Contributors

Jillian Baker is a former graduate student and sessional lecturer with the University of Saskatchewan with more than six years of experience in the fields of community-based research and Indigenous literatures. Her work with the university and harm reduction organizations in Saskatoon led her to a Community School Coordinator role in the Saskatoon Public School Division, where she helps to connect youth with community services and agencies. An executive member on the Board of Directors at Str8up: 10,000 Little Steps to Healing Inc., and a facilitator in the Inspired Minds All Nations Creative Writing Program out of the Saskatoon Correctional Centre, Jillian continues to maintain the relationships she began during her doctoral work, and creatively expand upon the programs she facilitates within the correctional system to include visual arts as well as creative writing.

Gillian Balfour is a professor of socio-legal studies and feminist criminology and vice president academic at Thompson Rivers University. She has published widely in areas of sentencing law reform impacts on Indigenous women, the lived experiences of incarceration, the implications of restorative justice in the context of gender-based violence, and the place of organized labour in Canadian women’s prisons. She is currently writing about the rise of colonial carceral feminism in Canada, to explain the continuum between missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the mass incarceration of Indigenous women.

Vicki Chartrand is associate professor in the Sociology Department at Bishop’s University, Québec, and adjunct professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. Her general research background and interests include penal and carceral politics, modern-day colonialism, grassroots justices, and collaborative methodologies. Chartrand recently received a Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQSC) emerging scholars grant to collect and document the initiatives and strategies of Indigenous families and communities to address missing and murdered Indigenous women and explore alternative grassroots justices. Other research has included pedagogy and abolition, women and prison release, institutional violence, and prison education. She is a founding member of the Centre for Justice Exchange, a collective of academics, students, and other individuals who seek to advance more inclusive justices.

James Delorme is a member of the Cowessess First Nation, located in southeastern Saskatchewan in Treaty 4 territory. He is the chair of the Aboriginal Wellness Committee at Mission Institution, a correctional facility in Mission, British Columbia, where he is currently serving a life sentence. He has been working with Elders employed by Correctional Service Canada since 1989.

Jeff Ewert, a Métis, is currently incarcerated at La Macaza Institution, a medium-security federal penitentiary located in the Laurentian Mountains in Québec, where he is serving two life sentences simultaneously.

Paul Hachey, who is Métis, is presently serving time at Mountain Institution, a medium-security facility located near the town of Agassiz, in British Columbia’s upper Fraser Valley.

Mark Jackson is an associate professor of human geography in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. He received his PhD in 2007 from the University of Alberta for his work on postcolonial modernity through the cityscape and histories of Calcutta, the work of Walter Benjamin, and postcolonial urbanism. In his current research, Jackson aims to rethink the political and ethical meaning of critique within relational ecologies and under the terms of decoloniality. More broadly, he is interested in how the postcolonial imagination and decolonizing intellectual and practical projects are influenced by, and influence, posthumanisms. Jackson is the series editor of Routledge Research in Decoloniality and New Postcolonialisms, the focus of which falls on emerging interdisciplinary postcolonial research in the social sciences and humanities.

Charles Jamieson is a Kanyen’kehà:ka (Mohawk) and a member of the Six Nations of Grand River, whose reserve lies in southwestern Ontario, near Ohsweken. He is imprisoned at Matsqui Institution, in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

El Jones is a spoken word poet, an educator, journalist, and a community activist living in African Nova Scotia. She was the fifth Poet Laureate of Halifax from 2013 to 2015 and, in 2016, a recipient of the Burnley “Rocky” Jones human rights award for her community work and work in prison justice. She is a co-founder of the Black Power Hour, a live radio show on CKDU that creates space for incarcerated people to share their creative work and discuss contemporary social and political issues. In addition, she has supported women in Nova Institution in writing and sharing their voices. In 2021, she joined the faculty at Mount Saint Vincent University, in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. She is the author of Abolitionist Intimacies (Fernwood Publishing, 2022). She would like to pay tribute to the many nameless and unrecognized women whose work makes it possible for her to be here today.

David B. MacDonald is a mixed race (Indo-Trinidadian and Scottish) political scientist from Treaty 4 territory and is a professor at the University of Guelph. He has held faculty positions at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the Graduate School of Management (Paris, France). He has a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics. His work focuses on comparative Indigenous politics in Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Trinidad and Tobago. He has also worked extensively in the areas of international relations, American foreign policy, genocide studies, and critical race theory. He is the author of The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation (University of Toronto Press, 2019).

Chevelle Malcolm is a recent graduate of the University of New Brunswick, holding a degree in biology and philosophy. As a child growing up in Jamaica, her passion for reading classical and Caribbean literature cultivated a love of writing and storytelling. She began writing poetry at the age of ten and used her poetry as a means of self-expression. As a woman of faith, she is very passionate about social justice and morality, writing poetry to champion the cause of the marginalized groups in society. While studying at the University of New Brunswick, she became an award-winning poet and a frequent reader at community events supporting black communities and commemorating missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Chevelle finds pleasure in every opportunity to use her poetry to bring awareness, empowerment and healing.

Clint Augustine McIntosh is a man of mixed Scots and French-Cree heritage who has been convicted twice of armed robbery, reckless discharge of a firearm, unlawful confinement, and possession of a prohibited weapon. He received seven years for these offences.

