spirituality within the program and preaches that such spirituality… is the occult. Mallea’s description of authorised in-prison programmes in Manitoba relates to the argument made here, that criminal justice is a key project for the dissemination of structural violence, through
the fact, that the site of isolation from ones cultural context and pseudo-religious/scientific-programming – the prison – becomes a primary venue for the continued subjugation of the Indigenous life-world. One could argue that this attempt is no less violent than projects utilised during
the colonial context; if one accepts that the forced imposition of non-Indigenous religious belief and practice is ‘violent’, coupled with the ‘violence’ of the imposition of psycho-therapeutic service mechanism of a Eurocentric drug rehabilitation programme, and removal and isolation from

By banning Indigenous spirituality from the context of rehabilitative service

one’s Indigenous community in a decidedly ‘non-Indigenous’ institution.

delivery, the violence of isolation that occurs with incarceration, is exponentially enhanced through
the concomitant violence generated by denigration of the Indigenous life-world . The (Ordinary)
Structural Violence of Settler Colonial Criminal Justice The etiological myth deeply entrenched in the
self-consciousness of our Western society is the morally elevating story of humanity emerging from
pre-social barbarity Zgmunt Bauman (1989: 12). In the contemporary space an Aboriginal resistance and survival struggle continues. However, the colonial project also continues. The state still has
assimilation agendas, intent upon the removal of Aboriginal peoples from traditional lands and the absorption of Aboriginality into a ‘white Australia’ Irene Watson (2009: 1). 28 African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: AJCJS, Vol.8, Special Issue 1: Indigenous Perspectives and
Counter Colonial Criminology November 2014 ISSN 1554-3897 We can anticipate significant disagreement from some with the argument that criminal justice represents as key site through which the settler colonial state manifests the colonial project of structural violence against
Indigenes. An early example of this view is espoused by Anthony Giddens (1985) who, during his critique of Foucault’s perspective on power and the state, argued that the French theorist’s emphasis on coercive, closed institutions was too constricted to enable a sophisticated analysis of
power and social control in contemporary Western societies. Giddens’ (quoted in Gledhill, 2000: 17; emphasis Gledhill) preferred instead “a more general shift in the sanctioning capacities of the state from the manifest use of violence to the pervasive use of administrative power”. This
change in modes of social control from violence (or at least the threat of it) to the use of administrative, disciplinary technologies to elicit internal pacification of the population, is evidenced by contemporary police forces and the science of policing replacing violent policing, such as the

. It also signals the compartmentalisation of policing within the

deployment of military troops and military action, as fundamental to the practice of social regulation

