Investigating Colonial Roots of Indigenous Incarceration
Written By: Bella Rojas
Incarceration has long been framed as a neutral response to crime and a system designed to correct wrongdoing and maintain social order. Yet for Indigenous peoples across North America, imprisonment carries deeper historical roots in genocide, displacement, and cultural erasure. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, as of 2021, American Indians and Alaska Natives are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at a rate of 763 per 100,000 people, more than double the national average, making them the second most overrepresented ethnic group in U.S. prisons and jails. Native women are especially affected, accounting for 2.5% of incarcerated women despite representing only 0.7% of the U.S. population.
This disparity is no coincidence. While settler colonialism may not be the sole factor behind Indigenous over-incarceration, it laid the foundation for the systems that perpetuate it today. The issue is not that Native peoples are inherently more prone to crime or violence, but that they have been systematically targeted and criminalized through the institutions and ideologies of the settler state.
To fully understand the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples across North America, we must first examine the colonial construction of Indigenous criminality. As Luana Ross argues in Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality, from the earliest stages of settler colonialism, colonial governments deliberately attached labels of savagery and danger to Indigenous communities to justify violent conquest and create a narrative of Indigenous elimination masked by an agenda of maintaining “law and order.” In other words, criminality and incarceration emerged as tools of social control and were utilized to contain Indigenous sovereignty and self-governance, seize land, and promote Indigenous extermination.
Kelly Lytle Hernández further exposes this colonial carceral agenda in her book City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles. Through a case study of 18th- and 19th-century Los Angeles, one of the first U.S. cities to systematically jail Indigenous people, Hernández demonstrates how incarceration became intertwined with urban expansion and settler domination. During this period Native men and women of the Tongva tribe were often arrested for vague “crimes” such as vagrancy or public drunkenness, effectively using imprisonment as a process of elimination and control through incarceration.
Today, indigenous incarceration stems from many of the structural inequities faced by native communities as a result of a history of settler colonialism. Extreme poverty and other socioeconomic disparities, poor access and support for mental health and substance abuse care, as well as jurisdictional confusion that places Native defendants under harsher federal laws, all contribute to the high rate of imprisonment of Natives today. But without acknowledging the historical roots of such issues and addressing the symptoms of struggle within native communities, a perpetual cycle of stereotyping and incarcerating natives will continue.
Sources
Hernández, Kelly Lytle. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Ross, Luana. Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. University of Texas Press, 1998.
Prison Policy Initiative. 2024. “Native Incarceration in the U.S.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/native.html.
Kilgore, James. “Mass Incarceration Since 1492: Native American Encounters With Criminal Injustice.” Truthout, 7 Feb. 2016, truthout.org/articles/mass-incarceration-since-1492-native-american-encounters-with-criminal-injustice/.
