Prisons are anti-labour and anti-Indigenous institutions that exist to warehouse the surplus populations left behind by the production of capital. Its populations consist of primarily poor, working class people who come from displaced communities shaped by organized abandonment from the state. Correctional officers serve the interests of the state and act as the front line oppressors in prisons defined by deplorable conditions and violence.
In Ontario, all correctional officers in provincial prisons are represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) under the correctional bargaining unit. OPSEU has been praised in the past few years as a progressive union that stands in solidarity with liberation movements such as Palestine, releasing statements claiming to recognize that “the road for all oppressed peoples is interconnected.”
When it comes to the violence inherent to prisons however, OPSEU uses the correctional bargaining unit as a means to dead-end the human rights of those incarcerated, the population bearing the most significant brunt of state oppression. Such a reality reveals the contradiction of carceral unionism, in which the collective bargaining power meant to further worker solidarity is instead being used to stifle the fight for downsizing prisons and implementing transformative reforms that lead to prison abolition. What results is the further entrenchment of state carceral power through the co-opting of union organizing to silence incarcerated voices.
This is especially evident in OPSEU’s response to what occurred at Maplehurst Institution in December 2023.
Maplehurst
On March 31st of this year, video footage from December 2023 at Maplehurst Correctional Institution in Milton, Ontario emerged that showcased egregious actions from guards in full riot gear committing harm to nearly 200 prisoners that were stripped and sitting cross legged with their hands zipped tied behind their back. Multiple accounts reveal the violence from the correctional staff directly violating the rights of several incarcerated individuals. Maplehurst has a notorious reputation for being one of the most violent prisons in Canada in terms of violence enacted by staff.
In response to the allegations emerging from the December 2023 incident and before the footage was open to the public, OPSEU released a statement on August 23rd, 2024 titled “Stop blaming front line correctional staff who work under impossible conditions: OPSEU/SEFPO statement on ICIT deployment at Maplehurst Correctional Complex,” which justified the behaviour of the guards in the name of “public safety.” In the announcement, the union not only chooses to not include any statement from any prisoner who experienced violations of their rights, but in fact implied that it is the prisoners themselves who perpetrate the violence that continues to rise within correctional institutions, with correctional bargaining unit chair Chad Oldfield saying, “You can’t just rely on inmate accounts to assess the security level and threat posed to staff and inmates…when violence perpetuated by inmates continues to rise within correctional institutions.” The statement went further, with OPSEU president JP Hornick claiming that prisons lack investment to properly address the “over-crowded, understaffed institutions with crumbling infrastructure and lack of proper programming and mental health support for inmates.”
The decision to blame prisoners for the violence that occurs inside is a recurring trope that serves to detract from the fact that it is the conditions of prisons themselves that lead people into desperate circumstances that may lead to violence. As George Jackson put it 55 years ago, “To determine how men will behave once they enter the prison it is of first importance to know that prison men are brutalized by their environment–not the reverse.” When the blame is directed at prisoners however, it is a concerted reactionary effort by the correctional bargaining unit to reinforce the pathologization of prisoners (disproportionately Indigenous, racialized, and poor) as inherently violent, and therefore deserving of being confined away from society.
Just as condemning incarcerated people for the violence in prisons serves as an ideological strategy to justify imprisonment, so does the use of the term “understaffing” to imply that the solution to the violence within prisons is that they simply do not have enough prison guards. Alec Karakatsanis, a writer and civil right lawyer, has written extensively on how the “shortage” argument utilized by prison guard unions is used to manufacture the public’s consent for expanding incarceration. Karakatsanis argues that rather than seeing the problem as that there are not enough guards, the real issue is that there are too many people in cages, “But prison guard unions and others push a narrative in which the problem can be framed as a lack of investment in prisons, so that outrage over the system’s failures can always be channeled into more resources for it.”
