Citation

Murray SJ, Burgess S, Holmes D. Societes 2017; 136(2): 73-90.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017)

DOI

10.3917/soc.136.0073

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This essay offers a critical rhetorical reading of the death of Ashley Smith, a young woman who died of positional asphyxia when she tied a ligature around her neck while held in solitary confinement. Smith's death was ruled a homicide by the jury in the Coroner's Inquest and subsequently figured as a suicide in the Correctional Service of Canada's published Response to the Inquest one year later. The equivocation over the precise cause of her death calls into question the responsible agency - or agencies - that killed, whether directly or through systemic negligence. Drawing on Foucault's theoreticohistorical distinction between sovereign power and biopolitics, the authors argue that Smith's death is a biopolitical effect of neoliberal correctional institutions. There is a ruse, however, in the way the Correctional Service of Canada evades responsibility: it invokes a sovereign juridical prerogative over the lives placed in its care in an effort to cover over its biopolitical operations. © De Boeck Supérieur. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

Language: fr

Keywords

Ashley Smith; Biopolitics; Correctional Service of Canada; Judicial sovereignty; Neoliberalism