Punishing ‘Aboriginality’: The Discursive Assemblages of Pathology and Difference in Correctional Discourse

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

This paper critically examines empirical findings surrounding Correctional Service Canada’s (CSC) ordering of ‘Aboriginal social history’ and criminal risk in healing based correctional therapy for Indigenous prisoners. The rapid growth in positivist legal and psychological theory over the last two decades has produced a ‘regime of truth’ regarding elements of criminality specific of Indigenous prisoners within federal prisons and suggests that criminalized deviancy is treatable through alternative therapy, specifically Indigenous healing models. One consequence of integrating elements of Indigenous culture in risk categorizations and calculations is the extension of correctional power to diagnose a priori assumptions of criminality based on one’s social position in history. CSC’s inclusion of colonial-harms (experience of residential school, community dislocation/isolation, and intergenerational impacts of residential school) as risk precursors to criminality indicates a recoding compartmentalization of Canadian history as a treatment target for correctional therapy. I will suggest that CSC’s healing-based correctional therapy for Indigenous prisoners represents an intensification of penal power that is at once a colonial mimicry of Indigenous forms interwoven with disciplinary apparatus of the prison producing the docile object of difference.

Author

• Jean-Philippe Crete, University of Alberta