As imprisoned people constitute some of the most at risk population in the world with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fathima Cader reflects on what prison abolition means with regards to people for whom the prison is a daily workplace.
To abolish prisons, we must abolish prison unions. This is not an anti-labor argument. If mainstream labor intends to remain relevant through the seismic shifts of our current political moment, it will need to wrest itself away from centrist institutionalism. A clear-eyed reckoning with the material conditions and consequences of what contemporary unions call “work” underscores that not all work is good work. Not all work deserves union protection. We can and we should turn away from work that produces death. This includes the work of corrections.
Police are in, but migrant farmworkers aren’t. Yes to jail guards, but no to domestic workers. Canadian laws stipulate myriad regulations about who is and who isn’t allowed to unionize, rules that do not correspond protection to exploitation. Why is someone who bears arms for work allowed to unionize, but not the person who picks our tomatoes? It was never a neutral category, this question of what we call work and who we called a worker. Unions know this. We must seize these fissures and redraw the terrain of solidarity, so that union membership more meaningfully accords with working class interests and mobilizations.
The pandemic underscores this, how death lies at the intersection of corrections and capital. I write from Canada, where COVID-19 deaths are trending upwards, while union density trends downwards, as it has for decades. At the time of my writing this, each day breaks the previous day’s record-high of COVID-19 infection and deaths. The uneven distribution of paid sick leave, extended healthcare, and pharmacare has been lethal. These benefits, which are generally present in varying degrees in most Canadian collective agreements, have been crucial to minimizing some workplace harms. No less importantly, by virtue of being organized, unionized workers have launched work stoppages in especially dangerous sites, such as schools, even though wildcat strikes are technically illegal in Canada.
But it would be insufficient to point to declining union density as a central aggravator in the vulnerability of non-unionized workers to death and illness. Research has already drawn staggering links between evictions and escalating COVID-19 rates. Nor has the pandemic provided respite from ongoing police killings and other state violence against Black, Indigenous, and migrant communities. Block by block, grassroots communities — workers and non-workers alike — are resisting. They have taken to the streets in increasingly militant actions in the fight to save our lives. In Hamilton in Ontario, protestors attended the mayor’s home, leaving on his doorstep a coffin with three naloxone kits sitting on a bed of flowers. In Toronto, organizers demanding eviction moratoriums are live-publishing the rapid zoom eviction hearings dispossessing tenants in the middle of winter, many of them elderly, many of them disabled. These actions have been met with arrests and legal threats, but with lives hanging in the balance, organizers have been undeterred.
If unions are to match this level of radicalism, they will need more than solidarity statements and anti-oppression workshops. There is no coherence in housing both the sheriff changing the apartment locks and the grocery store clerk facing homelessness under the same tent of “worker.” The prison guard shutting people away in solitary confinement is not more deserving of union protection than the worker they cage. Indeed, Canadian prisons provide an especially urgent and horrifying example of the failures of labor’s status quo. COVID is raging through Canadian prisons. The conditions of incarceration exacerbate the vectors of transmission: overcrowding, filth, and poor ventilation — these deprivations are endemic to Canadian prisons.
“Prison health is public health.” From Nunavut to Ontario, the phrase repeats like a refrain through Canadian court decisions. “The risk of infection is higher in custodial institutions, where conditions — cramped quarters and shared sleeping, dining, and toilet facilities — make it difficult, if not impossible, to implement social distancing and other protective measures,” reads one sentencing decision.
Though Canada does not officially have a death penalty, even short bouts in prison can be deadly. Robert Langevin was 72 years old when he died of COVID in a Quebec jail. Since December 2019, he had been awaiting trial in detention, legally innocent of any crime. He used an oxygen mask. In March 2020, he wrote to prison authorities, asking to be released: “I am a vulnerable human being. […] This isn’t human. […] I don’t want to die here.” Robert would be the first person in Canada to die of COVID in a provincial jail. When asked about his death, Quebec’s Public Security Minister Geneviève Guilbault responded: “Of course, we cannot avoid all cases because those are close living quarters.”
