“It’s an awful thing, but it’s better than being dead”: Exploring the violent emotional circuitry of segregation and its failed reforms in Canadian federal prisons

• In Event: PWG - Prison policies, human rights, and the treatment of vulnerable populations

Abstract

Given the plethora of evidence that segregation is mentally, emotionally, and physically torturous, prison authorities around the world are being increasingly forced to adopt more politically palatable alternatives to segregation. In 2019, the Canadian government enacted Bill C-83, effectively abolishing segregation in federal prisons – at least, on paper – and established Structural Intervention Units (SIUs) as a supposedly less harmful alternative. However, critics have problematized CSC’s implementation of the SIU model over the last three years largely as an exercise in repeating previous segregation practices under the rhetoric of ‘reform.’ We build upon these criticisms of SIUs using qualitative data from interviews (n=57) with formerly incarcerated people about their experiences of segregation. After contextualizing our analysis in the carceral geography literature, we describe the methods used for our project, Feeling the Carceral. Next, we discuss the conditions of segregation/SIU spaces and critique CSC’s claims that the SIUs are less harmful than previous segregation practices. Taking up Gill et al.’s (2018) notion of carceral circuitry, we argue that the new SIU model is not only an obvious reiteration of previous segregation practices, but that the perceived necessity of segregation in some form by several formerly incarcerated participants reveals the disturbing mental, emotional, and material realities of life in Canadian federal prisons more generally as a kind of extra-judicial punishment that no degree of segregation reform alone can ameliorate.

Authors

• Jennifer M. Kilty, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa

• Sophie Lachapelle, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa