Abstract
Despite playing a pivotal role in thousands of criminalized people's experiences with the criminal legal system every year, the nature, workings, and consequences of community-based orders (e.g., probation, bail) and associated conditions of supervision have remained neglected by scholars working on issues of Canadian penality, law, and justice. Internationally, community-based forms of supervision, too, remain under-studied, at least when compared to research on (mass) incarceration. Grounded in socio-legal theorizations of space and time, Red Zones: Criminal Law and the Territorial Governance of Marginalized People provides an empirical investigation of the nature, frequency, magnitude, and consequences of release conditions tied to bail, probation, and conditional sentences across three Canadian urban centres (Vancouver, Toronto, and Montréal). Written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, the main thrust of the book is to show how conditions of release, via particular strategies of territorialization (i.e., legal and penal practices that govern criminalized people by imposing specific spatio-temporal configurations), “create powerful techniques of regulation and governance directed at marginalized people” (p. 13). The authors draw attention to the multiple ways release conditions affect the individual—how they bear down on marginalized people's lives, mobilities, choices, and ways of being—and how they systematically shape the workings and underlying logics of our legal and penal institutions. Red Zones represents both a central contribution to Canadian criminological and socio-legal scholarship, and bears significant relevance for the literature on punishment, supervision, rights and law internationally.
Existing studies have consistently shown that conditions tied to community-based supervision keep a tight grip on people's lives, and that they constitute forms of punishment rather than alternatives to it (see e.g., McNeill, 2019). Red Zones provides further evidence of the punitive character of bail and probation, while expanding existing theorizations and knowledge on penal surveillance and supervision in the community in two notable ways: First, drawing on critical legal geographers’ work on space and time, the book offers a novel theoretical framework that serves to illuminate the spatio-temporal workings and effects of release conditions. The authors conceptualize court orders tied to bail and probation as forms of “territorialization” (p. 29) that organize and regulate people's time, mobility, relationships, and conduct, and that frequently result in people's bodies being removed from, or contained within certain spaces or “zones”. Beyond their corporeal effects, conditions produce a set of relational consequences; they can lead to the “cutting” of social relations and networks, while rendering people visibly exposed to formal social and legal control. By examining conditions through the lens of the effects of “territorialization”, Red Zones both expands and refines existing knowledge on community-based supervision by highlighting how court orders function as corporal forms of power, “acting on bodies, containing, directing, or excluding them” (p. 35).
As a second contribution, Red Zones provides nuanced insight into the intersecting operations of policing, courts, and prison institutions, and how they play out, individually and collectively, in the context of people's tightly regulated lives in the community. The authors demonstrate how police and prosecutors shuffle bodies between different spaces or “territories”—the streets, jails, probation offices, and so on—that, while situated outside the prison proper, are commonly experienced by criminalized people as part of a “carceral continuum” (p. 55). I particularly appreciated and enjoyed the authors’ focus on the role of the courts when they explain how “[courts] have directly contributed to the expansion of the criminal justice system itself” (p. 104) by manufacturing and imposing penalties related to the broad category of “Administration of Justice Offences” (AJOs, such as failure to comply with a court order or breach of probation). Because courts remain a neglected aspect of studies of community supervision, the authors’ socio-legal knowledge and explanations of the court processes were particularly valuable, as were the empirical insights into how legal actors have come to justify and normalize the imposition of far-reaching and harmful conditions. Red Zones expands our legal and empirical understanding of the significant role of AJOs in the larger legal system: AJOs are often resolved by guilty plea, limiting people's due process rights; they significantly account for increases in admissions to remand custody; and they expose people to ongoing contact with the criminal legal system. Overall, Red Zones is exemplary for the ways it illuminates attention to the (inter-)workings of the police, the courts, and the prison system, dissecting how the ‘penal state’ works in the lives of criminalized people.
In addition to invigorating and expanding our understanding of community-based supervision, Red Zones offers several other key strengths. First, it is notable for its empirical breadth, which it achieves without compromising on empirical depth, richness, and nuance. The Introduction (Chapter 1) provides a glimpse into the breadth of the project when the authors introduce to us three of their research participants: Martine from Montréal whose life world illustrates the punitive consequences of the tight spatio-temporal grip of probation and bail; Paul from Vancouver whose story draws attention to the ways bail supervision can entrap people in a spiral of arrest and enhanced surveillance; and Zora, a graduate student from Toronto who also suffered the consequences of a punitive bail system in the context of experiencing criminalization at the G20 Summit. The authors skillfully show the connecting thread among these different stories—the ways conditions produce “red zones” or, in other words, spaces (often including large parts of urban areas) that people are legally prohibited from entering —while providing us with empirical detail on three inter-related, yet different, contexts for understanding legal and punitive supervision.
Following a powerful introduction, Chapter 2 outlines the book's socio-legal framework, focused on territory, space, and time. The remaining chapters provide insight into the history of probation and release conditions (Chapter 3); the frequency and magnitude of release conditions in Canada (Chapter 4); court processes in relation to AJOs and the shifting nature of criminal law (Chapter 5); the perceptions, mentalities, and practices of legal actors, including their justifications for imposing legal territories (Chapter 6); and the nature and consequences of court orders from the perspective of marginalized people under legal supervision (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 moves away from the previous focus on poverty and social marginalization, concentrating instead on “Red Zoning Politics” and specifically on the ways conditions of release play a key role in the regulation of political dissent and access to political spaces. Chapter 8 may initially appear perhaps somewhat disconnected from the book's main focus on social marginalization; however, not only does the Chapter offer insight into a new and fascinating empirical context, but it also contributes to demonstrating the varied and wide-reaching impact of court conditions on different people's lives as well as how such orders shape and often hinder civic and political participation on a societal level.
Second, the book is rigorous and versatile methodologically, drawing from both quantitative and qualitative data. Using a large quantitative data set of court data from Montréal and Vancouver, comprising over 1 million conditions of release across both cities, the authors offer strong evidence of the fact that conditions tied to community supervision have increased in both number and duration, and that the majority of conditions entail some form of spatial restriction, such as banning individuals from certain neighbourhoods, with often harmful consequences for people's ability to access life-affirming services or maintain social relationships and networks. Chapters 6 to 8 draw on qualitative interviews with judges, defense lawyers, and prosecutors, as well as with criminalized subjects. It is not often that we find the perspectives of both legal actors and legal subjects included in one book, and one may be concerned about Red Zones trying to cover perhaps too much ground. The authors, however, manage to provide sufficient empirical richness on both perspectives, enabling us to understand and make sense of how legal actors justify conditions with reference to both punitive and therapeutic ends, and how criminalized subjects, in turn, experience exposure to such conditions.
Third, another strength of the book lies in how it combines theoretical rigor with tangible policy suggestions that are rooted in firm legal understanding and sociological awareness of the ways criminalization and marginalization affect people's life worlds and opportunities. By explaining with nuance and care how the problem of ongoing surveillance and institutional recidivism is a fundamentally manufactured problem (i.e., courts manufacture and create AJOs), the authors stipulate responsibility for the problem at hand,—they show how the courts, the police, and the wider penal system, on their own and collectively, are responsible, and should be held accountable for producing and maintaining ongoing and ever-tightening surveillance in people's lives. While the data demonstrate a rather bleak account of our criminal legal system and due process rights, by explaining the legal and on-the-ground practices by which AJOs come to be, are sustained, justified, and enforced, the authors advance an important discussion on the possibilities of and pathways toward criminal justice reform away from punitive surveillance. They conclude the book with a number of prescriptive policy suggestions in Chapter 9, focused on the reduction of conditions and the importance of protecting legal rights and securing access to legal counsel.
Lastly, the book is exemplary for its inter- and multi-disciplinary approach. The authors’ varying expertise in law, geography, and social work shine through in every chapter. It is the multi-disciplinary approach, knowledge, and expertise to the subject that I would argue enabled the authors of Red Zones to cover a lot of ground without sacrificing on richness, nuance, and cohesiveness. Red Zones is an exemplary and inspirational piece of work that demonstrates the strengths of interdisciplinary scholarship and scholarly collaboration across disciplines.
To summarize, the authors have produced a book that is extremely rich while versatile. The book provides a theoretically stimulating and methodologically rigorous account that will be of interest to inter-disciplinary groups of scholars, including legal and socio-legal researchers, sociologists and criminologists, and critical geographers. The book works well to read as a whole, but could also be assigned in chapters to a graduate or undergraduate class focused on specific topics, such as the history of community-based penalties, the use of conditions, the role of legal actors, and other topics relevant to law and criminology. Red Zones skillfully brings together theory and empirical nuance on community supervision, law and legal geographies, and social marginalization, advancing our understanding of the far-reaching consequences of supervision in the community. I have no doubt scholars of punishment in particular will appreciate the book for its novelty, richness, and methodological rigor.
