Settler Colonialism in the Penal Voluntary Sector

• In Event: Carceral Care

Abstract

Although the idea of volunteers helping criminalized individuals often evokes potent imagery of care, benevolence, warmth, and generosity, these assumptions are under-theorized and largely unsubstantiated. Drawing on ethnographic and interview research conducted in the penal voluntary sector in Canada, this paper explores how control, punishment, inequality, stigma, and exclusion can be perpetuated by helping relationships. More specifically, this research engages with the fact that within many Canadian penal voluntary sector organizations, it is predominantly white volunteers who seek to “help” criminalized Indigenous women. This research therefore highlights how some volunteers reproduce and entrench settler colonial dynamics through their work in the penal voluntary sector. Ultimately, this research highlights the complexities, risks, and opportunities of volunteers’ efforts to help criminalized women within social, relational, and organizational contexts that are defined by their unequal distribution of power, status, and agency.

Author

• Katie Quinn, Syracuse University