A call to replace Canada’s incarceration model, which has proven destructive, discriminatory, expensive, counterproductive, and — most of all — unnecessary.Imprisonment developed in the Western world as the punishment to suit all offences, from violent assault to victimless drug use. Centuries ago, incarcerating convicts represented progress on society’s part, since it came as a replacement for capital punishment, maiming, and torture.Our current model — ta...

Just outside Toronto, a 14-year-old Canadian girl was auctioned on the internet for men to purchase by the hour. A young woman was taken by slave traders from an African war zone to Edmonton to earn greater profits by exploiting her in prostitution. A gang called Wolfpack recruited teenagers in Quebec and sold them for sex to high-profile men in the community.The global problem of human trafficking is only beginning to be recognized in Canada, even though it has been hidden in plai...

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seem...

Politicians and the media may claim that youth gangs are an American export, but the truth, says youth-gang expert Michael C. Chettleburgh, is that Canada has been cultivating its own homegrown gang culture for years. And gang culture isn’t relegated to Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver—it’s also in Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Halifax and Hobbema, Alberta. It includes not only poor black kids but privileged white youth, First Nations and Southeast Asian teens in large and small communities across C...

What's going on with Canada's police? Once an institution that commanded respect and trust, the police are now widely regarded with skepticism and even suspicion. The dramatic death of Robert Dziekanski at the hands of the RCMP at Vancouver's airport, accusations of racial profiling, and the resistance of police to independent civilian oversight have created the impression of organizations and individuals accountable to no one and above the law.For the past twenty years, John Sewel...

New Revised and Expanded Edition available now!!Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned survei...

Real cases from the Supreme Court dealing with youth issues.Laws, as they relate to youth and youth issues, can be difficult to understand for those they are intended to serve. In the first book of the Understanding Canadian Law series, author Daniel J. Baum breaks down the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions relating to youth in plain language intended for readers of all ages.Drawing on examples from recent Supreme Court rulings, Youth and the Law walks t...

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and p...

Crime is tearing South Africa apart. Whether it is hijacking or rape, a home robbery or a husband's explosion of rage, violence is so common that few lives have been left untouched by it. The result is a society deformed by its fears. Closeted behind locked doors and high walls, panic buttons at the ready, members of the middle class live lives haunted by fear. The poor, who are both more likely to be victimised and less able to secure themselves, are just as traumatised. A Country at War ...

A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars.“Somewhere among the anger, mourning and malice that Policing the Black Man documents lies the pursuit of justice. This powerful book demands our fierce attention.” —Toni MorrisonPolicing the Blac...

According to Statistics Canada, all crime rates -- including violent crime -- have been trending downward over the last twenty years. Yet the Harper government continues to insist Canadians are in the midst of a crime epidemic. This is their rationale for spending billions on new prisons, and for legislation that will put thousands more behind bars and increase the likelihood that young Canadians will have criminal records.In this book, author Paula Mallea lays out the evidence tha...

The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb...