On s.810.2 Peace Bonds: Reintegration, Risk Management, and Harm


Devin Pratchler, University of Saskatchewan

After his release from prison in 2017, Curtis McKenzie was rearrested, but not for a new offence; rather, McKenzie was now the subject of a Section 810 Peace Bond. McKenzie openly struggled with substance use and, although he was now a “free man,” the conditions of his bond required him to stay completely sober. Following a breach of those conditions, McKenzie was returned to the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, where, in 2020, he took his own life. Section 810 peace bonds have come to supplant other forms of community supervision (i.e. parole) for high-risk offenders in Canada. A peace bond is, quite simply, an agreement to keep the peace in the community. This agreement is often accompanied by release conditions intended to curb future harm caused by those deemed likely to (re)offend—even if they have not committed a substantive offence. Through peace bonds, local police have become deputized to screen and surveil people released from prison who would otherwise be unmonitored in the community. Although peace bonds are central to the lived experiences of justice-involved peoples in Canada; only a handful of studies have taken them up within the literature, often from a socio-legal or psychological lens. This study, through a discourse analysis of a 10-year dataset from a local police service, contributes to the literature on peace bonds by providing a critical and sociological analysis of the 810 process. This analysis demonstrates how institutional norms and technologies shape the work of officers in accordance with goals of reintegration and risk management. Preliminary research suggests that, despite the centrality of 810s, these goals are in tension. This is encapsulated by Jung and Kitura (2022), who suggest that police officers involved in 810 work are tasked with “navigating ethical conundrums that tie together the contrasting and possibly conflicting roles of enforcer and rehabilitation facilitator” (38; emphasis added). This implies that police officers, similar to those working in parole, are expected to actively control and surveil offenders, whilst also facilitating the process of reintegration—despite the fact the two roles demand different, and conflicting, responses to risky behaviors. Moreover, the stories of Curtis McKenzie and other Indigenous peoples, however, demonstrates that a third literature is relevant to the use of peace bonds in Saskatchewan—literature related to the imposition of (colonial) harm (Turner 2023; James 2021). Peace bonds are a salient issue within Canadian Indigenous communities, extant research on peace bonds does not reflect this. This opposition calls into question the drivers of peace bond use in Saskatchewan. Specifically, this project asks: i) how do rules and policy shape officer work related to peace bonds? ii) what values are embedded within these policies and how do they shape the work of officers? and iii) how do these values shape the officer/subject dynamic around risk-management, reintegration, and harm? Through 10 years of locally grounded evidence, this project addresses the dearth in the literature by spotlighting s.810 peace bonds locally. Beyond the analysis of police records, this project will bring transparency to peace bonds as a substantive matter within Canada, spotlighting their use and opening dialogues surrounding acceptable risk management and reintegration practices.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: