Resisting ‘progressive’ carceral expansion: lessons for abolitionists from anti-colonial resistance

This research was made possible by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship. The author wishes to thank Owen Toews, Shelagh Pizey-Allen, Kevin Walby, and Sara Martucci for feedback; and all the members of Bar None Winnipeg, and the University of Winnipeg Department of Criminal Justice for ongoing conversations and support.

Abstract

This article documents a government-led strategy to more closely integrate policing with community-based ‘crime prevention’ programming in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. These initiatives have targeted neighborhoods with large Indigenous populations. In this article I illustrate how community-level conflicts over responses to ‘crime’ are also sites of settler colonial conflict, and how settler colonial governance is reproduced and resisted through the governance of crime. Interviews with politicians, policy-makers, bureaucrats in the crime prevention branch of the provincial government, and directors and employees at community-based organizations suggest that the pursuit of the government strategy of integrated crime prevention and suppression has been more a project of attempting to ‘manage’ urban Indigenous people than serve their interests. As a contribution to abolitionist thought and theory, this article profiles sites of conflict between community police and community-based organizations over definitions of the ‘crime’ problem in city-center Winnipeg. These examples highlight a kinship between carceral abolitionist and decolonial politics.

Keywords:

• Prison abolition
• settler colonialism
• community policing
• progressive punishment
• Winnipeg
• resistance
• non-profit industrial complex

Notes

This research was made possible by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship. The author wishes to thank Owen Toews, Shelagh Pizey-Allen, Kevin Walby, and Sara Martucci for feedback; and all the members of Bar None Winnipeg, and the University of Winnipeg Department of Criminal Justice for ongoing conversations and support.

1. While the relationship between police and Indigenous people is rooted in a specific history distinct from that of immigrant populations, Carmichael and Kent’s (2015) article affirms the hypothesis that the size of a police force is determined by a sense of "minority threat" as viewed in relation to whiteness - therefore, the category "Aboriginal" was included in their calculations of minority populations.