“It comes with the territory”: Policing the carceral boundary in Ontario, Canada

Police are uniquely empowered to restrict movement, manage the circulation of bodies, and facilitate passage into the carceral system. And yet, carceral scholarship tends to separate prisons from the police that fill them. Combining key sensitizing concepts from the sociological literature on boundaries and critical border studies, this article shows how police activate a socio-symbolic separation between civil society and the prison, which shares important, analytically revealing properties with territorial borders. Based on 29 in-depth, open-ended interviews with police from 13 different services across the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, Canada, this study analyzes how police make sense of their occupational activity in terms of their location in the carceral structure. Paying special attention to the shared representations officers use, three central themes emerge. First, police-civilian encounters constitute a core site of carceral boundary production. Second, much like national borders, the carceral boundary produces tremendous insecurity that officers attempt to manage through constant vigilance and the threat of force. Finally, conflict escalates as interactions at the boundary intensify. By attending to the ways police conceptualize their constitutive role in carceral boundary production, we can better appreciate the tension at the heart of the police civilian encounter.