Despite international calls to abolish the use of segregation in prisons, the practice has been defended by some Canadian correctional workers as a sometimes-necessary practice to preserve prisoner and staff safety. Informed through a lens of risk and the socio-legal literature on segregation, the current interview study explores perspectives on segregation from 28 correctional officers (COs) employed in provincial correctional services at a prison in Atlantic Canada. COs expressed a need to continue using segregation—albeit less often and under reformed contexts—to ensure safety for prisoners and staff and preserve prisoner accountability. Findings indicate COs recognize the structural, situational, and personal factors and complexities that shape decisions to impose segregation. They call for increased available resources to improve prisoner safety, dignity and wellness, prevent harm and self-injury, and reduce the use of segregation. We conclude with recommendations for provincial and territorial correctional institutions to consider moving forward.

This article examines how exploitation informs judicial interpretations of human trafficking in Canadian criminal cases. While socio-legal and popular notions of trafficking often suggest that forced movement into a decidedly exploitative labour context is required, our analysis of key appellate cases and constitutional challenges reveals that actual exploitation is not a necessary element of the offence. Instead, the trafficking in persons provision criminalizes the intent to exploit, while requiring the court to adopt an “objective” assessment of whether a reasonable person in the complainant’s circumstances could potentially fear for their safety in the context of providing (sexual) labour. We argue that this objective standard contributes to a gendered hierarchy of legal knowledge and ultimately privileges the perceived masculinized rationality of the courts and legal actors while rendering the subjective experiences of complainants as less central to the prosecution of human trafficking.