Incarcerating the ‘Inadmissible’: KIHC as an Exceptional Moment in Canadian Federal Imprisonment

First, we provide an overview of the IRPA immigration security certificate mechanism, and discuss its deployment in the post-September 11 context. We then describe the agencies involved in security certificate detention and the characteristics of the KIHC facility, and note its nature as an exceptional moment in Canadian federal corrections. To contextualize the discussion of KIHC, we then provide an overview of the anti-certificate movement, with specific attention to its depiction of the Kingston Centre. Having introduced the facility and its operations in some detail, we conclude by framing it within a theory of sovereign exceptionality and counter-law (Agamben 1998; 2005; Ericson 2007). We suggest that KIHC represents a concretization of the state of exception, by virtue of its physical presence as an apparatus of border control within the space of a federal penitentiary, its ambiguous jurisdictional status, and, not least, the nature of the incarceration it makes possible. Importantly, the space created by KIHC represents the normalization of the extraordinary, rendering an exceptional process permanent by granting it an institutional setting.