sophisticated, bureaucratic mechanisms of codified law, incarceration, parole and probation. Giddens gives much
weight in his analysis of contemporary social regulation to the supposed diminution of violence resulting from the contemporary states steady movement towards facilitating internal pacification of the ‘population’ through administrative power. As such, he argued that a distinguishing
feature of this mode of regulation of a population is the withdrawal of the military from direct participation in the internal affairs of the state. Within Giddens’ schema, criminal justice, including policing, when compared to the violence deployed in support of the colonial enterprise,
represents a form of ‘quiet imperialism’. Indigenous and critical sociological scholarship exposes the Eurocentric bases of this type of theorising of the ‘pacifist’ exercise of power by the contemporary settler state. For example, an extensive literature demonstrates the explicit violence of
policing in neo-colonial jurisdictions, both historically and contemporarily (see Churchill, 1997; Wilson, 1998 for the North American context, Watson, 2009 for the Australian, and Jackson, 1988; Pratt, 1992 for New Zealand). Violence as a coercive tool of social control is fundamental to
the formation and enduring hegemony of the modern (neoliberal) capitalist state. Indeed, as Bauman (1989) succinctly demonstrates in his sociological study of the Holocaust, violence as a project for controlling a population is not only possible in a ‘rationally’-derived polity, but is in fact
the end point of the development of this so-called science of state craft: Once the hope to contain the Holocaust experience in the theoretical framework of malfunction (modernity incapable of suppressing the essentially alien factors of irrationality, civilizing pressures failing to subdue
emotional and violent drives, socialization going awry and hence unable to produce the needed volume of moral motivations) has been dashed, one can be easily tempted to try the ‘obvious’ exit 29 Criminal Justice in Contemporary Settler Colonialism: Tauri from the theoretical impasse;
to proclaim the Holocaust a ‘paradigm’ of modern civilization, its ‘natural’, ‘normal’ (who knows – perhaps also common) product, its ‘historical tendency’ (Bauman, 1989: 5-6: emphasis Bauman’s). Bauman (Ibid: 6: emphasis Bauman’s) further argues that “[i]n this version, the Holocaust
would be promoted to the status of a truth of modernity (rather than recognised as a possibility that modernity contains)”. In effect, Bauman counters Giddens’ (mis)representation of modern state-craft characterised by the diminution of violence as a biopolitical strategy of control or as
something that, when it does arise, represents an aberration, the rending of evil through the fabric of civility that cloaks ‘western civilization’. Instead, as Bauman (1989: 18) contends, there is nothing inherent in the instrumental rationality of contemporary state-craft that makes it
singularly incapable of deploying structural violence, in fact: The bureaucratic culture which prompts us to view society as an object of administration, as a collection of so many ‘problems’ to be solved…. as a legitimate target for ‘social engineering’… was the very atmosphere in which the
idea of the Holocaust could be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion. To consider contemporary settler colonial policing as part of the diminution of violence as a key colonial project within the settler-colonial context, is to gloss over the fact that
structural violence continues to be a significant strategy in the settler state’s ongoing pacification of their Indigenous peoples and other dispossessed populations. The evidence of the continued importance of this particular colonial project to the settlercolonial state is extensive: we see it
used in its commonly described ‘direct’ form as a response to Indigenous activism, such as at Bastion Point and Wounded Knee in the 1970s (D’Arcus, 2001; The Waitangi Tribunal, 1987), Oka in the 1990’s (Kalant, 2004) and most recently against the Mi’kmak First Nation’s resistance to
gas mining in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. The violence deployed in these contexts was strategic, planned, and purposeful. As such, it stands in stark contrast to the supposed benign use of administrative power that Giddens’ and others present as characteristic of western,
(neo)liberal government (Hayek, 1944; for critical discussion of this perspective see Oksala, 2011; Springer, 2011). Second, we can observe in the structural violence of contemporary criminal justice systems the pervasive, militaristic-style overpolicing of people of colour in Western
jurisdictions, evidence of bias and racism in the way police use their discretionary powers, courts their discretion in terms of prison sentences or community sentences, and correctional services through the denial of the legitimacy of the Indigenous cultural context as a source of
