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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

The prison reaches across space and time into pre- and postcarceral life. The penitentiary's concrete and razor wire reconfigure into the private perimeters of house arrest and the electronic enclosures of ankle monitors. Carceral control spools into community sentences and parole supervision. Expanding carceral circuitries embed carceral logics into in half-way houses, methadone clinics, and sweat lodges.

Although exciting and immensely valuable, this conceptual expansion of the carceral has largely overlooked a—if not the—constitutive site of carceral boundary production: police. Police officers patrol the increasingly inchoate boundary between “inside” and “outside.” While the prison surely reaches into the community, only the police maintain the final authority to articulate its function. That is, only police have the capacity to arrest and charge, to make critical interdictions and perform the preliminary rites of institutions (Bourdieu, 2008) necessary to transform free civilians into captive prisoners.

While most scholarship in the field treats policing as a distinct practice or even craft unto itself (Ratcliffe et al., 2020; Willis and Toronjo, 2023), some recent work bridges the police–prison studies divide (Skinns and Wooff, 2021; Xing and Ballucci, 2023). However, given the methodological obstacles to studying cartographies and transcripts of power, research largely focuses on cataloging the various pains suffered across sites of confinement (Haggerty and Bucerius, 2020). This article shifts the analytic frame away from the pain of detainees to consider the subjective experiences of officers themselves.

Using in-depth qualitative interviews with police officers in Ontario, Canada, this study analyzes how police make sense of their occupational activity in terms of their location in the carceral structure. First, I show how, given its constitutive role in Canada's ideational and territorial boundary formation, Canadian policing is a particularly rich site for this investigation. Next, I review a collection of research literature that successfully refracts the prison boundary into a kaleidoscope of carceral discourses and ideologies; performances and practices; spaces and places. A generous review of this literature helps outline the full extent of the problem. That is, each additional prism extends our analysis of the carceral boundary but occludes the centrality of police in the scope of its production. To focus the analytic lens, I combine key sensitizing concepts from the sociology of boundaries and critical border studies. Building on this scholarship, and based on interview data, I show how the carceral boundary shares important analytically revealing properties with territorial borders. Paying special attention to how officers themselves narrate their activities and interpret police-civilian encounters, three central themes emerge. First, police officers invoke their structural-symbolic tethering to the prison when organizing their subjective interpretation of, and orientation to, police-civilian encounters. That is, officers conceptualize their activity in terms of carceral boundary activation in order to make sense of their experiences. Second, much like national borders that produce territorial zones of exclusion, the carceral boundary produces tremendous insecurity. Officers attempt to manage this insecurity with constant vigilance and the threat of force. Lastly, comparable to the violence at territorial frontiers, conflict at the carceral boundary often escalates as interactions at the boundary intensify. The relationship between individuals, communities, and police is not just a function of police conduct, but the carceral processes they initiate. Thus, any study of police-public interaction remains incomplete without an analysis of the police–prison relationship and the meanings police attach to it. By attending to the ways police conceptualize their constitutive role in carceral boundary production, we deepen our understanding of the tensions at the heart of police–civilian encounters.

Background

Canadian police: A rich site for boundary scholarship

Canadian policing, in particular, presents a rich site for interrogating the intersection of policing and carceral boundary/border production. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP—earlier, the Northwest Mounted Police) were central to establishing Canada as a white, sovereign nation. They “settled” the Canadian frontier precisely by denying Indigenous sovereignty, controlling Aboriginal and Métis populations, securing resource acquisition, and facilitating land dispossession (Bell and Schreiner, 2018). In this sense, domestic policing in Canada has always been—and still remains—a border patrol. Indeed, the RCMP continues to wage “small wars” (Bell and Schreiner, 2018; Hume and Walby, 2021) on Indigenous nations and territories. At the same time, Canada incarcerates Indigenous people at disproportionately high rates (Government of Canada, 2023b), evincing a broad carceral landscape of settler-colonial enclosure and control (Barker, 2025).

Beyond their constitutive contribution to Canada's borders, the RCMP were also central to Canada's ideational formation: the RCMP served as a symbolic representation of the national body through which a Canadian identity and spatial order was collectively imagined (Bell and Schreiner, 2018: 123). The RCMP's image remains equally important today. According to their official website, the RCMP, known affectionately as “the Mounties,” are “a household name around the world” and function like “unofficial ambassadors” for Canada (Government of Canada, 2021). Their uniform is a “world famous symbol, “internationally recognized […] as being ‘Canadian’” (Government of Canada, 2021). In fact, the RCMP uses intellectual property laws to control and protect its image. Consequently, the wholesome Dudley Do-right caricature of the RCMP tends to predominate (especially abroad) as the dominant conception of both “Canada's” police and Canadian policing. What's more, the RCMP serve double duty as the municipal police force in many rural, notably Indigenous, communities, further blurring the line between “Canada's” Police, and police in Canada. While this study did not recruit federal police officers per se, the police in and around Toronto all have national iconography variously insinuated into their uniforms. Accordingly, police take on a decidedly national(ist) dimension in a Canadian context—even at the municipal level.

