Prison Abolition for Collective Freedom: Facilitating Co-Resistance to Binary Colonial Prisons

Canada’s binary prison system is a product of prison reforms that aimed to be attentive to what has been presumed to be innate differences between men and women. More recently, however, the binary structure of prisons has been troubled by a new era of trans rights recognitions. While penal actors are now grappling with how to include and accommodate Two-Spirit and trans people within this context, a review of the history of women’s incarceration in Canada brings to light how the division of men’s and women’s prisons has always been a tool of social control. While binary prisons are institutionalised sites of trans oppression, binary prisons should likewise be understood as an affront to Indigenous sovereignty as they impose a colonial understanding of gender within an institution where Indigenous peoples are mass incarcerated. This paper explores how the introduction of trans rights into Canadian prisons is situated with respect to Canada’s ongoing history of gendered colonialism. Tracing the shift in prisons reforms, from those that established a rigid dichotomomous understanding of men/women to the more recent mandate to recognise and accomodate gender diversity, brings to light how this system of punishment is intimately connected to experiences of oppression and dispoesssion under the Western gender system. By bringing together feminist, trans, and Indigenous critiques of prisons, this paper illuminates shared struggles and shared investments in moving towards prison abolition in the pursuit of collective freedom.