ABSTRACT
In the 1990s alone, federal prison populations increased by 25% and provincial prison populations by a further 15%. Despite common perception to the contrary, the Canadian prison population is disproportionately large relative to other comparable societies. Significant discrepancies between indigenous and non-indigenous incarceration rates can be found consistently across all provincial and territorial jurisdictions in Canada, but the degree of disproportion increases significantly in the West and in the Territories of the North. In the history of Anglo-American settler colonialism the extension of criminal jurisdiction has long been central to the subjugation and displacement of indigenous polities. One feature of prevailing discourses on prisons that serves to propagate a certain occlusion of its colonial dimension is the persistent language of "over-representation" and "racial disproportion," an idiom one can find even in the most critical camps. Over-representation is a highly ambiguous and malleable idiom, susceptible to multiple interpretations and easily rendered into diverse programs for action.