Mapping carceral contours: From prison wall to boundary patchwork

The Prison wall—as it's usually understood—cleaves the world in two. The wall simultaneously produces inverted mirror worlds: outside and inside; good and bad; free and unfree. In fact, dominant representations of the prison deepen this bifurcation, constructing the carceral institution as a kind of “phantom zone”—an antispace outside of society entirely. Yet, recent prison scholarship challenges conventional imagery of the prison perimeter as impenetrable, fixed, and objective, emphasizing instead its permeable, elastic, and constructed nature (Gilmore, 2007; Norton et al., 2024). Anchoring a good deal of this scholarship, Jennifer Turner suggests rethinking the prison boundary as a “patchwork” of processes (Turner, 2016: 231). By reconfiguring the boundary as lived, performed, and practiced (2016: 31), Turner invites us to consider where, how, and by whom, it is constructed.

In line with this invocation, interdisciplinary researchers have expanded the limits of analysis beyond conventional criminal justice settings, effectively mapping an expansive carceral archipelago by connecting diverse places and spaces under a legend of confinement (Loughnan et al., 2022: 5). ¹ For instance, a collection of authors have recently revived and extended Lowman et al.'s (1987) concept of the “transcarceral,” to emphasize how interinstitutional networks of social control extend the carceral boundary beyond the prison wall. These authors expose multiple carceral pipelines that funnel bodies from putatively noncarceral (even anti-carceral) spaces on one end (e.g., Immigration and child welfare services (De Finney and Mucina, 2021), Aboriginal healing lodges (Allspach, 2010), community sanctions (Robinson, 2016)) to the prison on the other.

By resituating the prison at the heart of a larger “carceral circuitry” (Gill et al., 2018: 197) or “continuum of unfreedom” (Cassidy, 2019: 48), scholars draw attention to the prison boundary in both pre- and postcarceral life. For instance, parole conditions maintain a quasi-carceral grip on “released” prisoners. As the Government of Canada puts it, “parole does not mean that offenders are completely free” (Government of Canada, 2015). Indeed, the stigma of previous criminal convictions combined with onerous parole conditions and a lack of postrelease opportunities ultimately increases the likelihood of returning to prison (Ricciardelli and McKendy, 2021; Turnbull and Hannah-Moffat, 2009). In fact, in 2019–2020, 26.6% of parolees were rearrested for breaching their conditions, compared to 6.4% for new nonviolent offenses and 1.1% for new violent offenses (Public Safety Canada, 2023). In addition to parole conditions, ankle monitors function like “portable prisons” (Gacek, 2022: 16) within a contemporary web of “techno-carcerality” (Gidaris, 2020: 1), while the penal architectures of “house arrest” transform family homes into prisons, such that “the prison walls are the walls of their home” (Wadhawan, 2021: 13). Likewise, Maier (2020) argues that half-way houses operate less such as postcarceral reentry centers and more like open prisons. As one halfway house resident puts it, “you know you’re still in prison, the fence is just further out” (Maier, 392).

Taken together, this literature substantiates Turner's fundamental claim: the carceral boundary is a boundary patchwork. However, if the boundary is a patchwork, then the police knit that patchwork together by moving bodies across it. The police have the capacity to convert (pre-, post-, non-, anti-, quasi-) carceral spaces, places, and practices into penal confinement—to transport people across the boundary, from one zone to another. Indeed, despite the boundary's ultimate permeability, Turner maintains that the carceral boundary constitutes a fundamental inside-outside binary. To properly appreciate the nature of this binary division, a combination of concepts is required. Foundational scholarship from the sociology of boundaries helps conceptualize the carceral boundary itself, while core concepts from critical border research help map the spatial dimensions produced in and through the police encounter.

A hybrid analytic framework: Merging the sociology of boundaries with critical border studies

The boundary of civil society, according to Alexander, is ritually maintained and discursively demarcated according to a stable binary code. At once symbolic, social, moral, and spatial, the boundary of civil society constitutes the fundamental division between sacred and profane; us and them; good and bad; inside and outside. It is a closed community. Thus, accepted members “are continuously, even fervently, concerned with justifying why others cannot be included” (Alexander, 2007: 27). And yet, civil society per se has no objective border—no physical limit beyond which counterdemocratic entities can be banished. Rather, the prison functions as the ultimate site of exclusion and thus occupies the civil sphere's contiguous territory. As both a cognitive and physical container, the prison helps order civil society by defining its opposite: a place of belonging that is “not here” for people who are “not like us.” In effect, it shields appropriate citizens who deserve inclusion from dangerous and untrustworthy Others. As a meaning construction, the carceral boundary separates distinct, mutually exclusive zones: civil society on one side, the prison on the other.

Of course, the boundary between inside and outside can be (and has been) contested, expanded, and reshaped in myriad ways to shelter new friends and banish new monsters (Giesen, 2022: 46). However, in each configuration, the police maintain exclusive authorization to enact its function. From the perspective of insiders, the primary purpose of police is to protect vulnerable civil society from the threat of outsiders who, given their polluted qualities (e.g., “irrational,” “emotional,” “out of control,” and “unreasonable”) “must be excluded, repressed, and possibly even eliminated in a physical way” (Alexander, 2007: 27). Indeed, the dominant symbolic representation of police positions officers not only at the boundary, but as the boundary—the thin blue line between order and disorder; safety and danger. Its poetic dimensions notwithstanding, this metonym precisely denotes the constitutive power of police to separate counterdemocratic entities from civil society. Only police can initiate the process of banishment through confinement—expulsion through containment.