This aligns with the perspective of Lindsay Jennings, a prisoners’ rights advocate and founder of Incarcerated Voters Ontario. When interviewed by Spring, Jennings emphasized how the vested interests of correctional bargaining units and prisons fuel the harms of mass incarceration: overcrowding, systemic violence, and the criminalization of marginalized communities. When faced with external oversight or reform efforts, prison guard unions then wield labour and health and safety rights to protect their violent culture while framing such changes as threats to officers’ authority and safety.
Jennings has been a primary voice against OPSEU’s response to what occurred at Maplehurst, and following the release of the statement, she created a detailed Instagram post that outlined how OPSEU remains complicit in its continued protection of correctional officers who “engage in abuse, cover-ups and systemic violence behind the walls of Ontario’s jails and prisons.” An analysis consistent with the Toronto Star’s investigation that revealed internal documents describing the destruction of evidence and falsifying of records following the 2023 incident.
Jennings elaborated further on Maplehurst to Spring, stating that incidents like these illustrate how correctional unions serve to shield their members from accountability: “When it comes to finding out what happened, unions become part of the gatekeepers of information. You can’t FOI (freedom of information request) anything when it comes to unions and this in turn further dismisses and disenfranchises folks that are incarcerated.” Another report from the Toronto Star discovered that 11 correctional staff at Maplehurst were found to be engaging in a code of silence to protect officers who committed force at the incident. In 2013, the ombudsman conducted a thorough report of the code of silence culture embedded within correctional guard culture, which states that every recommendation was implemented by provincial correctional facilities. Despite this, as evidenced at Maplehurst, the code of silence culture persists.
It was only when the video footage of the 2023 incident was released and Ombudsman’s investigation announced when more media backlash sparked a second statement from the correctional bargaining unit on June 12, 2025, titled, “OPSEU/SEFPO calls on Ombudsman to hold Maplehurst’s senior decision-makers to account in upcoming investigation.” The statement doubled down on justifying the actions of the guards and argued they have no control over what happens as a result of systemic issues. JP Hornick was quoted once again, stating that guards “remain dedicated to their communities and public safety, but refuse to be the scapegoats for systemic problems.”
It is worth noting that merely six days earlier on June 6th, OPSEU released a statement on National Indigenous History Month which stated, “As trade unionists, we look deeply within ourselves and take instruction on what we can put on the line today to protect Indigenous futures.” Questions arise: does this also include the futures of the Indigenous population at Maplehurst, where the unconscionable violence was imposed on them by unionized guards? How does OPSEU’s protection of the agents of anti-Indigenous violence protect Indigenous futures?
Following the second statement, Incarcerated Voters released another response contesting the claim that what occurred at Maplehurst was a result of “poor leadership.” Rather, it was a coordinated assault by officers who carried out their actions with the intention to further abuse their power over prisoners, as the video evidence clearly showcased. Jennings concluded to Spring that OPSEU’s denial, refusal of facts and continued defence of staff “can be interpreted as an effort to suppress scrutiny and shift attention away from systemic issues within the institution.”
Prisons cannot be reformed
Prisons are not broken; they are working as intended. The same goes for prison guards, whose culture is embedded within violence, colonization and complicity. What happened at Maplehurst is quite exceptional in terms of the violence carried out but violence perpetuated by guards and conditions of confinement is a feature of incarceration. Orisanmi Burton argues that prisons should be understood as spaces of low intensity warfare in which the harm inflicted by guards has been legitimized as legal.
Jennings referred to prisons as a franchise business, where increasing death rates, violence and overcrowding serve as core functions of the prison industrial complex that force prisoners to comply with the demands of correctional staff. What is important to understand is that the social position of guards themselves is not much higher than the prisoners who they exert violence upon. Rather than recognizing their shared exploitation with prisoners under racial capitalism however, prisons and pro carceral institutions and organizations, including organized labour, serve as reactionary forces that divide such solidarity from occurring.
The only way to reconcile such contradictions is for unions such as OPSEU to drop the correctional bargaining unit and to commit to supporting non-reformist reforms that lead to decarceration and the closures of prisons.
Are the interests of union members always the interests of the working class?
