Check out our newest contribution to CARMS: "A Just Transition: Moving Away From Prison Construction in Canada" written with @Souabouomar & @JustinPicheh. TLDR: Building new prisons "closer to home" isnt the answer to poor conditions & prisoner isolation. carfms.org/introducing-de…
Canada is building new facilities to incarcerate people. Policy-makers at all levels should push back against this costly, ill-advised, trend. Instead, they should redirect funding to collaborative transformative justice practices that strengthen local communities.
Imprisonment is an expensive, inhumane, and ineffective approach to preventing & responding to criminalized acts, yet prisons continue to be built and filled across the country and the provincial, federal and territorial level.
A common justification is the need to improve conditions of imprisonment and reduce crowding, alongside promises of more programming and care to people behind bars ‘closer to home’. The notorious TSDC and other new jails show that a new building fail at meeting this objective.
In NFL & Labrador, the government has budgeted $1 million to expand the Labrador Correctional Facility. The government wants to ensure that women, including Indigenous people can “be jailed in a location closer to their families and loved ones”.
The ‘closer to home’ rhetoric echoes in Nova Scotia where provincial plans to replace Cape Breton Correctional Facility were justified through the “desire to keep [incarcerated people] in close proximity to their own communities”. Closer to home, but still in a cage.
The NWT govt has plans to build a $23.6 mill, multi-security level facility designed to cage women that includes a segregation unit. These facilities are meant to keep prisoners in custody within their home-territories, rather than shipping them elsewhere to do time.
It has become clear that building detention centres, jails, and prisons to keep incarcerated people in cages ‘close to home’ interests policy-makers across the levels of government. But this approach is misguided. Living in a cage close to home is far from being home.
Instead of expanding human caging infrastructure, such a ‘closer to home’ goal can be easily, affordably, and safely accomplished by diverting and decarcerating people through community-based alternatives.
Divesting from prison building will free up billions of taxpayers’ dollars. Such funds could build safer and inclusive communities through attrition – which is to say a gradual reduction – of human caging in Canada via a “just transition”.
A just transition away from imprisonment would involve building capacity for transformative justice (TJ) approaches. Hinging on the belief that no one is disposable, TJ involves both those who have caused harm and those who have experienced it in responding to the harm
The just transition for prisoners and detainees involves not only rejecting the party line that more and bigger prisons make Canada safer but accepting that collaborative transformative justice practices will save money and strengthen communities.
Rather than building jails and prisons to keep people caged closer to their families - knock the walls down and bring our loved ones home!
This thread covered much of our blog post but still go check it out & continue 2 resist the ongoing expansion of human caging infrastructure
This thread covered much of our blog post but still go check it out & continue 2 resist the ongoing expansion of human caging infrastructure