Police impose (by virtue of their authority to impose) a boundary between free and not free. Tilly (2004) outlines a series of boundary change mechanisms that help conceptualize the relationship between police activity and the carceral boundary. Police produce the carceral boundary (between freedom and captivity) through a series of causal (e.g., imposition/encounter) and constitutive (e.g., activation/inscription) mechanisms. The police–civilian interface constitutes the site of encounter, the point of contact between previously unlinked social sites (the prison and the civil sphere). Their very ability to perform “site transfer” (the movement of persons across the boundary) inscribes a division (however thin or provisional at first) between free society and the prison. And as interactions at the boundary intensify, so do the relations and representations across it. Activated in this way, the carceral boundary—imperceptible only moments before—suddenly becomes “central to the organization of activity in its vicinity” (Tilly, 2004: 224) (emphasis added). Indeed, the unavoidably spatial dimension of police work invites yet a further comparison with the boundary's “twin concept” —the border (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 167).

Mirroring recent work that blurs the prison boundary, critical border scholarship dislocates the border from the defined, territorial limit of the nation state (Brambilla and Jones, 2020; Johnson et al., 2011; Paasi, 1998, 2022; Pachucki et al., 2007). As Paasi puts it, “borders do not represent fixed points in space but rather symbolise a social practice of spatial differentiation” (2021: 23). That is, borders create and enforce categories of political exclusion (Brambilla and Jones, 2020), marking some bodies as belonging and other bodies as dangerous (Johnson et al., 2011). Physical barriers of territorial enclosure function principally to enforce these distinctions, fortify economic advantage, and ultimately institutionalize inequality (Rosière and Jones, 2012: 231). Accordingly, borders “represent an existential moment of crisis” (Johnson et al., 2011: 66). Indeed, if society is made meaningful through boundaries (Lamont et al., 2015) that denote the order of things (Douglas, 2002), human experience is made meaningful by virtue of its directionality and passage towards “somewhere other than here” (Paasi, 2012: 2303). Thus, borders that interrupt the flow of life constitute sites of profound insecurity. Maintaining these borders—and, by extension, the territories of privilege they protect—requires constant vigilance and often the threat of violence.

It's not the purpose of this paper to offer an exhaustive survey of police activity in terms of each boundary mechanism, let alone boundary effect, nor to perform a comparative analysis between police encounters and other border sites—though both approaches would surely be fruitful. Rather, I outline these sensitizing concepts to prompt a rereading of the police encounter as the core site of carceral boundary production. Police impose a division when/wherever they (successfully or unsuccessfully, intentionally or unintentionally) “freeze” (or move) a subject in space/time. As the officer arrives, so does the boundary, manifested in their capacity to interrupt mobility and disrupt fixity. The power of the state condenses into the approaching officer and carves a line between where one is and where one is going, unearthing the profoundly provisional nature of the human right to move. In certain contexts, the presence of the officer functions like a border prohibiting entry. But borders actively enable crossings as well. Accordingly, the police–civilian encounter functions much like a national port of entry at which travelers are welcomed, detained, or turned around.

In the context of the police–prison nexus, however, crossing takes on a very different meaning. One doesn’t merely cross into a new territory of rules, identities, patterns, and norms. Rather, police power reconfigures sociospatial territory, progressively displacing the individual subject as sovereign of their own body and movement. The moment of encounter is simultaneously a moment of separation. In this sense, subjects encounter the carceral boundary the moment an approaching officer produces categories of “here and there,” limiting fields of possibility and territories of action. The following analysis substantiates this conceptual framework by considering the shared representations police use to make sense of their daily encounters.

Methods

Conducted between 2020 and 2022, this study is based on 29 semistructured interviews with a cross section of police officers from across the Windsor-Quebec-City corridor, which includes some of Canada's most densely populated regions proportional to national population (Noakes, 2025). ² I began recruiting participants through social media by following officers with a prolific Twitter presence, following every Ontario-based officer in their social-media network, and repeating that process until each branch stopped generating new connections. Of the 901 accounts that I followed, I was able to direct message 320 officers: 216 public accounts and 104 private accounts who followed me back. 27 officers responded and agreed to an interview. Two additional participants were referred by another participant. Of the 29 participants, 27 were recruited from 11 different police services of varying size. About half came from large municipalities (over a million people), with the other half coming from smaller services. I conducted most of these interviews in person, at coffee shops and diners chosen by participants. A few higher-ranking participants invited me into headquarters. A quarter of the interviews were conducted virtually. All interviews were audio recorded, ranging from 1 to 2.5 hours, with 4 exceeding 2 hours (average length was 1 hour and 40 minutes). Interviews were transcribed and then coded using NVivo. All participating officers have been given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.

Representativeness regarding police interviews is complicated in the provincial context as police demographic information in Ontario is only tracked by individual municipal services, and many do not capture variables like gender or minority status. Nevertheless, rough comparisons can be made with national data (again though, this data does not disaggregate race and gender). According to the Government of Canada (2023), 23% of all sworn officers in Canada are women (2023a), while six women make up 19% of my respondents. Concerning race, the Toronto Police Service has the highest representation of visible minorities in their ranks, with 26% compared to 8% at the national level (Government of Canada, 2023a). My sample averages the two, with 15% identifying as a visible minority. Despite the relatively small, self-selected sample, it does broadly represent the face of Canadian policing according to these two variables. While most Canadian officers range between 30 and 50 years old (Government of Canada, 2020), the average age of this sample does skew slightly towards higher ranking, more experienced officers in the later stages of their careers. Despite interviewing older officers on average, respondents also possess a wide range of experience, occupy a variety of roles, and started their careers at very different life stages during markedly different eras of policing. Together, this sample provides a unique opportunity to explore whether and to what extent the carceral boundary figures in the meaning constructions of officers across divergent occupational locations.

To investigate the presence of the prison in officer sense making, I conducted semistructured interviews centering on the rhythm of police activity: arrest-charge-sentence-release. Paying special attention to procedures, practices, and technologies of confinement, officer responses generated thick descriptions of the material processes that link police work to the prison, as well as the subjective experience of the prison as an animating force during police–civilian encounters. Using an inductive–deductive approach (Charmaz, 2012) to data analysis, I coded transcripts according to emergent thematic categories (e.g., “closing in”) and existing analytic frameworks (e.g., “deprivation of liberty”). I then refined the data into subthemes to capture precisely how officers oriented to these categories (e.g., “closing in as dangerous”).

Encountering the boundary

When explaining police–civilian encounters, officers regularly invoke a structural-symbolic tethering to the prison. That is, officers interpret their experiences in terms of carceral boundary activation. “[Civilians] don’t see you as a person,” says Paige (39, white female Constable). “They see you as the uniform. And the uniform has a lot of authority to take your rights away. It definitely makes people feel uncomfortable. It kind of puts up a wall.” Here, Paige exemplifies the collective representations officers use to contextualize their arrival on the scene. Police are the uniform, and the uniform is a wall.

Additionally, officers describe their deployment in primarily territorial terms. For instance, Edward (61, white male Staff Sergeant) describes witnessing a funeral procession honoring the fallen member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. He says, “it was a huge funeral. The bikers took over all our roads. It was embarrassing in itself.” Here, Edward ties his identity as a police officer to the spatial-moral territory of his precinct. What's more, officers tend to agree that much of their time is spent facilitating the movement of bodies across this territory. “A lot of the morning shifts,” says Roman (38, Black male Constable), “that's what the calls are, getting homeless people to move off peoples’ private property.” He continues, describing one memorable example in detail:

We get this call to a vet's office—there was a homeless person sleeping in the front entrance. We know who the guy is. We know his name because we deal with him daily. Every day we get calls for this guy. He roams the streets. He doesn’t commit any crimes. He's not a bad guy—just a homeless guy. So, we get there and wake him up and get him on his way.

Roman's presence transforms the veterinarian clinic doorway into a territory from which the unhoused man can be turned away. In reality, law and space are deeply interwoven. However, by centering the subject's location and mobility rather than criminality, Roman equates this encounter with the quintessential border function—the sorting and moving of bodies. The carceral boundary doesn’t need to be intentionally or explicitly inscribed by any individual officer for it to activate during the encounter. As Marshal (65, white male Sergeant) sees it, officers are “a gateway to the [carceral] system.” In this sense, the police perform the twin operations of a border. They both impede movement and facilitate passage.

After the unhoused person had been de-ported (quite literally) from the clinic doorway, the owner came out to express his gratitude. “It was four of us,” says Roman. “We ride together as a bike unit. And—the vet—he goes, ‘gosh, just standing around you, you guys make me feel like I’m going to get arrested.’” According to Roman, the vet was joking, but there was “a kernel of truth to it.” Here, the bodies of multiple officers assemble to impose a physical barrier reverberating with recently exercised kinopower—the power to determine and enforce who gets to stay and who has to go (Nail, 2016). Expectedly, the boundary—encountered at the point of police–civilian contact—often precipitates more than nervous chatter. For instance, Smith (62, white male Constable) describes his encounter with a university student while on patrol near the local campus.

It was late at night. And he comes around the corner, and there's two burley police officers there. He is walking towards us, and he just turned around and ran. So, we go for a little run there. But it was slushy. He slipped and he fell. So, we caught up to him and I grabbed him and I said to him, “why did you run?” And he said, “when I seen you two guys there coming, you scared the shit out of me!”

Smith follows up with more questions: “What did you think we were going to do?”; “Where are you from?” Though Smith doesn’t say explicitly, he seems to indicate the young man was Indigenous and speculates that, since he was from “up north,” he might have an unfavorable view of police. They get his name and search the system. When he passes inspection, they “let him go.” Not dissimilar from international borders “where identity claims are adjudicated” (Johnson et al., 2011: 66), civilians stopped by police are asked to provide stories of “identity and passage”: Who are you? Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you doing here? The goal and effect of this performance review is to categorize and sort subjects. Subjects are reviewed not only on the basis of physical threat level but the risk they pose to the social, symbolic, and moral order. When performed by police, the results of this review can mean the difference between being safe or dangerous; civilian or criminal; and ultimately, free or not free. One's capacity to pass (or resist) inspection ultimately decides the rate and depth of descent into the carceral territory where topological space is mapped along ever narrowing configurations of confinement.

Often times, the police—and the carceral boundary they inscribe—constitute danger in and of themselves. Importantly, this danger is understood differently, experienced unevenly, and distributed culturally. Taylor (54, Black male Sergeant) describes his relationship to police growing up as a Black teenager. “When police came around your community it was usually negative. Someone was getting arrested. And your determination was, ‘It's not going to be me. I am not going to be the one.’” He recounts one instance when he and his friends were playing basketball. A pair of police cruisers pulled up near the court. “One of them hit the lights and the sirens and we just took off running, hopping over fences. None of us were criminals. But instinctively, the first impression was just to run.” Sidney (high ranking Black male officer) who grew up in a comparable situation to Taylor, describes a similar relationship to police and a similar impulse to run.

