Containment & COVID-19 in the Settler State: Indigenous Incarceration and Immigration Detention in Canada and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada and Australia each have long histories of containing Indigenous peoples and migrants. The overincarceration of Indigenous peoples continues to worsen in both countries, despite targeted reforms. Migrant detention is on the rise worldwide, with Canada and Australia’s systems understood as among the harshest. This thesis explores why Canada and Australia contain these populations by examining these practices through the lens of contemporary settler colonialism. Like most everything, containment by states has undergone rapid changes as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to understand how COVID-19 impacted those within carceral institutions, and contextualize that treatment within the same settler colonial logics and histories that animate their containment in the first place.\nMy methodology consists of a literature review and a comparative study of Canada and Australia’s responses to COVID-19 in carceral institutions. The literature review summarizes theories of settler colonialism and the settler state, and traces Canada and Australia’s containment practices through to the contemporary overincarceration of Indigenous peoples and detention of migrants. My comparative study utilized publicly available data, media sources, and literature to map the policy responses to COVID-19 in carceral spaces, and interpret the implications of those policies. This data was sourced from published statics from the Canadian and Australian government and affiliated institutions, independent reports from domestic and international bodies, and works published by independent researchers and journalists.\nThis thesis concludes that people held in carceral institutions in both Canada and Australia were severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic beyond the negative impacts felt by the general public. In Australia, while cases of COVID-19 remained low, the rights of those in prisons and immigration detention centres were substantially eroded as a result of the pandemic, and for some even basic sustenance and medical needs were interrupted. In Canada, COVID-19 was rampant in carceral facilities, with higher case counts per 1,000 people among those contained in comparison with the general Canadian population. While finalizing this thesis, COVID-19 remains an active threat to both countries and their incarcerated populations, particularly in the wake of the Delta variant.\nFrom this study, I find that contemporary settler colonial logics work to keep Indigenous peoples and migrants incarcerated and renders them as ‘less grievable’; a framing which ultimately exposed those contained to both a greater risk of infection from the virus, but also maltreatment in the name of public health. Crucially, this understanding of those within carceral facilities as less grievable rendered them less worthy of protection. This apprehension of these lives as less grievable has further allowed Canada and Australia to maintain their domestic and international identity as progressive, liberal democracies, while enforcing decidedly anti-progressive policies within carceral institutions. In spite of this, this study found isolated instances of decarceration, which may one day serve as important precedent on the road to abolition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".