The Prison as Reconciliation? Considering the “Indigenization” of Carceral Spaces in Canada
Press Release
March 10, 2026
IN 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) documented the realities and the longstanding impacts of Indian Residential Schools and released its 94 Calls to Action. Among them was Call to Action 30 that called “upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to commit to eliminating the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in custody over the next decade, and to issue detailed annual reports that monitor and evaluate progress doing so”. To this end, Call to Action 31 recommended that federal and provincial-territorial levels of government “implement and evaluate community sanctions that will provide realistic alternatives to imprisonment for Aboriginal offenders and respond to the underlying causes of offending”. Both recommendations, along with others such as Call to Action 36, which urged these “governments to work with Aboriginal communities to provide culturally relevant services” to Indigenous prisoners, were made as an acknowledgement that imprisonment, like residential schools, is a settler colonial institution that causes great harm to Indigenous peoples through cultural erasure and state violence, necessitating action to reduce the use and consequences of incarceration.
A decade later, the number of Indigenous peoples behind bars continues to grow (Department of Justice, 2024; also see Statistics Canada, 2026), with Indigenous women being the fastest-growing prison population in Canada (Malakieh, 2020; also see McGuire and Murdoch, 2021). Moreover, many jurisdictions across the country, from Nunavut in the North to Ontario in the South, and from Newfoundland and Labrador in the east to British Columbia in the west, have either built or are expanding their capacity to incarcerate (see tables 1 and 2). Taken together, such developments suggest federal and provincial-territorial governments are not only failing to implement Calls to Action 30 and 31, but are engaged in prison expansion, which will make it possible to further entrench the mass incarceration of Indigenous peoples in this country.
In Ontario, the Ministry of the Solicitor General has announced plans to spend billions of dollars on new provincial prison infrastructure (see Faqiri et al., 2025), including expanding the women’s units at the Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee by 91 beds (Ministry of Finance, 2025; also see Piché, 2025). The expansion has been framed as a collaborative initiative with Indigenous communities, emphasizing Indigenous design elements, cultural symbolism, programming rooted in Indigenous traditions, and visible representation through imagery and language. In August 2025, the Ministry of the Solicitor General hosted an Indigenous-focused open house (see Figure 1), inviting participants to help create “culturally meaningful spaces” that reflect Indigenous identity, ceremony, and cultural integrity (Infrastructure Ontario and Stantec, 2025).
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