Parole for life: A qualitative inquiry into the Canadian life sentence
Date
2024
Authors
Kish, Nicole
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Abstract
Life sentences in Canada punish individuals until their deaths, constituting the harshest sentence permissible under the Criminal Code. Canadian life sentences are presently among the harshest versions of life imprisonment globally. There is a dearth of research into life sentences and their impacts in the Canadian context. To address this, this thesis presents the findings of a qualitative study that considers 19 interviews with life sentenced people in Canada who are living in the community on parole for life. It draws from standpoint theory and thematic analysis as its methodological approach, centering the experiences of people with the sentence, then broadens to locate individual experiences within the legislative and policy framework that they are embedded within and socially organized by. This approach highlights the ways that life sentences constitute an opaquely administered sentencing regime that is operating in conflict with the listed goals and limits of Canada’s prison system. The goal of Canada’s prison system is to be reintegrative, yet through the administration of the sentence, life sentenced people are both expected to and prevented from reaching this goal. This liberatory research roots analysis in critical legal and political theory, centering the impacts of law in society. It demonstrates that the conditions of parole-for-life are operating without procedural safeguards, fracturing families and creating invisible isolation in the community in particularly harmful manners for Indigenous Peoples, and for the many very young people who are given live sentences in Canada. Building on Agamben’s concept of states of exception, parole-for-life is explored as a rising status of exclusion, pronouncing not just the adverse impacts this status creates for those who are subjected to it, but also the power potentialities that the increasing normalization and presence of this status provides to the state. Broadly, findings offer that the presence of perpetual punishment is changing the nature of the relationship between citizen and state. Practical policy and legislative solutions are offered, emphasizing the need to legislate a process to terminate life sentence parole after a successful behavioral period is demonstrated in the community, which is aligned with international human rights law and the practices of many countries globally.
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life sentences, prison, incarceration in Canada, offender, parole, community re-entry, community reentry, reintegration, Indigenous, law, critical jurisprudence, critical legal theory, socio-legal, qualitative, Canada, life imprisonment, marginalization, Agamben, state of exception, bare life, social death