In his analysis of how organized labour has responded to mass incarceration in the United States, James Kilgore argues that there are times when the interests of the working class conflict with the interests of the members of respective unions. Such an observation describes the tension that exists between sections of public sector unions that defend state violence imposed on prisoners and sections of those very same unions that elevate true worker power. Similar to OPSEU in Ontario, the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union (MGEU) represents a large portion of public sector workers in Manitoba, as well as correctional officers.
The MGEU has been noted as the lead proponent for prison expansion in the province with one of the largest proportion of Indigenous prisoners, using overcrowding, staff shortages and lack of worker protections to reinforce carceral logics that justify the incarceration of the working class. During the Manitoba NDP’s long tenure between 1999 and 2016, 651 new jail beds were added and incarceration grew by 113%, the largest increase in the province’s history. Such a rise, as argued by Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land and James Wilt, cannot be separated by the heavy influence the MGEU correctional sector had on the NDP’s rise to power in the province.
In Ontario, Doug Ford has promised to build over 1000 more jail beds by 2031, and 110 have already been added to existing infrastructure. While the OPSEU correctional bargaining unit and the Ford government may disagree on negotiations relating to wage increases and pension improvement, their interests align in protecting prisons as legitimate institutions that serve the public. Both OPSEU and the Ford government purport that prisons “keep communities safe” and weaponize scarcity themed language such as “understaffed,” “underfunded” and “overcrowded” to frame the “crisis” of prisons as the fact that we simply don’t have enough of them—not the fact that they’re unreformable sites of state violence.
More prisons means more death, which means more grieving families. In 2021, the correctional bargaining unit grieved the presence of 18 memorial crosses in front of Elgin-Middlesex detention centre that had the names of people who were killed at the prison. The grievance board ruled in favour of OPSEU, who claimed that the presence of the crosses created psychological stress for guards. The 18 crosses were then removed from the site with little consultation with the families according to Jennings, who asks, “What would the people on the grievance board or OPSEU do if it was their family member who was killed?”
Solidarity beyond bars
There is no better time than now for organized labour to dissociate from institutions that undermine the basic human dignity of society’s most vulnerable. It will not be easy: correctional bargaining units are known to be primarily men, and are vocal and heavily united amongst issues. But that doesn’t mean divesting from police and prison unions is impossible.
Multiple unions in the United States successfully voted to remove police unions in the wake of the Black Lives Matter 2020 protests. This occurred alongside various campus-based unions that also voted to remove police from their representation. In Canada, a group of CUPE members began advocating from the bottom up for the removal of police from the union back in 2019 and brought the resolution to the floor at the CUPE labour convention. Such demands must be strengthened to include the divestment of correctional bargaining units such as those in OPSEU and MGEU.
If OPSEU truly wants to be the union of the working class, it should advocate for the unionization of prisoners, not their oppressors. As Jennings noted to Spring, the work of incarcerated people is excluded from most labour protections, including minimum wage, safety standards, and the right to collective bargaining. In fact, one of the biggest barriers to the formation of prisoner labour unions has been prison guard unions themselves, who consider them to be a threat to their institutional control and legitimacy.
Finally, the ultimate stance organized labour can take is to align themselves with decarceration and prison closure campaigns, such as the ongoing fight against the Kemptville jail and the #NOPE Campaign. Decarceration benefits everyone as it would redirect resources away from prisons towards social welfare and true community safety.
OPSEU’s collective bargaining power is imperative when it comes to upholding the rights and liberties of workers in other sectors. This is all the more reason why they should be held accountable for the harms done under the correctional bargaining unit, as it represents a betrayal of those members working in essential fields. Those who align themselves with the prison industrial complex have no place among the workers they brutalize and oppress, and especially those that claim to fight for workers’ rights and the liberation of marginalized groups. To quote an OPSEU newsletter, “decolonization is not an abstract metaphor – because colonization isn’t either, continuing to deliver violence like this on our doorsteps.” One concrete way to stop delivering colonial violence is to stop protecting those who mete it out.
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