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Drawing from focus groups and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines decision-making practices and monitoring techniques of Canadian Intensive Supervision Units (ISUs) managing high-risk individuals in the community. We argue that ISU subjects are hyper-individualized through their unique conditions of release, contesting notions that actuarial risk assessments have eclipsed individual understandings of dangerousness in risk, correctional and policing literature. Using Foucault's disciplinary, pastoral and confessional dispositifs , we highlight how ISU agents make subjects active participants in their own punishment. Moreover, we illustrate how dispositifs not only allow ISU agents to understand, select and govern subjects but also, more problematically, transform subjects into ostensibly dangerous entities reifying and necessitating escalating criminal justice interventions under auspices of protecting the community from potential—not guaranteed—harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on youth capitalization as it relates to gender differences in the delinquency of siblings. The study of opposite-sex siblings Provides a unique opportunity to examine variation in how parental capitalization of sons and daughters is influenced by the same family unit. The structural form and function of the family changed enormously in relation to gender over the latter half of the last century, as indicated in the growing participation of mothers in the labour force of Western developed nations. We find this reflected in data that we look at from both contemporary German and Canadian school settings analyzed in this paper. We argue that the male subculture of delinquency is a residue of the former hegemony of an outmoded patriarchal power structure in both of these geopolitical settings, as well as across most family settings. In settings where mothers have unusually great power relative to fathers, there is substantial and significant evidence of daughters being less controlled than sons; however, even in settings where mothers have equal or greater occupational power than fathers, and where differences in parental control of daughters relative to sons are reduced, it is still the case that these gender differences in parental control are linked to gender differences in delinquency. Male subcultural delinquency may simply be a vestigial social trait, making male subcultural delinquents the social dinosaurs of a passing, more patriarchal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, Indigenous lobbies have pointed a harsh finger at the endemic overrepresentation of Indigenous individuals in prisons in Canada and abroad. In reaction to such a condemnatory critique, correctional authorities in Canada have sought to ‘aboriginalize’ prisons. This paper addresses some of the prison's adaptation schemes to shed light on three contradictory logics of risk-based management: (1) high-risk aboriginal offenders have little access to risk-reducing programmes; (2) aboriginality undergoes an ontological mutation that occurs during the process of risk assessment; and (3) aboriginal correctional staff play a contradictory role in the (re)production of ‘aboriginal risk’. To what extent, then, does the aboriginalization of prisons constitute a valuable transformation? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the widespread use of conditions in various phases of the criminal justice system (e.g. bail, probation, parole), there has been little theoretical examination of their purposes or the implications associated with their use. This paper extends the theoretical discussion of women prisoners' reintegration by focusing on parole conditions as a form of 'targeted governance'. Using national data on federally sentenced female offenders in Canada, it shows how parole boards constitute the female parolee as a fractured subject consisting of various 'risk/need factors' to which parole conditions are applied. It also considers how conditions are techniques of targeted governance that exemplify an integrated exercise of penal power, which is simultaneously productive and repressive: conditions help prepare women prisoners for freedom' on parole by mobilizing particular techniques of self-governance, while at the same time operate as modes of surveillance that police the boundaries of acceptable conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A thorough-going ambiguity surrounds the very meaning of racial profiling at the border This ambiguity, including in particular the slippage between race/nationality, effectively enables both official denials of racial profiling as well as the continued play of racialized risk knowledges at the border. In this paper, we take this ambiguity seriously and trace the dynamic and heterogeneous configurations of racialized knowledges that constitute border risks and that shape the broad discretion of frontline border control officers in Canada. This discretion, emboldened by the crime-security nexus, is itself shaped by a protectionist logic that represents the nation as 'damsel in distress', border officers as her guardians and the border as the thin blue line in need of constant vigilance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on research from Canada's two operating drug treatment courts, this paper explores the relationship between therapy and law, revealing a network in which expert knowledges are freed from expert actors. This uncoupling allows for the translation of the goals and interests of legal and therapeutic actors involved in the court. This uncoupling affects the ways in which both justice and therapy are imagined and articulated in these settings. While the bid to cure the criminal addict is often assumed to be a benevolent and progressive