Panel Discussion 2:

Abolitionist praxis and labour

in the carceral continuum

Saturday 17 April 2021 ~ 5:25 - 6:25pm Pacific

Recording available here (60 mins)

Abolition and prison labour

Anonymous

We examine the conditions of indentured labour work regimes in Canadian federal prisons where prison labour is considered participation in vocational programs and thus does not adhere to labour standards including adequate pay. In 2018 prisoners sought a judicial review, Guérin v. Canada, that sought to challenge the status of prisoner labour by asserting the rights of inmates to pay under the Canadian labour code, and a double constitutional challenge to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom.

We argue that prisoners work as indentured labour, which has the effect of propping up a prison industrial complex in Canada. Indeed, the Correctional Services of Canada sells the products of prison labour on their website, and prisoners perform work that is integral to the running of the prison. Furthermore, prisoners rely on their scant allowance to survive, paying out of their allowance for room and board, and phone system fees. Given the increases in the cost of living (canteen, clothing, phone etc) their purchasing power is lowered due to the lack of pay increase since 1981. On top of this, whatever is left over is needed to facilitate prisoner contact with family and reintegration into the community. The prison labour regime creates isolated, docile bodies making re-adaptation difficult, thus maintaining the status as a precarious wage earner when released. We argue prisoners’ wage labour should be recognized as such under the law. While all labour is exploitation - an abolitionist perspective must support struggles within the prison walls that facilitate prisoner empowerment.

The carceral continuum and abolition praxis

Anonymous

As someone who has worked on the realities of institutional violence across different sites from homeless shelters and social housing, to prison, I offer a paper on the concept of the carceral continuum (first proposed by Foucault) to understand how intersectionality oppressed folx who fall outside the wage labour relation tend to move from one institution to another with prison constituting the penultimate model of the carceral logic. Those bodies who form a problematic mass and are subjected to various forms of warehousing, forced assimilation, discipline and control, stigmatization and Othering as they move throughout the social space.

Beyond the specific architectures of various institutions, the carceral continuum also describes a spatial discipline in the colonial/capitalist city (private property, public space and parks) and a relationality between those who incarcerate and those subject to containment and control. Based in community building work, I show how the carceral continuum allows us to see the totality of the institutionalization of criminalized/unwaged lives - rather than making a distinction between prisoners/non-prisoners, and when a prisoner is incarcerated and when they are released. Thus, abolition as a conceptual frame and a mode of resistance can usefully be applied to all the institutional spaces and relationalities that non-waged/criminalized persons may find themselves within - and thus expanded in terms of its visioning of a futurity. A term that refers to the core carceral logic that runs through colonial/capitalist society and thus impacts everyone at all times and in all spaces.