This is the fifth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with Active History.
When environmental historians describe the “Great Acceleration,” they usually point to dramatic post-Second World War transformations in human activity.1 Carbon emissions surged. Industrial production expanded. Highways, suburbs, pipelines, and hydroelectric megaprojects reshaped landscapes at unprecedented speed and scale. In Canada, the decades after 1950 saw massive infrastructural expansion: hydroelectric development across northern rivers, the growth of extractive industries, and the spread of transportation networks that integrated previously remote regions into national and global markets.
Yet these familiar indicators – energy production, extraction, industrial output – tell only part of the story. As economic and technological systems expanded, states simultaneously developed new forms of governance to manage the social disruptions produced by accelerated capitalism, urbanization, and settler colonial expansion. One of the most significant yet overlooked infrastructures in this process is the prison. Prisons have rarely been considered within environmental histories of the period, limiting how scholars understand the full scope of postwar transformation.
Carceral institutions must be understood as part of this broader process. Prisons are not simply social institutions that confine individuals; they are material landscapes that reorganize land, water, labour, and energy. Across Canada in the postwar decades, the growth of carceral systems reshaped rural environments, altered local economies, and reinforced systems of territorial control which were deeply entangled with wider environmental change. Recognizing prisons as environmental spaces opens a new perspective on Canadian environmental history in the age of the Anthropocene. This essay argues that the Great Acceleration in Canada was driven not only by intensified extraction and production, but also by the expansion of governance infrastructures designed to manage the social and environmental consequences of rapid change.
The Overlooked Infrastructure of the Great Acceleration
The concept of the Great Acceleration emerged from Earth system science, where researchers identified a cluster of indicators showing dramatic increases in human activity after 1950. Graphs charting population growth, fossil fuel consumption, fertilizer use, and urbanization all reveal the same pattern: a sharp upward curve beginning in the mid-twentieth century, reflecting the rapid intensification of industrial activity and resource use.
Environmental historians have adopted this framework to examine how the postwar decades transformed landscapes. In Canada, scholars have explored the ecological consequences of hydroelectric megaprojects, oil development, industrial forestry, and agricultural intensification, particularly through studies of pollution and environmental injustice.2 These processes dramatically altered rivers, forests, and northern territories, with effects that remain central to ongoing debates about environmental change.
But focusing exclusively on extraction and production risks overlooking the governance structures that made this acceleration possible. The expansion of large-scale infrastructures required parallel expansions in administrative and coercive capacity, as states worked to manage labour, regulate populations, and secure territory under conditions of rapid transformation. Carceral institutions formed a critical component of this system, providing a spatial and institutional mechanism through which these forms of governance were enacted.
The Carceral Turn in Postwar Canada
While Canada expanded aspects of its carceral system in the postwar period, imprisonment rates remained comparatively stable, reflecting a broader culture of penal restraint.3 This apparent stability, however, obscures a transformation central to the Great Acceleration: the large-scale material expansion of carceral infrastructure. As the Canadian state responded to postwar industrialization, urbanization, and territorial integration, it invested not only in extractive and productive systems, but also in institutions designed to manage the populations affected by these changes.
These institutions were often located in rural or peripheral regions, where large tracts of land were available and government sought to stimulate local economies. Prison complexes were substantial infrastructural projects, requiring extensive construction, utilities, transportation access, and long-term operational support. Facilities such as Kingston Penitentiary and later sites like Collins Bay Institution illustrate how carceral landscapes became embedded within regional landscapes, shaping land use, labour markets, and patterns of mobility. Kingston Penitentiary, for example, required shoreline modification along Lake Ontario, dedicated water intake and waste systems, and integration into regional transportation networks. Its presence tied the surrounding environment directly to the ongoing operation of a federal carceral institution.
Like other systems of the Great Acceleration, prisons consumed large amounts of land, water, and energy. They required extensive heating systems, water treatment, sewage infrastructure, and continuous electricity to maintain security technologies and controlled environments. Their construction often necessitated new roads, service networks, and connections to regional power grids. In many cases, prisons functioned as anchor institutions within rural economies, reshaping development patterns and employment structures. Yet prisons differ in a crucial respect. They are not only sites of circulation, but of confinement. They are designed to manage flows – of people, resources, and information – by restricting the movement of human bodies. In this sense, they are landscapes of governance as much as landscapes of material transformation. Seen in this way, prisons reveal that the Great Acceleration depended not only on expanding production, but on expanding the state’s capacity to regulate and contain populations within rapidly transforming environments.
Landscapes of Confinement
Understanding prisons as environmental infrastructure also reveals how they participated in the territorial reorganization that accompanied the Great Acceleration. The rapid expansion of industrial and extractive systems after 1950 required not only access to land and resources, but the restriction of Indigenous presence on that land. In this sense, the Great Acceleration in Canada depended in part on processes of dispossession and forced assimilation that enabled the consolidation of state and economic control. As postwar development extended state authority into rural and northern regions, carceral institutions helped stabilize these spaces within expanding systems of governance.
Carceral expansion intersected with existing patterns of settler colonial governance, which Patrick Wolfe describes as a structure – “not an event” – organized through a logic of elimination.4 Indigenous peoples have been – and remain – dramatically overrepresented within Canadian prisons, comprising over 30 percent of the federal inmate population despite representing a small proportion of the national population.5 Within this context, prisons functioned not simply as sites of confinement, but as mechanisms through which the state managed Indigenous mobility, labour, and social life under conditions of accelerated territorial and economic change. Their expansion cannot be separated from the longer history of colonial policies aimed at regulating Indigenous life.
The siting of prisons in rural and remote areas further reshaped relationships between local environments and national governance structures. These institutions linked peripheral landscapes to federal administrative networks while embedding carceral power within specific ecological contexts, binding land, infrastructure, and authority together in material form.
The result is a distinctive form of landscape – what might be called a carceral environment. These spaces are characterized by surveillance technologies, fortified architecture, and tightly controlled ecological conditions. Lawns are meticulously maintained, perimeters cleared, and circulation strictly regulated; even vegetation is managed according to security priorities rather than ecological ones. Such environments represent a particular mode of human interaction with the non-human world, defined by containment, control, and the management of risk. The environmental transformations of the Great Acceleration were thus inseparable from the extension of state control over land and populations, including the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enforcement of assimilative structures necessary to sustain that transformation.
Slow Violence and Environmental Afterlives
Carceral institutions consumed large volumes of water, generated continuous waste streams, and required constant energy inputs to sustain surveillance and controlled environments. These demands extended far beyond prison walls, shaping surrounding ecosystems over time. Recognizing prisons as environmental infrastructures also draws attention to the temporal dimensions of the Great Acceleration. While the concept is often associated with rapid and visible change, its effects also unfold slowly through systems that produce long-term environmental and social consequences. In this sense, the Great Acceleration generated not only environmental transformation, but new forms of governance designed to manage its disruptions. Carceral systems were one such response.
This becomes particularly apparent through what environmental historian Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” harm that unfolds gradually and often invisibly across time, “incremental and accretive”6 in its effects. Carceral landscapes embody this kind of durational impact, both through their environmental footprints and through their role in managing populations over extended periods. As industrial expansion, urbanization, and resource extraction intensified after 1950, states faced increasing pressures to regulate mobility, contain social instability, and absorb the inequalities produced by accelerated development. The prison emerged as a key institution through which these pressures were managed.
The consequences of this system extend beyond the immediate operation of prisons. Resource consumption, waste production, and energy demands reshape surrounding environments, while incarceration produces long-term and intergenerational social effects, particularly within Indigenous and marginalized communities. Carceral systems thus enabled accelerated development by containing the populations most affected by its disruptions and stabilizing the conditions required for continued expansion.
In this sense, prisons operate as sites of environmental afterlife. They absorb the social tensions generated by accelerated economic and political systems, concentrating those tensions within specific places and populations. The landscapes that host them become part of a broader geography of containment through which states manage inequality and maintain territorial order. This geography was essential to the functioning of the Great Acceleration, allowing rapid environmental transformation to proceed while displacing and containing its social and ecological consequences.
The relationship is therefore reciprocal and constitutive. The Great Acceleration produced the need for institutions capable of managing disruption, while the expansion of carceral systems enabled accelerated development by stabilizing the inequalities and displacement it generated. The Great Acceleration, in this sense, was not only a period of rapid growth, but the emergence of enduring systems of environmental and social management that continue to structure Canadian landscapes.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).
Rethinking Canada’s Environmental History
Taken together, this perspective reshapes how we understand the environmental history of the Great Acceleration in Canada.
First, it expands the range of infrastructures that environmental historians consider significant. Ecological change is not shaped solely by dams, pipelines, and mines; institutions designed to manage human populations also play a central role.
Second, it foregrounds the relationship between environmental transformation and systems of governance. Accelerated industrial development required new mechanisms for regulating labour, mobility, and social order, and carceral institutions formed part of this broader architecture of control.
Finally, it highlights how environmental change intersects with inequality and colonial power. The spaces of the Great Acceleration were not neutral. They were structured by political decisions about who would benefit from economic growth and who would bear its costs. Prisons make this dynamic particularly visible, revealing how the management of people and the management of land became intertwined in the postwar decades that reshaped Canada’s environmental trajectory.
The Great Acceleration is often described as a period of unprecedented environmental transformation. Yet this transformation depended not only on technology and industry, but on the institutions that governed change and contained its consequences. Among these, the prison stands as one of the most overlooked infrastructures of the Anthropocene. Recognizing its place within Canada’s environmental history reveals that the landscapes of acceleration were also landscapes of confinement – spaces where the governance of bodies and the transformation of environments became inseparable.
Notes
1. Will Steffen et. al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no.1 (2015): 2–3.
2. John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, “Toxic Legacies, Slow Violence, and Environmental Injustice at Giant Mine, Northwest Territories,” The Northern Review, no. 42 (2016): 16.
3. Cheryl Webster and Anthony Doob, “Punitive Trends and Stable Imprisonment Rates in Canada,” Crime and Justice, vol. 36 (2007): 297, 331.
4. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–388.
5. Office of the Correctional Investigator, Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator 2021-2022 (Government of Canada, 2022), 96.
6. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.
Feature image: front elevation of Prison des Patriotes-au-Pied-du-Courant in Montréal, Québec. Image credit: Joanne Lévesque via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prison_des_patriotes.jpg
Alicia Carefoote