Following the Second World War, liberal nation-states sought to address injustices of the past. Canada’s government began to consider its own implication in various past wrongs, and in the late twentieth century it began to implement reparative justice initiatives for historically marginalized people. Yet despite this shift, there are more Indigenous and racialized people in Canadian prisons now than at any other time in history. Carmela Murdocca examines this disconnect between the political motivations for amending historical injustices and the vastly disproportionate reality of the penal system – a troubling contradiction that is often ignored.