A bunch of us came around the corner and there was a cruiser in the middle of the street, and a cop standing there with a shotgun. And we think, “Oh, fuck…” right? So, he sees us coming around the corner laughing and playing. But we take too many steps, so he racks the shotgun and we put our hands up and we’re screaming “it wasn't us! It wasn’t us!” and as each person hit the corner, they start running, falling over fences. We just kept on running just to make sure that we are getting away… because the presence of violence is always… always there.

While Sidney emphasizes the threat of physical violence, he regularly describes early police encounters in terms of both physical harm and legislative authority. In one instance, he tells me, “Police grabbed a guy I went to school with, beat him up, charged him, and then he got deported.” Nevertheless, when Sydney ran, “It was just fear of police. Violence. That was it.” Of course, police authority emanates as much from their “use of force options” (weapons) as the prison, if only because of their immediacy: right there on their hip. And as social media continues to publicize incidents of serious police violence, many (specifically racialized and otherwise marginalized) communities and individuals describe the police not as authoritarian executors of state legal authority but an immediate threat to personal safety (Maynard, 2017). Still, while the police may increasingly signify a threat to bodily integrity, it's unlikely that this signification has fully eclipsed the prison as the dominant shadow cast by police presence. The prison, not police violence, remains the quintessential terminus of our juridical world. “You saw the uniform,” says Taylor, “You saw the cop car. You are gone. So, it was definitely not an individual officer. It was the system that he represented. Definitely. I can tell you that for a fact.”

Of course, this boundary is encountered and felt differently by different social groups in different contexts. That is, dominant groups produce borders precisely to “purify space” through marginalization and exclusion (Newman and Paasi, 1998: 195). Accordingly, the need to “pass inspection” (Anderson, 2015: 13) is differentially distributed. White officers typically talk about a dark history of policing, insinuating that the days of racialized police violence are over, yet the Black officers I spoke with assure me they are not. Still, Taylor (54, Black male Sergeant) has faith that community policing principles can improve the dynamic. However, he says that “the community is not trusting the message because they don’t trust the messenger. Police have a beautiful message. But, that fear of jail, that fear of everything is still going to be there.” Sidney (high ranking Black male officer) feels even more pessimistic. As a teenager, his family member was shot and killed by police. The Special Investigations Unit investigated the incident and asked the officer to describe his rationale. Sidney summarizes the officer's response, “In his mind, Black criminals carry guns […] and signal a different kind of threat. I am sure even today some of our guys think like that. It's real. It hasn’t gone away.’” Errol (55, Black male Detective Constable) corroborates this assessment, recounting a recent conversation with a white officer who told him, “If I'm now driving around [a predominantly white affluent neighbourhood] and I come across a 75-year-old white man, I wouldn't feel any way. I wouldn't be prepared to do anything. But if I'm working [a predominantly Black low-income neighborhood] and I see a group of teens, and I stop a car, yes, I'd be ready. I'd be mentally prepared. I'd have my hand ready to pull my weapon.”

Marginalized groups clearly experience the symbolic boundary imposed by police presence most acutely. However, even officers themselves admit to feeling nervous when encountering the police. Paige (38, white female constable) tells me:

If I see a police officer driving behind me, even I get nervous. Hundred percent. Every time there is a cop behind me, I’m like, “why am I getting nervous? I'm a freaking cop myself—and I’m not doing anything wrong!” And I bet if you ask other police officers, they're going to say the same. It's the uniform. It's the authority it carries. What it represents. Everybody gets nervous because of the power of the uniform.

Evidently, police presence signals danger in a variety of registers and contexts. This territorial frontier produces uncertainty and ultimately conflict that necessitates the deployment of specific management strategies. Indeed, like all bounded space produced through violent acts of exclusion, these spaces can only be maintained through constant vigilance and the threat of violence (Brambilla and Jones, 2020: 4). Respondents describe approaching their occupational activities in precisely these terms.

Vigilance at the boundary

Officers describe a perpetually heightened vigilance precisely because their arrival appears to trigger a powerful desire to stay free amongst members of the public. Even while techniques of digital policing promise to make every subject increasingly intelligible, officers can never fully anticipate the extent to which their presence might precipitate a dangerous reaction. Whether they are at an active crime scene, responding to a call, or merely on patrol, the intersubjective quality of the carceral boundary means officers must always be on the lookout for its effects.

Edward (61, white male Staff Sergeant) emphasizes the importance of “being operationally ready all the time,” including just sitting in his cruiser at night. “I role-play,” he says, “How would I react if this happened to me? If I see two guys flying out of the bank, armed? How would I position myself? How would I pin them in? So that they can't get away? I mentally prepare: what if? What if? What if?” For officers, they are always already at the boundary of order and chaos.

