Consuming Punishment in Canada: Law, Crime and Justice in Canadian Prison Cinema

Abstract

This paper reports the findings from a qualitative study of Canadian films about prisons and punishment over the past 70 years using popular criminology as a conceptual and analytic framework. We show that shifts in cinematic representation of the prison and punishment within Canada reflected both the evolution of professional, legal, and academic understandings of the purpose of punishment in society, as well as government cultural policies that shaped the possibilities for a Canadian national cinema in the shadow of Hollywood. The dominance of documentary cinema within Canadian regulatory and funding frameworks in much of the twentieth century fostered, at times, critical cultural engagements with the prison. More recently, however, regulatory shifts and commercial imperatives in the streaming era and proximity to the US market have spawned less critical and more conventional, generic depictions that reproduce Hollywood tropes and stereotypes while neglecting the social costs of prisons and the colonial roots of mass incarceration of Indigenous peoples in Canada.