Decolonizing prisons: Indigenized programming and a critique of critical prison studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical prison studies (CPS) is increasingly influential in scholarly discussions about decolonizing prisons. Proponents of CPS largely oppose the idea that cultural prison programs are decolonial, which include courses teaching Indigenous cultures and colonial history, prisons facilitating spirituality, involving Elders and communities in rehabilitation, and specialized prisons called "healing lodges." Most CPS scholars writing on the topic disparage these initiatives as assimilationist and thus a weapon of cultural genocide. For these scholars, decolonizing prisons is impossible. CPS arguments against Indigenized programming are premised on abolitionist theory rather than a discernible decolonial method centring the perspectives of Indigenous peoples affected by prisons. I explore the accuracy and utility of CPS scholars' arguments against Indigenized programming, drawing from 587 interviews with incarcerated men and women detained inside six prisons across Western Canada. Almost 40% of these participants identified as Indigenous. Indigenous interviewees nearly universally praised Indigenized programs for how they can help heal and empower those affected by colonial violence. Participants desired more cultural programming and easier access to such resources. More research is needed on how prisons develop and implement cultural programming, but existing empirical works suggest that these initiatives, while flawed, support the dignity of incarcerated Indigenous peoples. My critique is a call for criminologists writing on Indigenous issues to consider the ambiguity and tensions of decolonial processes and to premise their arguments foremost on methods centring Indigenous peoples affected by incarceration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".