Letter: Prisoners Justice Day shines light on injustice

Editor’s note: This letter is in response to the story “A mother speaks of her son’s death on Prisoners Justice Day”, which ran Aug. 10.

Thank you for your extensive, detailed and thoughtful coverage of Prisoners Justice Day. Prisoners Justice Day is an important event which shines a much-needed spotlight on the harms and injustices that imprisonment inflicts on people, families, and communities. Yet, it too often passes without media attention.

We do not talk enough, as a society, about the severe damage done to people by the reliance on prisons to deal with social problems, from homelessness to mental health to unemployment to impacts of colonialism. As your article emphasized, poor and marginalized people are disproportionately represented in prisons and jails. Indigenous women are over-classified in maximum security placements, solitary, etc.

Despite what recent panics over violent crime suggest, most prisoners in Canada are in for low level, less harmful, or even harmless activities (personal consumption practices, survival strategies, nuisances, administrative issues). Most people detained in Canada, in remand in jails, have not been convicted of anything.

It is important to remember that Prisoners Justice Day arose from the efforts of imprisoned people themselves, in response to avoidable deaths behind bars (the deaths of Eddie Nalon and Bobby Landers). It is still motivated by the activities of prisoners themselves, many of whom still refuse to work or eat on that day as a show of solidarity.

What happens in prison occurs out of sight, out of mind. That makes it easy for the public to overlook or ignore it. Prisoners Justice Day can take us inside the prison walls and break the silence. Your article provides an important service in getting some of the stories out.

Dr. Jeff Shantz
Department of Criminology
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Surrey, BC