alternative to incarceration, the analysis reveals that therapeutic enterprise has decidedly punitive effects, amplifying control and erasing protections in the name of curing the offender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among modern exclusionary strategies (state sponsored or otherwise), prison segregation—the isolation of individuals from general inmate populations—is a particularly camouflaged form of exclusion with considerable impact on identity formation. Drawing from extensive documentary and nominal sources, as well as 45 interviews with women having experienced segregation in Canadian prisons from 1995 to 2003, this paper argues that the regimented and predictable time-space continuum of the prison's ‘ordinary’ life flies into pieces in segregation where (1) arbitrary timeframes, and (2) fluid and frugal spatiality keep women on the margin of collective memory. Such time/space configurations engender a loss of ascendancy on individual and collective sense of time/space, leading to the use of multifarious resistance strategies to negotiate personally suitable identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garland (2000; 2001) suggests that the liberal elite in the United Kingdom and the United States no longer sees itself as isolated from the everyday effects of crime. The result of this new experience of crime, he suggests, is that support among the liberal elite for punitive segregation is no longer lower than that of other citizens. In this paper, we look at Canadian evidence relevant to these two propositions. Data from national surveys are supportive of the analysis that David Garland presents for the decline in support for rehabilitative, reintegrative, or correctionalist crime control strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence from a study of Canadian bail hearings that suggests that, unlike new penology predictions, the disciplinary focus of the courts has not been totally displaced by risk reasoning. Our analysis reveals that individualized, moral assessments of accused persons have a strong influence on remand decisions. Accused persons who receive a negative personality assessment by the police are much more likely to be detained than those who receive neutral assessments. Our analysis also reveals that these subjective character evaluations help explain racial differences in the likelihood of pre-trial detention. Furthermore, rather than ‘managing risk’, our findings reveal that the detention of accused persons is a rather important resource that the prosecution uses to encourage (or coerce) guilty pleas from accused persons. Those accused who are not held in pre-trial custody, by contrast, are much more likely to have all of their charges withdrawn by the prosecution. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details how a subset of women can perceive of prison as temporary refuge from the hardships and marginalization they face on the outside. It focuses particularly on a group of 88 women incarcerated in western Canada. A large percentage of these women accentuated several reasons why they saw being incarcerated as a desirable alternative to their marginalized situation in their respective communities. These findings nuance our understanding of the place of prison in the lives of these women and draws attention to notable gaps in Canada's often-celebrated social welfare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pro-charging policies were implemented in Canada in the 1980s to denounce intimate partner violence (IPV). Since pro-charging policies were implemented, the proportion of men charged remains higher than women charged; however, the proportion of women charged increased dramatically. Little is known about the gendered differences in charging decisions in IPV cases. Utilizing a sample of 1,708 accused charged in IPV cases, logistic regression was employed to examine the influence of accused gender on the number of charges laid and the type of primary offence accused were charged with. The findings reveal there are differences between male- and female-perpetrated violence or responses to their violence, requiring more investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of criminologists are urging their peers to engage the general public concerning criminal justice issues in order to reverse the discipline's marginalization and curb the recent intensification of punitive policies. This study examines the practical implementation of public criminology's pedagogical practices in a sample of Canadian news media on a recent 'tough-on-crime' legislation. Overall, this study found that the 'void' of criminological evidence in mass media, which is so often lamented in the calls to public scholarship, was entirely absent. The author argues that the call to public criminology is already being answered by stakeholders outside of the academy, whose mass-mediated pedagogical practices are directed towards the furtherance of partisan agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that 'street codes' often govern behaviour and violence in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. However, little is known about what happens to established street codes in a context of massive neighbourhood change. Our research in Regent Park, Canada's oldest and largest public housing neighbourhood currently undergoing neighbourhood restructuring, suggests that the displacement of 'major criminal players' from the neighbourhood has eroded the long-established codes of conduct they enforced and has undermined informal systems of criminal governance in the neighbourhood. As a consequence, young people express concern over what they perceive to be a growing preponderance of violence in the context of a competitive rush to fill a power vacuum created by the displacement of neighbourhood 