Harrison (27, white male Constable), tells me about one of his first calls as a sworn member, responding to a domestic dispute. While Harrison was interviewing a complainant, his training officer leaned in, telling him “Stand over here, watch the knives in the kitchen.” This instruction shaped Harrison's future orientation and perception of all police–civilian encounters. “Now,” he says, “I do that every time. As soon as I come in someone's house, I look around for weapons, what could be a weapon, and get between them and the person.” The presence of any weapon-like-object demands heightened vigilance. However, the perception of a possible weapon demands constant vigilance. “Even if you feel comfortable that the person might not have a weapon,” says Harrison, “of course, you never know. There might be something that they’re hiding, right? So, you have to be wary of that all the time.” Cash (62, white male Detective Constable) tells me, even more emphatically, “you can never relax. You can’t assume that anyone is harmless. Not one person.” Indeed, the point of contact is not only an act of separation between “here” and “there” but also “us” and “Other” (Newman and Paasi, 1998: 191), and, therefore, “safe” and “dangerous.” The sense of danger produced in that moment of separation intensifies as they approach the moment of carceral inevitability. “I still get kind of nervous sometimes,” says Harrison, “when I am going to arrest someone…going to put cuffs on them… is someone going to come out and attack me?” Officers describe arrest as precarious not only because of a narrowed spatial proximity to the source of danger (the suspected “Other”), but because they are now occupied, and therefore vulnerable.

The necessary degree and scope of vigilance depends on the various sociospatial contexts in which the carceral boundary is encountered. Whether officers engage a suspect in a busy public square or an empty apartment hallway, the border is felt differently because police activate it differently in different contexts. For instance, certain stigmatized neighborhoods function in the police (and popular) imaginary as savage carceral frontiers—perilous places filled with perilous people. Harrison (27, white male Constable) pauses, seeming to reflect on how to articulate this sentiment delicately, “…there's places where like…I guess, where people are less…they like the police less…if that makes sense…” Respondents variously refer to “housing projects” and “poor neighbourhoods” as “rough” spaces, and construct these spaces in and through their approach to them: brimming with incipient dangers embodied in postures and poses, and imminent threats hidden around a perpetual corner. In these imagined territories—what Anderson calls the “iconic ghetto” (2015: 12)—vigilance is necessary, but wholly insufficient. Threats, more often than not, can only be mitigated by the threat of violence.

Officers often describe wielding the threat of violence explicitly during police–civilian encounters. However, they usually recontextualize these threats as nonviolent de-escalation techniques. Errol (55, Black male Detective Constable) describes approaching a suspect previously identified as a having martial arts training. “As I’m talking to him,” says Errol, “I noticed him all of a sudden start to blade off with his body posture, his stance, the one fist clenching.” Whether these details accurately signaled the suspect's imminent attack, Errol acknowledges that he wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t looking for them:

As soon as I saw that, I just simply say to the guy, “you know what, I know your background already. And I see you taking a position. I can tell you right now, I don't want to get in a fight with you. Because this is going to end up badly. You have your fists; I've got a weapon here. And I really certainly don't want to use it. But if it gets to that stage, unfortunately, there's going to be some bloodshed, and I'm sure, at the end of it, it's not going to be mine.”

Errol describes his tactic in this encounter as de-escalatory, what he called “communication jujitsu” rather than an explicit threat of violence. In reality, Errol manages the escalating threat of danger with dangerous threats of his own. Of course, the threat of violence is not always implicit, nor quiescent. Errol describes a second example to illustrate. On night patrol one winter, he came across someone who he “assumed” was prowling for unlocked cars.

We never knew what the person is doing, other than the fact that it's three o'clock in the morning and they're out on this side street that we’re assuming they don't live on. We see this guy, he sees us. And he starts running. We park the car, and we start chasing. Now we're running through backyards, going over fences, and yelling at this guy, “You don't stop I'm going to shoot!” And you’re yelling at this guy hoping that you're going to scare him. Finally, we got to a roadway, and he just disappeared. Vanished. So, we started back to the car, looking at this guy's footprints, this guy literally had a stride of eight feet. Easily. And sure enough, you go to the point we actually uttered the words “we're gonna shoot” and you can see the difference in the stride length. Like, a six-foot stride length to an eight-foot stride length. Yeah. You could see exactly.

Officers including Errol also describe using the threat of violence preemptively to establish early command of an encounter. Joseph (60, white male constable) describes his preferred method of “getting control, especially when there was a pack around.” He recalls, “I would try to get to the loudest one and say, ‘I don’t want to embarrass you in front of these people. I want you to have some dignity.’” Like Errol, Joseph describes this as a deescalation strategy, which, he insists, helps people “save face.” In an alternative sociological idiom, he's describing his own “social competence in domination” (Collins, 2008: 381). He blocks all but the most humiliating path (or, in Goffman's parlance, “line”) away from violence (1967: 7). Rather than helping the suspect save face, Joseph forces a choice from a series of options, each more humiliating than the next: submit and comply; fight and be defeated; run and be caught. Only a single viable recourse remains: back down. The threat of physical violence and the use of symbolic violence—far from mutually exclusive—are threaded together throughout these encounters.

Whether or not a given encounter is perceived as imminently dangerous, every officer understands that all encounters contain dangerous potential. Some officers ground this knowledge in second hand, seemingly apocryphal myths (e.g., the danger of drug-induced superhuman strength) while others draw on personal narratives. Cash (62, white male Detective Constable), for example, traces his hyper vigilance to one specific public disturbance call: a group of kids drinking at night in a public park.

We said, “guys, just file out of the park, no issues. You can even take your beer.” We were asking nicely. We weren’t bitchy about it because we recognized that we were in a bit of danger. So, we’re walking the kids out and the guy in front of me spins and punches me right in the jaw. Down I go. The fight is on. And I’m fighting for my life because my gun is relatively unsecured. And my partner's looking at 12 other guys, so he pulled his emergency pin and more police officers than you could shake a stick at are there within five minutes. But we had five minutes to fight for ourselves. That encounter with that individual shaped every encounter I ever had after that.

