Locating Penitentiaries in Canada: Where They Were Built in the Aftermath of WWII and Why It Matters Today

• In Event: Abolition, Culture, and Geography

Abstract

Until the conclusion of the second world war, the Canadian federal penitentiary system had been almost entirely comprised of maximum-security institutions, which were few in number and geographically dispersed. By the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Government of Canada had embarked on an unprecedented campaign to build new minimum- and medium-security institutions as part of an ambitious strategy to transform the federal penitentiary system through the introduction of rehabilitation-oriented architecture and design, staff, and programs. This strategy, comprised of dozens of new builds, set the foundation for future prison construction that followed in subsequent decades that further cemented the Canadian carceral state, both in material and symbolical terms. Drawing on archival and document research, as well as the conceptual insights of Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) and other carceral geographers, this paper explores how the “prison fix” was used to reactivate surplus land, buildings, labour, and state capacity following the conclusion of World War II. In so doing, this study highlights the relationship between the military and prison industrial complexes in shaping where federally sentenced people are imprisoned in Canada and discusses why it matters today.

Author

• Justin Piché, University of Ottawa / Journal of Prisoners on Prisons