'old heads'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Canadian government announced its decision to close six federal prison farms. Although the programme only impacted about 300 prisoners, the decision sparked the creation of a social movement dedicated to fighting to keep the farms operational, and the closures became a sizeable news story in Canada. We argue that actors on both sides of the farm closure issue used it as fuel for staging and capitalizing on a political penal drama. Our findings suggest conservatives do not have a monopoly over using penal dramas to achieve political and social aims and that penal dramas can be extremely productive--well beyond debates over prisoners and prisons. Thus, penal dramas help us capture the nuanced orientation of a particular penal field, which cannot be understood apart from its cast of interested actors or the national, state/provincial or local contexts in which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an environment of fiscal constraint and growing fear of catastrophic events, police services are turning to intelligence and analytic technologies to conduct aggressive information gathering and risk analysis. The present study uses 86 in-depth interviews and participant observation to explore the integration and utilization of intelligence-led policing (ILP) in a Canadian context. From this analysis, we identify how police cultures, organizational context and situational pace of policing constrain an intelligence-led framework. Further, we illustrate how police services have rhetorically adopted ILP and translated it to mean accountability in a time of austerity. By translating ILP, Canadian police services have been able to redefine success within their services without necessarily attending to the outcomes of their practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workplace safety is undergoing a process of 'responsibilization'. While employers have traditionally been the target of health and safety law, workers are increasingly assigned greater responsibility for their own safety at work and are held accountable, judged, and sanctioned through this lens. This is illustrated through an analysis of the rationales and mentalities of a new ticketing regulatory system in Canada whereby workers are targeted for sanctions and blamed for health and safety violations. Under the responsibilization strategy of health and safety, workers are not only re-defined as both potential victims and offenders but they also find themselves forced to adapt a rights-defined identity. This is a significant albeit subtle shift that paves the way for a host of new projects that strive to reveal the discourses and techniques that define and characterize individual responsibilization in health and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-legal and feminist theorists argue that law varies inversely with relational distance (Black 1976; Rapaport 1991). Relational distance is not static, however, and so law may increase or decrease in tandem with changes in relationships. Similarly, various theoretical perspectives predict that defendants who victimize intimate partners from whom they are estranged will be punished more severely than defendants who victimize current partners. Drawing from this work, I examine whether 'separation' killings attract harsher sanctions than 'intact' killings. Using 144 cases of intimate femicide that occurred in Toronto, Canada, my results demonstrate that offenders who kill estranged partners are treated more severely than those who kill current partners. Discussing possible interpretations of this differential legal treatment, I highlight assumptions that may underlie such a punishment rationale, suggesting avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the emergence of neo-liberal strategies of penal governing in Canadian Women's Prisons in Canada. Responsibilities of state and civil society in crime control; Evaluation of the interpretative politics of empowerment strategies; Influence of feminist and aboriginal knowledge on the depiction of empowerment as a penal strategy.

Investigates a 1992-94 wave in counterfeit credit card frauds in Montreal, Quebec. Influence of crime opportunity changes in motivation; Identification of related offenses; Purpose of the listings; Distinction between counterfeit schemes; Involvement of homogenous offenders; Conditions for successful displacement.

Examines the changing patterns in car theft in Canada. Ratio of recovered and unrecovered stolen vehicles as a reflection of the magnitude of professional and amateur offenses; Yearly variations in the rates of recovered stolen vehicles; Discussion of the jockey and the joyrider models of patterns of vehicle theft.

The article discusses the findings of the survey in working for the improvement in the treatment of women serving in Canadian prisons, and the issues involved in the defense of women in detention. The findings show that women prisoners want control over their own lives and fair and humane treatment as persons. Health was cited as one of their biggest concerns, particularly better food, more appropriate medication, and more fresh air.

Criminologists have been reluctant to pursue the idea that situational factors encourage criminal activity. Following Gibbons's work on 'criminogenic situations', we investigate the 'criminogenic' nature of homelessness. Using data on a sample of homeless youth (N= 390) in Toronto, Canada, we find that a significantly greater proportion of these young people commits offences after, rather than before, leaving home. Moreover, this pattern does not appear to be an effect of age, gender, or the number of previous homeless experiences; instead, it appears to be a result of the current homeless situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]