@article{ref1,
title="The death of Ashley Smith: Between the biopolitics of imprisonment and judicial sovereignty",
journal="Societes",
year="2017",
author="Murray, S.J. and Burgess, S. and Holmes, D.",
volume="136",
number="2",
pages="73-90",
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.<p /><p>Language: fr</p>",
language="fr",
issn="0765-3697",
doi="10.3917/soc.136.0073",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/soc.136.0073"
}