rehabilitative practices (Aboriginal Justice and Advisory Committee, 2000; Cunneen, 2006; Harding, 1991; Perry, 2006; Webb, 2004). Recently, a number of commentators have begun theorising the contribution of law and justice institutions in the “historical and ongoing contested
subjugation of Indigenous peoples”, most notably Smandych (2013: 92), Veracini (2007) and Wolfe (1999). The work of all three demonstrates that a key logic of settler colonialism is the elimination 30 African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: AJCJS, Vol.8, Special Issue 1:
Indigenous Perspectives and Counter Colonial Criminology November 2014 ISSN 1554-3897 of the Indigenous peoples. Cited in Smandych (Ibid: 93), Wolfe conceptualises the Settler Colonial logic of elimination as more than just the liquidation of Indigenous peoples, but also: In common
with genocide as Raphael Lemkin characterised it, settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base. In its positive aspect, elimination is an
organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child
abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. Why, might we ask, does Wolfe represent native schools, child removal and other similar Colonial Projects, as ‘positive’
manifestations of the colonialist logic of elimination? Smandych (2013) attempts to address this issue by arguing that when compared to physical genocide via warfare, these strategies are ‘positive’ in that they do not seek to replace Indigenous societies in their entirety, but to control
and corral; paradoxically, by (forcibly) bringing Indigenous people together in these institutional settings, resistance and socio-cultural regeneration is enabled. As Smandych (2013) relates, resistance and counter-resistance by both settler colonialists and Indigenous peoples, continues to
structure and reframe settler colonial societies, and ensures that the ‘end point’ of the logic of elimination remains elusive. And importantly, as Smandych (2013: 93) further argues, the logic of elimination “continues into the present” in the guise of the supposedly ‘quiet imperialist’
projects discussed previously. But as we have discussed here, the centrality of the criminal justice to the ongoing colonialist agenda, demonstrates the continued importance of ‘old colonial projects’ - most especially of structural violence, to the settler colonial context. Closing Comments
How is it then, that supposedly ‘liberal’, democratic, Western nations such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the U.S are portrayed in this paper as anything but ‘liberal’ when it comes to their use of the structural violence to effect the (continued) marginalisation of their Indigenous
peoples? For an answer we might refer to Foucault’s conceptualization of the ‘illiberality of liberal government’, where supposed liberal governments act in ways that mirror authoritarian regimes by implementing policies with prejudice, and sometimes with violence, against targeted
sections of the population: [A]s was evident in recent revelations about the way in which liberal-democratic states (like those in Scandinavia) have, in the course of the twentieth century, 31 Criminal Justice in Contemporary Settler Colonialism: Tauri practised forced sterilization in the
name of a eugenic Utopia on certain of their populations. Even more pervasive has been the tendency within certain states (Australia, Canada), having ceased to attempt actual genocide, to commit forms of cultural genocide upon indigenous people within their borders in the name of
their own well-being, such as in the case of the removal of children from their parents and families. While the bio-political imperative does not account for all that bedevils liberal-democratic states, it is remarkable how much of what is done of an illiberal character is done with the best of
bio-political intentions (Dean, 2010: 156). Perhaps, it is simply a continuation of the overwhelming ‘will to control’ that was so crucial to the original pioneering endeavours of the early colonialists. Or is it because we Indigenous peoples are what might be called an unfinished project that
impedes the neo-colonial (and neoliberal) state from announcing the end of colonialism? It should be remembered that we were meant to accept the gift of civilization, but instead had the temerity to resist, seeing colonization for what it really meant – the eradication of ourselves and
our culture. We were also meant to die out; unable to cope with the ravages of western disease and the superiority of ‘western civilization’, but instead we reproduced at much higher rates than the colonialists. When these events failed to transpire it was believed that policy and the

