Criminalization, Regulation, and Indigenous Resurgence Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering topics on criminalization, racialization, drug policy, involuntary treatment, Land Back, and Indigenous criminology.

Criminalization

The process through which conduct is defined, regulated, and punished as a crime, or the reinterpretation of customary and accepted behavior as an offence against the state.

Trouble Case

A conflict in which people openly ask the formal legal system for help, making legal rules and legal ordering visible.

Labour Discipline

Legal and social pressures—such as criminalizing festivals, drinking, and irregular work habits—designed to push task-based rural populations into punctual, continuous wage labor.

Civilizing Mission

The colonial ideological claim that suppressing Indigenous or subordinated practices would morally improve populations portrayed as inferior, self-indulgent, or disorderly.

Vagrancy Law

Legislation criminalizing unemployment, homelessness, mobility, or lacking visible means of support, frequently used to compel displaced populations into unfree or low-wage labor.

Popular Legal Consciousness

The public's legal understanding and degree of acceptance regarding whether a state law or definition of crime is legitimate.

Pass System

A legal and segregationist policy enforced in Canada from the 1880s through the 1940s that required Indigenous people to obtain an official pass from an Indian agent to leave their reserves.

Race

A social, political, and cultural construction that assigns meaning to real or imagined bodily differences across history and geography, rather than a fixed biological fact.

Racialization

The historical, legal, and social process through which racial meaning is actively produced and attached to specific groups, bodies, practices, or social situations.

Settler Colonialism

A ongoing racial project and structure based on taking Indigenous land, governing Indigenous peoples through administrative and legal systems, and disavowing conquest.

Discourse

A system of knowledge and representation that constructs the concepts, objects, and social rules through which a society understands and speaks about reality.

Orientalism

Edward Said's concept describing the Western system of knowledge and representation that constructed 'the Orient' as an inferior, exotic, and governable opposite to Europe.

Contact Zone

Mary Louise Pratt's term for social spaces where historically separated peoples meet and establish ongoing relations characterized by coercion, radical inequality, and conflict.

Manichean World

Frantz Fanon's concept describing a colonial reality divided into rigid, binary oppositions such as colonizer/colonized, human/subhuman, and civilized/barbaric.

Moral Panic

Stanley Cohen's concept defining an exaggerated or false societal reaction in which a minority group or subculture is constructed as a folk devil threatening social values.

Folk Devil

A person or group symbolically blamed and portrayed as dangerously deviant during a moral panic.

Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci's concept describing how ruling classes maintain political dominance through a combination of physical coercion and winning social consent.

Critical Race Theory

An sociolegal framework establishing that systemic racism is an ordinary feature of society and law, rejecting claims of legal neutrality.

Intersectionality

Kimberlé Crenshaw's analytical framework examining how multiple systems of power and inequality—such as race, gender, class, and sexuality—operate simultaneously.

Collateral Consequences

The indirect legal, economic, and social penalties that follow criminalization, including severe barriers to housing, employment, child custody, and travel.

PRISMA

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses; a standardized framework used to ensure systematic reviews are transparent and reproducible.

PICO Framework

An organizing tool in clinical research data extraction representing Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome.

Susceptibility Bias

A research bias occurring when baseline study groups begin with different levels of health risk or baseline severity, complicating direct comparisons.

Psychiatric Comorbidity

The co-occurrence of a mental health condition alongside a substance use disorder in the same individual.

Decriminalization

The official removal of criminal penalties for specified conduct, such as personal drug possession.

Legal Regulation

A policy model that permits an activity within a state-governed framework for production, distribution, and sale rather than prohibiting it.

Simple Possession

The unauthorized possession of a controlled substance designated strictly for personal use.

Necessity Trafficking

Sharing or selling small quantities of drugs for personal subsistence, covering personal drug-use costs, or sharing safe supply.

Net Widening

A process where a policy reform intended to reduce punishment inadvertently expands state surveillance and legal control over new populations.

Drug Treatment Court (DTC)

A specialized court program combining judicial supervision with mandatory treatment, criticized by advocates for using criminal coercion under the language of care.

Expungement

The permanent removal or destruction of past criminal conviction records so they no longer impose ongoing legal and collateral consequences.

Safe Supply

The provision of regulated, quality-controlled substances of known potency to reduce deaths and harms caused by an unpredictable toxic unregulated supply.

Depenalization

Partial legal reform where conduct remains technically illegal but criminal jail sentences are replaced by fines or administrative measures.

Carceral Care

Healthcare or treatment interventions that operate through compulsory detention, forced confinement, surveillance, discipline, and loss of legal consent.

Bodily Autonomy

The fundamental legal and human right of a person to exercise absolute control over their own body and medical decision-making.

Habeas Corpus

A legal proceeding used to challenge the lawfulness of an individual's detention or forced confinement before a court.

Chemical Restraint

The involuntary administration of medication primarily used to restrict or control a patient's movement or behavior rather than for clinical treatment.

Tolerance

A physiological reduction in bodily response to a drug following repeated use, where a sudden loss of tolerance during forced abstinence elevates overdose risk upon return to use.

Ableism

Systemic discrimination and social structures that devalue disabled individuals or treat specific minds and bodies as defective.

Disability Justice

An intersectional framework connecting disability rights with anti-racism, anti-colonialism, gender liberation, and economic justice.

Land Back

The Indigenous-led regeneration of Indigenous laws, governance, self-determination, and relational accountability on ancestral lands and waters.

Consent-Based Jurisdiction

Territorial governance grounded in Indigenous authority and meaningful legal consent rather than unilateral settler-state control.

Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC)

The international standard establishing that Indigenous peoples must give voluntary, informed approval without state coercion prior to activities affecting their lands or rights.

Rematriation

Restoring Indigenous lands, authority, and relationships using an Indigenous relational framework rather than colonial property concepts.

Nvwoti Asquangododi

A Cherokee phrase translated as 'to keep the medicine going,' representing intergenerational land-based knowledge transmission.

Decentering the State

Reducing reliance on settler-state recognition and instead prioritizing and strengthening community-based Indigenous governance and practices.

Active Witnessing

Sarah Hunt's concept describing the political responsibility to remember, tell the truth, and take direct action against colonial violence rather than remaining a passive observer.

Indigenous Criminology

A decolonial framework grounded in Indigenous knowledges, settler-colonial history, self-determination, and critical analysis of state justice institutions.

Immiseration

The deliberate structural production and maintenance of extreme poverty, economic exclusion, or deprivation among a population.

Indigenisation

Incorporating Indigenous personnel or cultural practices into state institutions without altering the underlying colonial power structure.

Epistemic Violence

The structural harm produced when dominant Eurocentric knowledge systems erase, invalidate, or silence Indigenous ways of knowing.

Silencing Colonialism

The criminological practice of omitting colonial history and structural dispossession from explanations of present-day Indigenous social conditions.

Differential Citizenship

Recognizing that distinct political communities within the same state possess distinct rights, jurisdictional claims, and treaty relationships.

Aboriginal Title

An unextinguished, communal right to land recognized in Canadian legal precedent (such as Delgamuukw) that encompasses territorial use, resource rights, and decision-making.

Drug, Set, and Setting

A framework explaining substance experiences based on the drug's properties (Drug), individual user mindset (Set), and physical/social environment (Setting).