Most of my friends work freelance. They’re writers, editors, researchers, designers, illustrators, photographers, even university employees. But none of them have consistent, secure work. And while the right would have you believe that the BA is a bee-line to being a barista, it’s more about what our society has come to value. There are increasingly fewer secure jobs for teachers, artists, designers, writers, journalists, social workers, youth workers, and librarians. This is not because we have a lesser need for quality education, research and ideas, cultural projects and institutions, critical media, or social services – it’s because current governments, the corporate elite, and the growing right in Canada is ideologically opposed to these elements of our society.

This attack is not only an attack on the middle class, or on those of us who are university educated. For people like me, who come from low income families it means that social mobility is a myth. In Nova Scotia, many low income folks have university educations because of more substantial assistance programs that existed for people in rural communities, single parents, and people with disabilities. The erosion of these programs along with massive tuition fee increases since the early nineties leave education out of reach of many Nova Scotians. For workers not looking for more education, but simply a job that offers a decent wage and benefits, the contracting out of services, and the union busting practices of corporations have meant that it is difficult for those with a high school diploma or less to get decent, well-paying jobs. When a hospital outsources its laundry or its food services, the labour cost savings comes on the backs of low income people.
Governments (even Nova Scotia’s supposed social democratic government) have also been unwilling to take a stand against the corporate agenda. Creating a fair tax system, where corporations pay their fair share would create revenue for our social programs, including expanding medicare, instituting fully-funded post-secondary education, and ensuring all families have access to high quality childcare. Instituting card check, so that it is easier for workers to organize unions in their workplace would help workers fight for better and safer working conditions, decent wages, and benefits for them and their families. These changes would vastly improve the lives of all working people, including those precariously employed in the service sector.

Also, despite anti-poor rhetoric and stereotypes held by people on the right and left alike, poor people like art and culture too. Publicly-funded art, music, theatre, and sport programs in our schools and in our communities are the ones that kids from low income families have access to. The rich will always be able to put their kids in private programs, in private schools with the best of this or that, but the rest of us rely on public funding to access facilities to learn everything from ceramics to swimming, cooking to woodworking. We should be sharing our collective resources for programs and spaces for people, no matter their income, to share and learn skills, build relationships, and spend time with people from their communities. We should dedicate resources to museums and art galleries, and we should provide the time and space for teachers to take their students to them, and the resources to eliminate admission costs (let’s start with once a week) and programs that get seniors and people living with disabilities to these important institutions to look at art, to learn about history, to hang out with people.

If we built schools, community centres, libraries, and community health centres, expanded public transportation across the province, created better community services for people living with mental health issues and addictions, and funded more museums, public art, and art galleries, we wouldn’t just create jobs for artists or teachers or social workers, but also for construction workers, cleaners, clerical staff, aid workers, kitchen workers, drivers, and more. All the while, creating healthier, more vibrant, and stronger communities.

If I could, I’d stay in Halifax. I’ve lived in Nova Scotia 7 years, and I love the place. I haven’t moved apartments in 5 years. I have a collection of political projects I love here, I have great friends. I like being able to ride my bike for a half hour and get to a lake. I love being next to the ocean. I wasn’t really looking to leave, but I’ll trek the 1800 km back to Toronto, where I grew up, because a job is there. People in Nova Scotia understand the pull of work. People throughout this province migrate west for work. Unemployment in some regions of the province is 15 per cent. I have been travelling between Toronto and Halifax over the past 7 years for a bunch of reasons, and these days, every plane I get on westward is Halifax-Toronto-Calgary. But don’t think for a moment that there can’t be strong public institutions, better community supports, and well-paying jobs with benefits here in Nova Scotia and everywhere. Jobs that don’t put our families at risk of death or dismemberment; services that are supportive and empower people to be able to make decisions about their own bodies and their own lives; vibrant arts and cultural institutions and programs, and communities filled with happier, healthier people; these are all things worth fighting for.

With floats like this in the Pride Parade, we need to be talking more about a world without prisons!