This experience grounds Cash's entire field of perception. “You have no idea what it's like,” he tells me, “Your bowels clenched so tight that you can hardly breathe. It's a tinderbox. That's policing. Like, every day, every shift. I’m in a state of red alert.” Conversely, some officers clearly revel in their domination of the encounter. “When I was young,” says Lincoln (57, white male Detective Inspector), “I was a track athlete. I love a foot pursuit because I never lost one.” Mirroring this sentiment, Joseph (60, white male Constable) tells me, “I have always been a scrapper. I even enjoy it when it happens.” Gauge (43, white male Constable) describes his involvement in a lethal car chase (outlined below) as “the best day ever.” Regardless of how police narrativize danger, officers consistently describe using both symbolic violence and the threat of real violence to manage the insecurity produced in the boundary. Nevertheless, conflict often escalates during the encounter as relations across the boundary intensify.

Violence at the boundary

Conflict intensifies most notably along borders that separate disparate qualities of life (Rosière and Jones, 2012). For Marshal (65, white male Sergeant), the dual function of police as both wall (preventing movement) and gateway (to the system) explains why subjects “lash out with aggression, resentment, escape attempts.”

Marshall recounts entering a halfway house to suspend a statutory release order and take a parolee back into custody. Marshall offers no objective criteria for the arrest, but according to the halfway house director, the man in question was disrespectful to staff. Marshall tells me that, when they first met in the director's office, the parolee seemed like “the nicest guy in the world. Totally cooperative.” But the situation shifted when the halfway house director left the room to retrieve some of the man's personal effects:

That's when the guy made a bolt for the door. He's like, “I can't go to jail.” And so, he had to try to make it. He didn't have a hope in hell of getting out, but he was going to try. I blocked the door and I got slammed into the door. And the fight was on. And we completely trashed the director's office. We still laugh about this whole thing.

Here, “getting out” clearly invokes its inverse: keeping in. At the moment of carceral inevitability, police fully activate the carceral boundary, converting the director's office from a carceral frontier into a temporary detention site. Like a catalyst, police presence transforms the relatively everyday space into an anteroom of the prison. Conventionally understood, the quasi-carceral halfway house occupies a space outside and separate from the prison. But the officer's arrival collapses any distance between the two; and the prison walls come rushing back along with the realization that they never fully receded in the first place.

Of course, these struggles typically take place in a very narrow spatiotemporal frame. Occasionally, however, they stretch over space and time, and when they do, they become chases. Lincoln (57, white male Detective Inspector) describes a similar experience, entering a housing complex to serve a trespass order to a man and escort him off the premises. A woman and her two children lived in one of the complex's Rent-Geared-to-Income units. The subsidized lease accommodated only the three of them. However, the landlord had evidence that the woman's boyfriend (and father of at least one child) was staying there as well. This violated the terms of the lease. Lincoln and his partner entered the complex, approached the unit, and knocked. The woman answered, cracking the door, and even though Lincoln could hear the man's voice coming from a room behind her, she denied that he was in the unit. Eventually, the man flung open the door, “yelling and fuming” at the officers about how, “this is all bullshit, this is my fucking kid blah blah blah. And he is agitated. He is hostile. He is a very athletic young man. You can see he is glowing with sweat. Pacing around.” Here, the felt sense of confinement folds back onto the approaching officers—the ones doing the confining. “We are stuck now,” says Lincoln, “within the doorway.” The sense of cutting off and closing in becomes so palpable that the officers themselves start to feel vulnerable.

Now it's back to officer safety. The kitchen is there; there are knives in the block. It's like. “Okay, how far is he going to take this?” As he starts to come out, I back out to let him through. But my partner stands at the door just to slow him down, like, “hang on, we have got to serve you with the notice here. You are technically under arrest under the trespass property act.” And he is like, “fuck you guys.” And he two-fists my partner back against the wall. And he runs down the hall.

For Lincoln, the felt moment of enclosure—indicating carceral inevitability—triggers an eruption of energy. Just like in Marshall's case, the subject, however “agitated,” was complying, at least initially. According to Lincoln, the man was putting on his shoes, his shirt, and preparing to exit the residence. Only when the officer blocked him from leaving did he begin to run. Of course, he may have fled whether or not the officer held his ground in the doorway, creating that felt sense of “no way out.” Nevertheless, Lincoln himself identifies this as the pivotal moment when the interactional dynamic shifts and the suspect transitions from relatively compliant to evasive. “There is something very primal about wanting to stay free. But as much as it becomes primal for them to get away, when your subject is the person that is fleeing—you have to go after them no matter what. If you run from police, there's gonna be a price to pay.” Officer Kent (51, white male Staff Sergeant) describes the dynamic in similar terms. “Once the officer has identified someone that they want to catch, they become personally invested. It's kind of that predator instinct.” So, Lincoln gave chase, flying through hallways, bursting out the rear of the housing complex, and crashing through the back door of a neighboring home where he finally tackled the man, slamming him onto a kitchen table in front of the house's occupants. The man would later be convicted for a string of unrelated sexual assaults. Lincoln tells me, with the clarity of hindsight, the subject wasn’t worried about the trespass order at all. Instead, he’d be thinking, “they are going to get me, and they are going to figure it out, I am the guy, and I am going to be going back to jail. So, fight. I am not going back at all costs.” So, the subject of the trespass order experienced the thralls of impending confinement more intensely than Lincoln could have predicted precisely because the prison was more imminent than he knew.

