Red Zones

‘A brilliant contribution to criminal law and criminal law theory! In their remarkable empirical and legal study on Red Zones, Marie-Eve Sylvestre and her colleagues, Nicholas Blomley and Céline Bellot, show how the quotidian forms of law’s technical practices - such as bail and probation supervision - have a momentous impact on the administration of the criminal law, on punishment practices, and on our own understandings and expectations of justice. Chock full of insights about how these practices function to regulate the poor and create both spatial and temporal effects that make rights arguments and resistance far more difficult, Red Zones is a must read for anyone studying criminal law, criminal law theory, and policing.’ Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia University‘A huge contribution to criminology and to urban geography, this book shows, with vast amounts of data, that low-level judicial proceedings such as bail act in a dysfunctional manner by imposing unrealistic spatial prohibitions on those who most need to access services and friends in stigmatized downtown areas. The far-ranging empirical research, carried out mainly in Vancouver and Montreal, is of great relevance not only across Canada but throughout North America, since the practice of imposing ‘red zones’ (spatial prohibitions) through probation, parole and other lower-court and police mechanisms has become ubiquitous.’ Mariana Valverde, University of Toronto‘Red Zones is a highly original and ground-breaking book that compellingly reveals how marginalized peoples are increasingly governed through territory and time via criminal law and justice processes. Its rare combination of legal theory and rich empirical data will appeal to legal scholars, criminologists and geographers alike.’ Randy K. Lippert, University of Windsor

Marie-Eve Sylvestre is Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa and holds the Research Chair on Criminal Law and Policy and the Regulation of Marginalized People. She is also the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and co-leads the Ottawa Hub for Harm Reduction. She currently acts as Justice Expert for the Commission of Inquiry into the relationships between Indigenous People and Public Services in Quebec. Her research focuses on the criminalization and regulation of poverty and social conflicts in urban public spaces, as well as their alternatives.

Nicholas Blomley is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He is interested in the spatiality of legal practices and relationships, and the worldmaking consequences of such legal geographies. Much of his empirical work concerns the often oppressive effects of legal relations on marginalized and oppressed people. He is the author or co-editor of five books, including Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (1994) and Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow (2010).

Céline Bellot is Director of the Social Work School at the Université de Montréal and Director of the Observatory on Profiling (Observatoire des profilages). She is the Chair of the Center on Poverty and Social Exclusion (Centre sur la pauvreté et l’exclusion sociale) and the Committee on the State of Homelessness. She holds a Ph.D. in Criminology and her research focuses on issues of criminalization of poverty, including homeless populations, Indigenous populations, drug users and street youth.