The following is the text of a speech I delivered at this year’s Halifax Dyke and Trans March. I thought I would share it here to mark Prisoner Justice Day, which is August 10. This year, in the Halifax Pride Parade, Crime Stoppers included a float that had a fake prison cell, indicating the ever present need to talk with mainstream LGBTQ communities about the realities in Canadian prisons.

Today, I’m going to talk about something we talk about a lot at marches and protests: justice for our communities. I’m also going to talk about something we don’t talk about very much; I’m going to talk about prisons. I’m going to talk about how queer and trans people are often criminalized and about what it’s like to be behind the walls of a prison when you’re a woman, or when you’re queer, or when you’re trans or gender non-conforming. I’m going to talk about how prisons don’t mean justice for our communities, and they definitely don’t mean liberation for queer and trans people.

Struggles for equality, justice, and dignity for queer and trans people continue to be waged. Sometimes, it can seem like the law and the police have the answer. If bashing was a hate crime and penalities were stiffer, maybe we would see fewer of our people experiencing violence. But we need to think about who derives safety from the police, and how systemic violence including sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, anti-poor ideologies, and colonialism is maintained and defended by the police.

When familes are evicted from their homes, it’s the police that do the evicting. When aboriginal women and sex workers face violence, rape, and murder, RCMP officers make jokes behind closed doors. When people with HIV and AIDS don’t disclose, the police are there to lock them up. When queer people come to Canada, fleeing homophobia, the government can say they’re lying and deport them. When migrant women without immigration status seek solace from sexual violence, rape, or domestic violence, Canada Border Service Agents wait for them outside shelters to detain and deport them. All around us, there are ways that the criminal legal system defends and perpetrates violence against our communities, and against other marginalized communities – especially racialized communities, migrant populations, and indegenous peoples.

Issues of violence and marginalization are so messily intertwined. When we think about homophobic and transphobic bullying, we should also think about all the young people who’ve fled dangerous homes and dangerous schools and are living on the edge. Maybe they’re selling drugs or shoplifting to get by. And because homophobia and transphobia and discrimination against youth permeate through our society, a young queer gets stopped and the police search them, and it’s illegal, but it happens, and there holding and then they’re in Waterville, and when they get out they still don’t have any supports, only now their resume shows a mysterious two year disappearance. When we think about violence against women, we should also think about the trans woman doing sex work who gets picked up in a sweep. And because she hasn’t had Sex Reassignment Surgery and can’t afford hormones right now, she’s placed in a men’s prison. She’s strip searched by men. She’s denied a bra. She is put in segregation because her “safety” is a concern because she’s a woman in a man’s prison.

These issues are issues in our communities and we need to treat them that way. We know that trans people. queer women, and gender non-conforming people still face barriers to gainful employment, to living wages, to work that respects our indentities. We still struggle to find supportive, knowledgeable health care professionals, and we face disproportionate levels of incarceration, criminalization, and struggles with addictions. In our prisons, people who have faced homophobia and transphobia and sexism their whole lives are punished for it. They’re re-traumatized, and they’re denied the most basic of rights.

The policing of gender is nowhere as strong than behind prison walls. There are men’s prisons and women’s prisons. There is no gender spectrum in the prison system. There are no gender neutral bathrooms, no spaces for the people who live outside the bound of those two very small boxes: M and F. In 1993, a trans woman incarcerated for life, Synthia Kavanagh, filed three complainted with the Human Rights Tribunal of Canada for her incarceration in a male prison. Eight years later, the human rights tribunal found in response to her case:

• Trans people can be housed by their assigned sex and not their gender identity if they have not had sex reassignment surgery. Despite this, the the Correctional Service of Canada needs to do everything possible to accommodate transgendered people in prison, such as protecting them from sexual attacks and harassment.
• Trans people and their housing needs should be assessed individually in consultation with a physician expert in the treatment of gender dysphoria.
• Policy should permit incarcerated individuals who had completed the qualifying period for sex reassignment surgery before going to jail to have the necessary surgery while in prison, if surgery was recommended by their physicians. CSC is expected to cover the costs of SRS if it is recommended by their physicians. In 2010, Vic Toews, then Minister of Public Safety halted this coverage despite a federal court ruling that says SRS should be covered.

