Tag: Prisons

Roughly 10 members of the editorial collective – comprised of Inreach and Free Lands Free Peoples members, and Briarpatch staff – have met every two weeks since April to shape this special issue.

Drug prohibition in prisons is a dangerous farce that generates violence, overdoses, and corruption.

From March 2020 to March 2021 there were more than 21 hunger strikes in Canadian prisons. Briarpatch looks back on a year of prisoner rebellions during COVID and what they won.

A new digital pill that tracks whether it has been ingested is poised to enter the Canadian market. But for people who are incarcerated and medicated, it threatens to expand surveillance both inside and outside prisons.

In a new report, people inside women’s prisons explain how incarceration has impacted their reproductive health – from limiting health care access, to verbal and physical abuse, to destroying family connections.

The COVID-19 outbreak inside Saskatchewan’s provincial prisons, where three-quarters of inmates are Indigenous, is the newest development in Canada’s 154-year-long campaign of Indigenous genocide.

As Lorna Poplak’s new book “The Don: The Story of Toronto’s Infamous Jail” shows, it’s impossible for a history of a prison to disappear the continuity between one institution and the carceral whole.

How a public-sector union became the leading advocate of jail-building in Manitoba – and laid the foundation for the province’s incarceration disaster.

Prisoners are locked in their cells 24 hours a day, with no running water and guards who refuse to wear PPE. Some are comparing federal prisons, where populations are older, to long-term care homes, the site of the province’s most severe outbreaks.

Some clarifications about Briarpatch’s recent article about the reopening of the Kingston prison farms, and the work of Evolve Our Prison Farms.

Canada’s prison farms are being reopened. But when prisoners will be paid pennies a day, and the fruits of their labour will likely be exported for profit, there’s little to celebrate.

Activists are determined to halt the construction of a new migrant detention centre in Laval.

Josephine Pelletier was shot to death by Calgary police in May. Her life and death shed light on the complicated interplay between colonialism, incarceration, and police brutality. This is her story.

The right of trans prisoners in Canada to self-identify their gender is an important win. How can it be used to fuel – and not drain – our efforts towards a future without prisons?

In 2016, Nicholas Dinardo was arrested and sent to remand at the Regina Correctional Centre. After remaining in segregation for most of the last year, he wrote this poem.

The Prisoner Correspondence Project connects LGBTQ2S inmates with pen pals on the outside. The relationships of care and empathy developed over years of exchanging letters are a form of radical solidarity that upends the control, surveillance, isolation, and erasure enforced by prisons.

When Stephen Harper’s government shuttered prison farms across the country without a coherent explanation, some saw an opportunity to transform them into animal sanctuaries.

Marx predicted that capitalists will always try to push down wages and undercut working conditions. He was right, and the working class can push back if it builds power broadly and intersectionally.

The worker response to the Saskatchewan Party’s piecemeal approach to dismantling the public sector.