In both cases, police form a physical dividing line, establishing a territorial frontier in which the biggest risk factor is the suspect's desire to stay free. Cash (62, white male Detective Constable) corroborates this claim by narrating an imagined suspect's inner monolog: “I’m not going back. I’m poor. I’ve been poor my whole life. Here's this cop who represents the system who's gonna make my life change, I can’t pay for a lawyer so I’m going to go to jail, I’m gonna lose my job, my family. I’ll do anything to get away from this cop. I’ll stab him or shoot him, punch and kick him, all I want to do is get away.” Most officers share this sentiment. For instance, Gauge (43, white male Constable) uses similar terms when recounting his pursuit of a group of men who were fleeing the scene of a robbery. “They were standing out of the sunroof firing at us. It was like right out of the movies, crazy. I think those guys knew that if they got caught, they would go away for a long time.” Eventually, the suspect lost control of the vehicle, resulting in a fatal crash.

Likewise, Glasser (60, white male Detective) tells me that people facing severe carceral consequences are the most dangerous because, “they figure ‘what the hell, what have I got to lose?’” Officer Blake (55, white female Inspector), a commander for tactical and critical incidence response teams, insists that home arrests can be the most dangerous moments for police, adding that, offenders with previous prison experience are most likely to barricade themselves in their homes when faced with arrest warrants. Barricades trigger heightened police deployment. For Blake, the threat level ratchets up precisely when “you have the place surrounded and you’re trying to negotiate them out.” Any individual approaching officer initiates a bordering process of cutting off and closing in, but a perimeter of tactical police punctuates the felt sense of no way out. What's more, officers regularly report triggering dangerous responses even in situations when they have no intention of laying charges.

Harrison (27, white male Constable), a newly minted officer, recounts a secondhand experience told to him by his training coach, who responded to the scene of a male standing on a bridge, threatening to jump. The officer was able to talk to him and calm him down, “But,” says Harrison, “because he posed a danger to himself, there were grounds for apprehension.” The goal was to detain him and transport him to hospital. “He was fine until he went to go and put the cuffs on and then the guy realized what was happening. ‘I am going to be imprisoned or detained at this point. And I don’t want that. So, I am going to fight.’ And, ended up punching him to try and get away.” At that point, Harrison tells me his training officer was about to use a taser before he realized “the guy had covered himself in gasoline.” The taser would have set him on fire. Indeed, boundaries make dangerous places, especially when they divide the world into opposing territories with divergent qualities of life: freedom on one side, captivity on the other.

By interrupting the flow of life, police activate a boundary between previously unlinked social sites marked by fundamentally opposing life conditions. When making sense of both quotidian encounters and exceptional cases of violence, officers use collective representations of themselves, the carceral boundary they impose, and the relations they produce. In sum, officers describe their presence as a wall between prison and civil society, which necessitates vigilance and escalates violence organized around the powerful human impulse to stay free.

Conclusion

The prison is at the beginning of every police–civilian encounter precisely because it is also always potentially at the end. This article deepens recent advances in carceral boundary scholarship and recontextualizes police encounters as the core site of carceral boundary production. By combining key sensitizing concepts from sociology of boundaries (Alexander, 2007; Lamont and Molnár, 2002; Tilly, 2004) and critical border studies (Johnson et al., 2011; Jones, 2010; Paasi, 2021), this framework prompts further inquiry into the iconographies and discourses that police use to authenticate representative moral authority, as well as the rituals and rites of passage through which suspects are transitioned across the carceral border. At the same time, we ought to consider the ways the prison constitutes an outside inside according to which the criteria for moral and territorial inclusion are articulated. Indeed, much more can be done to investigate police officers themselves as embodied carriers of the carceral boundary (Jones et al., 2017) and a core cadre of carceral “border workers” (Paasi, 2022).

Where criminological research tends to approach the police and the prison as analytically distinct, this paper decisively detaches the carceral boundary from the material threshold of the prison and suggests where and how it might be found anew. The very presence of a uniformed officer, with multiple uses of force options, activates a felt sense of the prison—not least of all because the police function as mobile appendages of the otherwise immobile prison leviathan. Indeed, this felt sense constitutes an important source of coercive police power. In sum, police connect the institutionally defined location of the prison with the abstract concept of “Prison,” which finds expression even in the smallest acts of confinement—right down to the moment an officer first stops a civilian in time and place with a simple, “hey you.”

Whether intentionally or not, officers carve the carceral boundary into the scene of their arrival. Topological space expands and contracts as they move, “ordering” as they go. Mirroring the conflict produced along borders, walls, and fences, the conflict animating the police–civilian encounter is “between the desire for freedom and the desire for control, between people who move around and people who want them to stay in place” (Brambilla and Jones, 2020: 5). Like borders and border hardening practices, the carceral boundary constitutes a territorial moment of political exclusion, which itself produces profound insecurity. Police attempt to manage that insecurity through a tactical deployment of vigilance and threats of force. Indeed, boundaries make dangerous places and dangerous others in equal measure. “Violence,” I’m told, “is inherent to the job. It comes,” as it were, “with the territory.”