Critical Analysis of Law Workshop: Efrat Arbel

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP

presents

Efrat Arbel
University of British Columbia
Peter A. Allard School of Law

Rethinking the “Crisis” of Indigenous Incarceration

Tuesday, November13, 2018
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park

Canadian courts have long recognized that the over representation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian prisons represents a “crisis” in the criminal justice system. Addressing the persistence of “crisis” in Indigenous corrections, this paper asks: why despite repeated declarations of “crisis” does the problem not only persist, but intensify? In answering this question, paper suggests that while the language of “crisis” accurately captures the severity and urgency of Indigenous mass incarceration, it is ill suited to address the problem at hand. Advocating a shift away from this discursive frame, it unpacks the discourse of “crisis” and the defensive anxieties it both reveals and obscures.

Efrat Arbel is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia Peter A. Allard School of Law. Her primary research interests lie in examining how legal rights are negotiated and defined in liminal legal spaces like the border, the detention center, and the prison. She teaches and publishes in refugee law, prison law, constitutional law, and tort law.  Prior to joining the faculty at UBC, she completed her LLM and SJD at Harvard Law School, and held a postdoctoral appointment at UBC with visiting terms at the Oxford Center for Criminology and the European University Institute. Combining her academic work with legal practice, she is also engaged in advocacy and litigation involving refugee and prisoner rights

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.