Red Zones

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.

• List of figures; List of maps; List of tables; Acknowledgments; Table of cases; Table of legislation; 1. Navigating the territories of the law; Part I. Foundations: 2. Law and territory, a legal geography; 3. 'Recognizances to keep the peace and be of good behaviour': the legal history of red zones and conditions of release; Part II. Expansion: 4. Territory widening; 5. The shifting and expanding terrain of criminal justice management; Part III. Territorialization and its Consequences: 6. Territorializing: how legal territory is made and justified; 7. Conditional life inside the red zone; 8. Red zoning politics; Conclusion; 9. Red zones in and out of the courtroom; Bibliography; Index.

'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