Prisoners’ Justice Day 2024 will take place on August 10th. On August 9th at 11:00 am ET, there will be a press conference by Tracking (In)Justice on their YouTube channel to launch the first ever publicly accessible database on deaths in custody across Canada.
The following are locations for selected Prisoners’ Justice Day events happening in Ontario on August 10th:
Toronto: Barbara Hall Park at 12:00 pm ET
Barrie: Trinity Anglican Church, 24 Collier St at 11:30 am ET
Ottawa: Room 215D, Jack Turcot University Centre (UCU), 85 University Private (University of Ottawa) at 11:00 am ET
Please see your local organizing groups for other cities and provinces locations.
The roots of Prisoners’ Justice Day
The death of Edward Nalon at the Millhaven Maximum Security Prison in 1974 ignited a solidarity movement for prisoners’ rights across the Canadian state. Nalon, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and had spent a vast amount of his time in solitary confinement, took his own life after his calls for help and to be moved back to the general population were ignored by prison guards.
On the one year anniversary of Nalon’s death the prisoners of Millhaven held a memorial, staged a hunger strike and refused to work. The following year, on May 21st, 1976, Robert Landers died of a heart attack while also in segregation after having his symptoms frequently ignored by the nurses at Millhaven. The lack of action from Correctional Service Canada’s (CSC) resulting from their deaths culminated in the creation of the first Prisoners’ Justice Day.
Thousands of incarcerated people across the country staged a one-day hunger strike to remember not only Nalon and Landers, but all those whose deaths came premature due to state-sanctioned violence. The original demands from the Millhaven prisoners, most of which have yet to be fulfilled, include the right to meaningful work with fair wages, the right to proper medical attention and the right to an independent review of all prison decision-making and conditions.
Prisoners’ Justice Day continues as a tradition every year on August 10th and is led by those with lived experience of incarceration. The day is for commemorating the many deaths resulting from imprisonment as well as recognizing the ongoing organizing efforts towards decarceration and abolition. Carceral resistance organizing, in its constant struggle against CSC, remains prominent as the conditions that created Prisoners’ Justice Day fifty years ago remain widespread for all those imprisoned in so-called Canada.
How many more inquests?
Consider the recent coroner’s inquest into the homicide of Soleiman Faqiri. An inquest is a public hearing conducted by a coroner consisting of a jury of five community members and occurs after every death in custody. The purpose of the hearing is to inform the public about the circumstances around the death as well as to provide recommendations to prevent such deaths in the future. While still legally innocent and having both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, Faqiri spent the last moments of his life being restrained, pepper sprayed and covered with a spit hood by guards who breached upwards of sixty policies in their actions. Despite the inquest resulting in a jury finding that Faqiri’s death a homicide, no legal repercussions came from the verdict. Of the fifty-seven recommendations brought about by the inquest, none have been implemented by the Ontario government.
The issue of inquests and lack of change resulting from their verdicts persists as a barrier to progress. For instance, of the over one hundred recommendations brought about by the inquest into the death of Ashley Smith in segregation at Grand Valley Institution for Women in 2007, only a few were implemented by CSC. This absence of action had detrimental consequences and contributed to the circumstances surrounding the death of Terry Baker in 2016. Baker, as with Smith, suffered from mental illness and had her pleas for help ignored before taking her own life while in segregation.
Organized abandonment
The deaths of Nalon, Landers, Faqiri, Smith and Baker should not be perceived as anomalies independent of one another, nor should they be reduced to solely analyzing the individualistic actions of prison staff. Rather, they should be seen as outcomes of a colonialist carceral system contingent upon reproducing and furthering the exploitation and violence embedded within capitalism. Prisons, in their complete deprivation of people’s well-being, freedom and liberty, function as one of the settings where this violence is most prevalent.
The upholding of capital interests will always come at the expense of prisoners, who represent the surplus population most subjected to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of organized abandonment. Poor and racialized communities in Canada have their social determinants of health neglected through disinvestment and exclusion. The state, with the intentions of maintaining white supremacy through hegemonic social order, responds to the harm that arises from this abandonment with policing, surveillance and criminalization. One only has to look at the conditions of Indigenous communities and their disproportionate representation in corrections to recognize organized abandonment in action.
Prisoners’ liberation is a constant struggle
Despite the lack of data regarding the specific socio-economic status of people confined in Canada, it is obvious to anyone remotely in tune with human reality that the overwhelming majority of incarcerated people come from impoverished conditions. 60% of the Canadian federal prison population does not have an education past eighth grade. The unemployment rate at the time of sentencing is also 60% and most identify employment needs at intake. Homelessness and incarceration intersect heavily, with 16% of admissions to Ontario corrections now being people who have no fixed address, compared to 6% in 2008.
Poor people are jailed only then to become more poor. The most an incarcerated person can make in a day, which only 4.6% of the federal population receives, is $6.90. Prisoner pay levels have never been adjusted for inflation and have remained the same since 1981. When considering the increasing cost of living in corrections, alongside the lack of employment while imprisoned and after release, the intentions of the carceral state becomes clear: not to prevent the cycle of imprisonment, but to further control, displace and divert the most marginalized away from what they truly need. Instead of addressing the actual root causes of harm and “crime,” prisons aim to warehouse human beings that have been abandoned by society, only to abandon them more.
The foundations of imprisonment become even more severe when considering the circumstances of incarcerated women. It is estimated that 80% of women imprisoned in Canada are confined due to poverty related crimes, such as failure to pay a fine. The intersection of abuse and confinement is appalling, with 86% of federally incarcerated women having a history of physical abuse and 68% having a history of sexual abuse. Imprisonment only adds to this history of violence. Sexual victimization, the denial of health services, as well as limited employment and reintegration resources are all factors that disproportionately affect women in prison.
The outcome of such harsh and unstable conditions is an increase in deaths in custody. Tracking Injustice, a collaborative civil rights project, finds that a minimum of 1495 deaths have happened in Canadian custody since 2000. From 2010 to 2021, deaths of prisoners in Ontario provincial jails increased by 173%. For federally imprisoned people, their life expectancy is 62 years, 20 years younger than the Canadian average. Even if released from custody before dying, research from the United States finds that one year of incarceration can take up to 2 years of someone’s lifespan away.
For Prisoners Justice Day 2024, Tracking Injustice will release the first-ever publicly accessible database that details their research on deaths in custody. This is an important development as every single unnatural prison death is preventable and every single death aligns with Friedrich Engels’ theory of social murder.
The future of prisoner justice
While the fight against the Canadian carceral state can at times leave us feeling despondent, it is vital to remember the mass organizing of resistance that exists both in and out of prisons that are devoted to furthering the rights of all incarcerated people. Organizations such as Rittenhouse: A New Vision, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, PASAN and Barton Solidarity Project work in solidarity with prisoners to help improve their conditions while simultaneously bringing about the principles of Transformative Justice.
The demands brought forth by Prisoners’ Justice Day involve not only fulfilling the original demands of the Millhaven prisoners, but for both decriminalization and decolonization, as well as decarceration onwards to a world without prisons.
Abolition, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is “about presence, not absence; it’s about building life affirming institutions.” Prisoners’ Justice Day is evidence of this presence. It is a solidarity movement that recognizes the past, present and future resistance against carceral systems that only exist to perpetuate harm.
We cannot claim to be a liberated society while we allow the most vulnerable among us to be continuously dehumanized through the conditions of imprisonment. To fight for prisoners’ rights is to understand that their freedom is inextricably bound to ours. It is to understand that we are not free until everyone is.
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