These sophisticated projects would compel

march of the capitalist free market economy – the supposed end points of social and political evolution – would force our assimilation or integration into ‘civilization’.

us to forever discard our archaic cultural practices and languages. Instead, we revitalized our cultures,
exerted our rights to self-determination and began actively challenging the hegemony of many of the
colonial projects utilised to control us and reduce our risk to society. The criminal justice system was,
and is, one of the most significant projects in this schema (Tauri, 2005). As unfinished business, we are
an embarrassment to the settler colonial state because our very existence calls into question the
legitimacy of settler colonialism and the effectiveness of the supposedly benign, enlightened types of
colonial projects now in vogue. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system makes a lie of claims that
the settler colonial state no longer has need of structural violence to control its problematic
Indigenous populations, or that settler colonialism represents a quieter (meaning less assimilatory)
process of subjugation. Instead, the policies and actions of the agents and agencies of crime control
demonstrate that structural violence remains a significant tool of subjugation of Indigenous peoples in
contemporary settler colonialism.

The role of debate is to decolonize research, a process which places Indigenous voices
and epistemologies in the center of the research process and challenges Western
methods of problem-solving. Studies of indigeneity and criminal justice reform in the
status quo are driven by western research models, not Indigenous voices. Voting aff
affirms a multi-paradigmatic space in favour of culturally centered research
methodologies.
McGuire, 20 (Michaela McGuire has a BA in Criminology and Sociology and an MA in Criminology from
Simon Fraser University; “XaaydaGa Tll Yahda TllGuhlGa1 Decolonizing Justice: The formation of a Haida
Justice System”; May 6, 2020, https://summit.sfu.ca/item/20289, p.34-36) KLab2020-Mahintha

Colonial forces have impacted how we see ourselves and imposed institutions have superseded
Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing . Simonds and Christopher (2013) define decolonizing research [as] a
process for conducting research with Indigenous communities that places Indigenous voices and
epistemologies in the center of the research process. It critically examines the underlying assumptions
that inform the research and challenges the widely accepted belief that Western methods and ways of
knowing are the only objective, true science while ignoring the pre-existing ways of knowing specific to
Indigenous peoples (p. 2185). Simonds and Christopher (2013) further argue that decolonizing research does not always mean a complete rejection of
western research methods but can require a reframing of them as is deemed “appropriate and beneficial by the local community” (p. 35 2185). Decolonizing

research from within a colonial institution and framework involves considerable attention be given to
research decisions, centering Indigenous knowledge and balancing institutional and community ethical
guidelines. Decolonizing research further involves recognizing the role colonial research forces have had
in devaluing and suppressing Indigenous knowledge (Smith, 2012; Victor, 2007). Colonial research protocols and knowledge systems
have actively ignored Indigenous peoples. Kovach (2009) explains that “in the colonization of Indigenous people, science was used to support an

ideological and racist justification for subjecting Indigenous cultures and ways of doing ” (p. 77). The misuse and
appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, ceremonies, and cultures by some Western researchers has led to a distrust of the research community as a whole (Wilson,
2008). Colonial
research protocols would include research that has ignored community and cultural
protocols, “disempowered communities…[and]… imposed stereotypes,” perpetuating existing feelings of
disempowerment (Simonds & Christopher, 2013, p. 2185). Distrust of academic research is based on the perpetuation of such research protocols and
projects that have devalued Indigenous peoples and knowledge in favour of furthering colonial understandings of the world (Cunneen, Rowe, & Tauri, 2017).
Research that fails to meaningfully engage Indigenous communities, amalgamates Indigenous peoples
into one group, and rationalizes distancing through the promotion of ‘objectivity” perpetuates harm
through the silencing of Indigenous people. For instance, colonial research often uses “secondary data” without including the lived realities
and perspectives of Indigenous peoples themselves or, engaging with Indigenous researchers (Deckert, 2016, p. 47). Relegating Indigenous peoples into an
amalgamated statistic with no recognition of their Nationhood, community or cultural differences propels their dehumanization and silencing. Deckert (2016)
suggests that if “academics predominately use research methods that exclude participation of Indigenous peoples, then criminology
is effectively
contributing to the marginalization of Indigenous voices on crime and justice issues ,” in favour of getting
published in reputable journals (p. 58). Cunneen, Rowe, and Tauri (2017) argue that colonial systems have continually ignored Indigenous perspectives. Evidence
based research is important; however, contextual analysis, mixed-methods approaches, inclusion of Indigenous researchers and perspectives, and acknowledgment
of limitations may result 36 in more effective research. Silencing of Indigenous peoples does little to remedy the reputation of research and perpetuates distrust. As
a result of the distrust of research there have been repeated calls to decolonize, indigenize and reclaim research. The prioritizing of Indigenous peoples, researchers,
communities, and concerns is a key element of decolonizing research (Kovach, 2009). Reclaiming our ways of doing research has led to a myriad of understandings
of Indigenous methodologies. Held (2019) suggests that the
next step in decolonizing research paradigms needs to be the
cocreation of a multi-paradigmatic space from which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers
can undertake research at the intersection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing that is
not only emancipatory and culturally adequate but supports the radical changes needed to advance true
decolonization (p. 10). Decolonizing research involves moving beyond the ingrained perception that
western research is the gold standard in favour of creative, multi-disciplinary and culturally centered
research methodologies.

