Red Zones Criminal Law and the Territorial Governance of Marginalized People

In Red Zones, Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Nicholas Blomley, and Céline Bellot examine the court-imposed territorial restrictions and other bail and sentencing conditions that are increasingly issued in the context of criminal proceedings. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with legal actors in the criminal justice system, as well as those who have been subjected to court surveillance, the authors demonstrate the devastating impact these restrictions have on the marginalized populations - the homeless, drug users, sex workers and protesters - who depend on public spaces. On a broader level, the authors show how red zones, unlike better publicized forms of spatial regulation such as legislation or policing strategies, create a form of legal territorialization that threatens to invert traditional expectations of justice and reshape our understanding of criminal law and punishment.

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.

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.