Handing Over the Keys

Generations of Indigenous families and communities have experienced carceral injustice at the hands of the state. Widespread criticism calls Canadian prisons the new residential schools and Australian ones a national tragedy. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the government itself has suggested Māori may be the most incarcerated people in the world. Handing over the Keys compares the policies of three countries with settler-colonial contexts that drive the hyper-imprisonment of Indigenous people.

Intergenerational imprisonment – the legacies of institutional confinement in an array of settings – leaves a long shadow. Linda Mussell draws on decolonizing research to seek the keys to transformative change. In this book, she unpacks current research and policy approaches, and then centres the voices of those most affected through interviews with people who have lived experience of imprisonment, as well as frontline practitioners and policy professionals.

Handing over the Keys is a carefully developed critical analysis that points the way toward policy transformation to address both Indigenous hyper-imprisonment and intergenerational impacts. What do people closest to this issue think? What responsibility does the state have, and what state action is appropriate? This urgently needed study proposes ways to hand over the keys that unlock the doors of confinement for generations to come.