What is a crime and how do we construct it? The answers to these questions are complex and entangled in a web of power relations that require us to think differently about processes of criminalization and regulation. This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged. It explores the dynamic interplay between practices of representation, processes of criminalization, and the ways that these circulate to both reflect and constitute crime and "justice."

Following the Second World War, liberal nation-states sought to address injustices of the past. Canada's government began to consider its own implication in various past wrongs, and in the late twentieth century it began to implement reparative justice initiatives for historically marginalized people. Yet despite this shift, there are more Indigenous and racialized people in Canadian prisons now than at any other time in history. Carmela Murdocca examines this disconnect between the political motivations for amending historical injustices and the vastly disproportionate reality of the...