The prison is not a standalone geography and must be understood as a broader tool of
white supremacy and colonialism
Thibault 16 (Katie Thibault; Graduate in Gender Studies from Queen’s University; The Canadian
Carceral State: Violent Colonial Logics of Indigenous Dispossession; April, 2016) – KLab2020-Mahintha

The prison is a tool of geographic dispossession that facilitates the continual disappearance of
indigenous communities, upholds white settler colonialism, and facilitates practices of racial violence. A
key theorist informing my research is Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whose writings focus on the ideological work and political agendas that inform
incarceration, prison expansion, and indigenous struggles. Gilmore’s (2007) book, Golden Gulag: Prison Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in
Globalizing California, questions the role of the prison in the state of California. Gilmore critically examines the ways in which the
prison
has been positioned as the “solution” to economic restructuring and political rhetoric focused on
“ameliorating” 12 crime. Gilmore’s analysis unpacks how prison expansion has been deemed a
“productive” component of economic expansion, while she also simultaneously exposes the naturalized
racial violence that makes mass-incarceration possible. In the U.S.—and Canada, although outside Gilmore’s purview—
crime rates are on a downward trend, and yet politically there continues to be a “get tough on crime”
agenda through mandatory sentencing and “three-strikes law” (Gilmore 108). In Canada, the Conservative government
has, since 2006, adopted a “Tough on Crime” agenda and introduced a series of public legislations to increase public safety (Mallea 5). A
reliance on mandatory minimum sentences (MMSs) is common for a tough on crime stance and ensures
that infractions will be met with a punishment that matches the severity of the crime (Mallea 13). The
troubling nature of MMSs is that it removes judiciary discretion, which removes the ability for judges to
sentences according to the unique situations that lead to the crime, and enforces minimum sentence to
the crime (Mallea 13). In both Canada and the U.S., there has been a politically postulated fear around crime, which
has been used to legitimize political agendas focused on increased prison expansion. These agendas are
also tied to the promise of job creation and economic development. Gilmore clarifies the economic
negotiations of surplus land and labour, which facilitated what she calls (87-127) the “prison fix,” in California;
she also describes how prison expansion is deeply connected to geography by being necessarily hidden from
public view. Her analysis is all encompassing, and she is able to demonstrate how all of these processes bifurcated the
divide between the rich and the poor and left marginalized racialized communities increasingly
vulnerable to criminalization and incarceration. As I work through Gilmore’s framework, which uncovers how state
mechanisms work to foster prison development, I want to think about how—in the Canadian context—the 13 incarceration of black and
indigenous peoples impact political and economic “progress.” This will allow me to also address what the
prison hides from public
knowledge and how what is unseen relates to the complex workings of carceral geographies (prisons
themselves as well as the spaces such as the reserve or the “ghetto”). This means, then, that the prison does
not simply lock in and conceal those who are incarcerated—it is not a standalone geography that is
disconnected from other spaces and places. The borders of the prison can also be thought of as porous
in order to think about how the people inhabiting the prison, who are in a complex transitional space,
are not always not separate from those communities who reside outside prison walls. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s
research has allowed me to think about how the prison is not a homogenous solitary site of punishment and
discipline. It is, in fact, a complicated location wherein differentiated racial histories play out within and
outside prison walls. Gilmore’s insights about the geographic underpinnings of the prison have allowed me to identify that very
different racial histories overlap and bifurcate: the prison locks in and differentiates black and indigenous (past and
present) incarcerations. As a site of modernity, the prison also reveals how “progress” and geographic
processes are deeply racialized (e.g. protecting citizens by locking up criminals) and also discloses the
ways practices of marginalization and racial violence are obscured from public view (e.g. protecting
citizens by locking criminals away).