It cannot be easier to imagine people dead than free.
What of prison staff? Where does their culpability lie, and where they might find relief from the workplace dangers they themselves face? Decarceration provides a simple, timely, and effective response to these concerns. It is an increasingly mainstream demand, tabled by doctors and academics, community groups and even some politicians. But two weeks into the pandemic, the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers was adamantly against it, going so far as to synomize incarcerated people with the virus: “Canada is in crisis, and its citizens are already dealing with a potentially deadly threat. It is irresponsible to introduce further threats into our communities.” Instead, prisons cancelled visits and rehabilitation services en-masse, estranging people already cut off from the outside work. Prisons then escalated into mass solitary confinement, an illegal practice that the United Nations calls torture.
Predictably, mischaracterizing discipline as public health proved inadequate and excessive: it was staff who infected prisoners. Prison staff brought the virus into entrapped communities and then carried the virus back out into outside prison walls.
The Calgary Correctional Centre was site to one of the fastest outbreaks of COVID-19 in a Canadian prison. In October 2020, infections skyrocketed in just eight days from no prisoner cases to 104, representing nearly 60% of the people held there. Meanwhile, 20 staff had tested positive. Staff at the Centre had reportedly begun wearing masks just the month prior, nearly half a year into the pandemic. Without masks or proper hygiene, outbreaks were inevitable. Authorities did not instruct staff to start wearing full personal protective equipment until 118 cases were reported at the facility. Not long after, provincial health authorities ordered asymptomatic staff who had otherwise been required to self-isolate at home to return to work at the facility.
In this way, the pandemic reminds us that concrete and concertina notwithstanding, prison walls represent an artificial divide between incarcerated and non-incarcerated peoples. These bars do not protect us.
“They’re exhausted, and they’re scared,” said the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees of the correctional staff. This is Alberta’s largest union, but instead of using its might to call for fewer prisoners, it has called for more prisons, including more staff. It is true and it is unacceptable that prison staff have had to fight their employers for even such basic measures as masks, but the failure to couple the demand for basic protections with a demand for depopulation is short-sighted. This error comes out of a long history of prison expansionism, pervasive throughout Canadian unions, and evidently difficult to dislodge even in the face of the pandemic’s rising toll.
For decades, prison unions have responded to complaints about prison conditions by demanding more prisons. Overcrowding, filth, racism… all these ills and more would allegedly be fixed if we had more jails. Even now, in this time of mass death, and in the face of increasingly mainstream calls for immediate and permanent prison depopulation, Canadian unions have not yielded this position. “Let’s get those shovels in the ground now.” In July 2020, five months into the pandemic, Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) renewed demands for a new jail in Thunder Bay. OPSUE describes itself as “one of the most progressive and powerful unions in Ontario.” It represents workers in a wide range of sectors, including 9,500 corrections staff. “It’s going to take at least five years to build a new jail,” complained Warren Smokey Thomas, OPSEU’s president. “What’s the government waiting for now — a riot? Injuries and deaths?”
As though the pandemic were not injury and death enough. We cannot mitigate the violence of prisons by building more of them. “They’re incarcerated largely because of systemic racism,” added OPSEU First Vice-President/Treasurer Eduardo Almeida, about Indigenous prisoners. Almeida is himself a correctional officer. “The conditions at Thunder Bay Jail just add insult to injury.” Thunder Bay has long been the site of especially acute and infamous violence against Indigenous peoples, including disappearances and killings. Indigenous people account for roughly 5% of the population in Canada. Contrary to the overall decline by 13% in the number of people in prison, the number of Indigenous people has increased by over 43% over the last decade. This “injury” that OPSEU speaks of is the ongoing horror of settler colonization. The “insult” is that OPSEU is passing off its efforts to jail even more Indigenous people as reconciliation.
