Prisoners, Cows and Abattoirs: The Closing of Canada’s Prison Farms as a Political Penal Drama

Abstract

In 2009, the Canadian government announced its decision to close six federal prison farms. Although the programme only impacted about 300 prisoners, the decision sparked the creation of a social movement dedicated to fighting to keep the farms operational, and the closures became a sizeable news story in Canada. We argue that actors on both sides of the farm closure issue used it as fuel for staging and capitalizing on a political penal drama. Our findings suggest conservatives do not have a monopoly over using penal dramas to achieve political and social aims and that penal dramas can be extremely productive—well beyond debates over prisoners and prisons. Thus, penal dramas help us capture the nuanced orientation of a particular penal field, which cannot be understood apart from its cast of interested actors or the national, state/provincial or local contexts in which it is embedded.

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