Carmela Murdocca is the York Research Chair in reparative and racial justice and professor in the Department of Sociology at York University. She is appointed to graduate programs in sociology, socio-legal studies, and social and political thought. Her research examines the intersections of racialization, criminalization, and the social and legal politics of repair, redress, and reparations.

Pamela Palmater is a Mi’kmaw lawyer, professor, and Indigenous rights activist from Ugpi’ganjig (Eel River Bar First Nation). She holds the position of professor and chair in Indigenous governance at Toronto Metropolitan University where she focuses her research on Indigenous rights and sovereignty, police brutality and corruption, and human rights generally. She is also the award-winning creator and host of three podcasts: the Warrior Life podcast about Indigenous land defenders, water protectors, and advocates; the Warrior Kids podcast which seeks to educate young children about Indigenous cultures; and the Criminal on Patrol podcast, which exposes the dark side of policing. 

Kim Pate was appointed to the Senate of Canada on 10 November 2016. First and foremost, the mother of Michael and Madison, and partner to Pam, she is also a nationally renowned advocate who has spent more than 40 years working in and around the legal and penal systems of Canada, with and on behalf of some of the most marginalized, victimized, criminalized, and institutionalized—particularly imprisoned youth, men, and women. Senator Pate strongly believes that the contributions of those who have experienced marginalization, discrimination, and oppression should be recognized and respected and she seeks to credit and empower all accordingly. She maintains contact with folks in prison through her numerous visits to Canada’s federal prisons and strongly encourages other advocates, scholars, service providers, judges, and parliamentarians to ground their efforts in a similar way.

Justin Piché is associate professor in the Department of Criminology and director of the Carceral Studies Research Collective at the University of Ottawa. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (www.jpp.org), co-founder of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, (www.cp-ep.org) and investigator for the Carceral Cultures research initiative (https://www.carceralculturescarcerales.ca).

Lorinda Riley holds a joint appointment with Native Hawaiian and Indigenous Health at the Office of Public Health Studies and Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge within the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa. She is the acting head of the Native Hawaiian and Indigenous Health Specialization. Her research focuses on healing historical trauma, Indigenous research sovereignty, and laws and policies related to Indigenous wellbeing. Specifically, she is interested in the impact of the western criminal justice system on Indigenous communities and uplifting Indigenous restorative approaches in the justice system. Her work takes an interdisciplinary and community-engaged approach to working with and supporting communities as they find solutions to problems and strengthen their community.

Viviane Saleh-Hanna is professor in the Department of Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She is an author, professor, and scholar who for almost two decades worked with prisoners in Canada, the United States, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, and Egypt to support their struggles against legal, health, reproductive, racial, gendered, economic, and social injustices. At the turn of this century, she was living in Nigeria and researching the punishing architecture of slavery documented and preserved in European slave dungeons, detention centers, and prisons built in Nigeria, Benin, and Ghana. Her book Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria (2008) was the first to make available first-hand accounts and daily experiences of people imprisoned in West African prisons. More recently, her work centers and articulates Black Feminist Hauntology (2015), Structurally Abusive Race-Relationships (2017), and Wild Seed Justice (2023). Guided by the teachings of the Center for Indigegogy at Wilfred Laurier University, she has been involved in collectives for north African language and cultural revivals that seek to bring north African Blackness into a space of empowerment for Indigenous north African Egyptians—ⲛⲓⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ—the people of the Black Soil. Her work with ⲙⲁ’ⲁⲧ the ⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ Goddess of Justice is forthcoming.

Josephine Savarese is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at St. Thomas University, in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Josephine completed graduate work in law at McGill University and in women’s studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. In 2022, she co-edited the book Mothers Who Kill (Demeter Press) with Charlotte Beyer. In addition to her research and scholarship around missing, marginalized, and criminalized persons, she is an active member of the Coalition Against Prison Expansion in New Brunswick.

Jeff Shantz is a writer, poet, photographer, artist, and organizer with decades of participation in community movements and as a rank-and-file workplace activist. He is a full-time faculty member in the department of criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) on the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Kwantlen, Musqueam, Katzie, Semiahmoo, Tsawwassen, Qayqayt, and Kwikwetlem peoples. He is the founder of the Critical Criminology Working Group and a co-founding member of the Social Justice Centre at KPU, where he is lead researcher on the Anti-Poverty/Criminalization/Social War Policing project. Shantz is the author and editor of more than twenty books, including Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online Anarchy (with co-author Jordon Tomblin, Zero Books, 2014).

Stands with the Wolves (Nolan Turcotte) is Plains Cree, from the Flying Dust First Nation, located not far from Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, in Treaty 6 territory. He is presently incarcerated at the Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security facility near Bath, Ontario.

Kevin Walby is associate professor and former Chancellor’s Research Chair in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg. His research interests include representations of crime and criminality, as well as policing, security, and surveillance and freedom of information law. He is co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons and a project leader at the University of Winnipeg’s Cultural Studies Research Group.

Andrew Woolford is professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba and former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Among numerous other publications, he is the author of This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in Canada and the United States. (2015), as well as the co-editor (with Jeff Benvenuto) of Canada and Colonial Genocide (2017). He is currently working on two community-based research projects with residential school survivors: Embodying Empathy, which will design, build, and test a virtual Indian Residential School to serve as a site of knowledge mobilization and empathy formation; and Remembering Assiniboia, which focuses on commemoration of the Assiniboia Residential School. He is currently engaged in a project on human and other-than-human relations within genocidal processes under the title “Genocide with Nature.”