This decision ensures that trans and gender non-conforming people, particularly trans women, continue to be subjected to transphobic violence in the prison system including trans women being strip searched by male employees and being housed with men, trans people being denied gender aprorpiate health care, and often being housed in protective custody or segregation in order to address violence from the general population. But what if you’re not trans in the way that the medical system determines, maybe you’re not trans at all, but you’re gender non-conforming – you don’t adhere to strict gender roles. I know there are probably several dykes here today who love their boxer briefs. If you’re a woman in prison and you like boxer briefs – too bad. Boxer briefs are men’s underwear, and cross dressing is against prison policy. Maybe this seems so small, but not even being able to have the comfort of apropriate underwear is emblamatic of a system that aims to control your every move. And on top of all this – sex, consensual sex between inmates or even with yourself – is against the rules. No sex with other folks in prison. No jerking off. No reading or looking at porn. Sex is forbidden.

Rape, though – rape happens. And while rape in Canadian prisons is less common than our neighbours to the south, why would we even use that as a relative measure. One rape in prison is too many. And when we talk about sexualized violence – we don’t talk about prison rape. In fact, the Correctional Service of Canada and Statistics Canada don’t even have figures on sexual victimization in prisons.

Talking about prisons and policing means talking not only about “our people,” queers, trans folks, people who don’t fit in to rigid roles of the gender binary and heterosexuality, but also the people who have hurt us and hurt our communities – homophobic people, people who bash gays, people who commit violence against women, rapists. I can’t believe in a world that addresses problems by tearing people from their communities, by putting people in cages, by subjecting people to more and more violence, and so my understanding of justice has to mean justice for those people too.

There are lots of things that you can do to challenge the prison system and policing in our society. Look around you, and see how surveillance and policing is becoming integrated more and more into our lives. Maybe you’ve seen the body scanners at the airport. Those scanners can out trans folks in the interest of supposed safety. Take interest in the security measures used at your kids schools, how searches and surveillance are being normalized. Speak out against treating youth like criminals. Stand up against prison expansion in your community. If you’re a member of a union – try and talk to your co-workers about standing up against building more prisons, even if it means a few more jobs. Get to know your neighbours. Build community wherever you can. Speak out against government policies and laws that criminalize the poor, that criminalize people living with HIV and AIDS, that subject people changing their names to fingerprinting, that cut our public services. Defend programs in your community for youth, for aboriginal people, for people living with addictions, for those experiencing mental health issues.

There are a million ways to fight for a world without prisons and if we are committed to a project of collective liberation – for people of all sexualities and all genders – then prisons are our enemy. Prisons are the frontline of the battle to maintain the rigid M and F, to maintain the idea of the “man and women and baby make three” family. Everyday, as we speak, behind prison walls gender roles are heavily policed, and straying from those roles can lead to segregation or beatings, rape is used as a tool to maintain cisgendered and hetero supremacy, and more and more of our queer and trans siblings are being mistreated. And you know, we don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about folks in prison. We don’t spend time thinking about how we can reach through those prison walls to say – we’re here. Even if you can’t see us, we are here and we think that addressing social problems with violence and with cages is the greatest injustice.

Kaley Kennedy is a young queer lady and prisoner justice activist. She has written on and spoken about the realities of Canadian prisons for a variety of audiences. 

Here is a description of the show:

In her new work Agitate, Educate, Organise Emily Davidson investigates the problematic relationship artists have as both producers and workers. Agitate, Educate, Organise depicts vignettes of women’s labour history from the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth century with an installation of letterpress printed wallpapers. Drawing on William Morris’ decorative work from the late nineteenth century, Davidson repurposes the anti-industrial aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement to show the radical social history of women workers.

