Recent news stories, inquests, and human rights tribunal decisions have highlighted the harmful impacts of incarceration on individuals and communities.

Hosted by Osgoode’s Journal of Law and Social Policy, this day-long symposium brought together people with lived experience, legal and academic experts, community organizers, harm reduction workers, and students.

Topics included:

  • specific forms of incarceration such as pre-trial remand, solitary confinement, immigration detention, and psychiatric detention
  • the disproportionate impact of incarceration on racialized and Indigenous peoples
  • the place of prison law in law schools
  • legal and non-legal strategies for reducing the harms of incarceration; and
  • looking ahead to prison abolition.

Students, professionals, activists, and community members were all encouraged to attend. We hope that this day presented an opportunity to create connections, foster continued mobilization, identify key research questions, and develop concrete initiatives to respond to the issues raised by incarceration in settler-colonial Canada.

The editors plan to publish a special issue of the JLSP on prison law, justice, and abolition arising from this symposium and other interested contributors (submissions are due August 1, 2019, please see Call for Submissions menu  above for more information.)

Sponsored by:

  Jack & Mae Nathanson CentreYCPPL LogoOsgoode Hall Law UnionCriminal Law Society