Prison expansionism enjoys bipartisan support. From the putatively progressive New Democratic Party in Manitoba to the centrist Liberals federally to the Conservative government currently ruling Ontario, political parties of all stripes in Canada have approved the construction of new prisons and the expansion of existing ones. Meanwhile, early in the pandemic, OPSEU found itself embroiled in an internal fight: factions of its prison staff members are seeking to break with OPSEU to join another union. “It’s despicable,” said Warren in the first of several press releases denouncing the union raid. “This is no time to be playing games. Lives are at risk.” That press release lists several measures OPSEU said it has been taking on behalf of its members, including “having a strong and relentless presence in the media.” It did not include decarceration.
The new union will face significant procedural and substantive legal hurdles in their campaign, but they are backed by Quebec’s second-largest union. If successful, their litigation could change the face of labor law in Canada. This rift within the house of labor will likely attract significant government and media attention. But this development is most significant for what it obscures: even as prison guards mobilize for better work, prisoners remain at heightened risk of infection and death. Like the old one, the new union too has not proposed depopulation.
For all their willingness to mount difficult legal battles and media campaigns, prison unions have ignored the simplest and quickest resolution of their concerns: depopulation. By refusing to take up decarceration, prison expansionist unions endanger not only prisoners and the general public, but their own members: reducing prison populations reduces staff risk. Correcting course will require a militancy among rank-and-file members that extends labor analysis away from prisons as sites of work to sites of containment.
It can be tempting to argue that by protecting jails, we protect jobs. By this logic, depopulation means unemployment, particularly for the working-class communities often targeted for jobs in corrections. Some pro-labor liberals point to the fact that some corrections staff are Black, Indigenous, or racialized as anti-racist reason to continue to staff these institutions that disproportionately jail Black, Indigenous, or racialized people. However, as Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land and James Wilt have pointed out: “Nobody should have to do the work of incarcerating other people. An estimated 36% of male correctional officers in Canadian prisons have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The trauma of locking another human in a cage, of being party to the violence inherent in the jail environment, is directly and proportionally related to how much of a threat correctional officers pose to the well-being of prisoners. These workers can and should be retrained for anti-carceral work, the way coal workers are being offered a “just transition” to jobs in solar and wind energy production.
We are entering a global recession. With mass job loss, housing precarity, and food insecurity already unfolding, we can expect to see increasing levels of incarceration and in conditions even worse than before. Prison issues are not simply about the conditions inside prisons, but the conditions outside them, the conditions create prisons and then populate them. As Angela Davis has observed: “the computability of state punishment in terms of time — days, months, years — resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primary form of punishment.”
Using early release and extended parole programs, some provincial and territorial governments reduced prison populations by 25% between February and April 2020. Between March and April 2020, the federal prison population fell by only 2% . More is needed. Because prisons refused to meaningfully and urgently heed calls for depopulation, as we now go into the winter, Canadian prisons continue to be sites of some of the country’s fastest (and most preventable) COVID-19 outbreaks. Corrections locals have wielded outsized influence over public sector unions, disproportionate to the actual size of their memberships relative to the size of their sibling locals. Prison unions have blocked basic basic public health measures for prisoners, contributing to the rates at which COVID-19 has been sweeping through prisons — contributing, in fact, to the illness of their own workers. But cutting off your nose to spite your face is consistent with a sectoral culture whose raison d’être is punishment.
It is a misnomer, a false equivalence, and a false moralization to call all things “work,” from teachers to police, from nurses to prison guards. We must be more discerning if the house of labor is to be something more than a circus of force. Because of the power imbalance between manager and worker, Canadian law recognizes that management should not be allowed to unionize. By the same token, neither should law enforcement, given the power imbalance between the armed and the civilian.
We outside prison walls have an obligation to our communities and our comrades behind bars. We all live under the shadow of the prison, even those of us on the outside. The prison system’s grip on our imaginations, our economies, and our social relations is a death vise. More than ever we need to shift the terrain of work away from harm and to healing. And, if they are to remain relevant, their unions will need to catch up. ■
Fathima Cader is a labor lawyer, based in Toronto. She has served as a Visiting Professor at the City University of New York and a McMurtry Fellow/Visiting Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Hazlitt, and elsewhere. Read more on her contributor page.