The show’s catalogue is a go it alone (together) publication, and includes a sheet of each of Emily’s five prints, a description of each scene, and an essay I wrote for the show. Emily and I have included the essay below.

Photos from the opening by Bredan, Dan and Rebecca. Click to view slideshow.

Solidarity, if more than a political tendency

Kaley Kennedy

“…a political tendency, however revolutionary it may seem, has a counter revolutionary function so long as the writer feels his solidarity with the proletariat only in his attitudes, not as a producer.”

 – Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer”

If we see art as political only when it acts as a medium for a political message or demand, we miss how the process of making art is, itself, political. Emily Davidson’s Agitate, Educate, Organise has a clear claim to being “political art;” their content depicts political struggle. But beyond the content of the vignettes, are deeper political questions about the status of workers, the importance of art, and the ways that artists and activists are able, or unable, to respond to the current wave of government austerity we face.

Davidson brings together the decorative arts and worker history because the two complement one another; by doing so, she demonstrates her own developing knowledge of art history and the struggle for women’s rights. This pairing is part of Davidson’s political consciousness, through which she recognises that: artists are workers; the history of women workers is also the history of women artists; and that women workers deserve to have their struggles memorialised and celebrated in a beautiful way.

In 2012, in Nova Scotia, making ends meet through art is difficult. According to census data, 2445 people worked as “Creative and Performance Artists” in the province in 2005. Even then, more than half of those workers made less than $10,000. Only a quarter were working full time for the full year and the median annual income for these workers was still only $24,000. Even in professional art-related fields, such as conservation and curatorial work, the majority of workers made less than $40,000.[i] While artists use significant personal resources to attend art colleges and to buy materials and supplies, and also need to spend long hours making art, developing their skills and techniques, and writing grant, residency, and gallery applications, they earn low incomes.

Generally, popular public discourse discusses art and culture workers either as fat cats living off of the taxpayer’s hard-earned money (the right’s view), or as innovators, able to drive a “creative economy.” This latter portrayal implies that art is important for the economy, but not a source of ideas to improve life and work for artists and their communities. This view is used as a tool to displace communities deemed less desirable including racialised people, the unemployed, queer and trans people, sex workers, and people struggling with mental illness and/or drug addictions; to drive public-private partnerships in the cultural sector; and as a platform for politicians to pay lip service to the arts. For example, the Government of Nova Scotia just introduced “Status of the Artist” legislation in the province with the stated purpose of “acknowledg[ing] the artist’s role in building the Province’s identity and culture and the enhancement that art brings to the Province’s social and economic well-being,”[ii] while at the same time forcing massive funding cuts on the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, a cornerstone of the province’s artist community, forcing transformative change that will significantly cut programs and staff, and increase tuition fees. These changes at NSCAD force the school to prioritize more marketable programs such as design over its fine arts curriculum, and further puts arts education out of the reach of low- and middle-income students, all the while further reducing the opportunities artists have for making money. The result of this process is discouraging solidarity between artists and other low-income people.[iii]

But, as governments withdraw from their responsibility to fund public goods, such as education, health care, libraries, public spaces, and the arts, solidarity among producers becomes increasingly important. Davidson has created a space with this show for different communities, including artists and union activists, to meet, and hopefully to advance, together, towards a better understanding of their shared history and struggle.

Davidson is concerned with ideas about social progress and the use of commemoration within social movements. She uses nostalgia as a way to make the audience think about the romanticisation of times past, even though contemporary social struggles share many similarities with historic ones. Davidson evokes the aesthetic of William Morris, a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She depicts women’s labour struggles in Morris’ own time in order to critique the absence of these struggles from his works. The Arts and Crafts movement was critical of industrialisation because it mechanized design and creativity. Morris was also a socialist utopian novelist, a poet, and a member of several socialist organisations. While he was creating beautiful depictions of elements of the natural world, the women in Davidson’s designs were in a life or death struggle against industrialiation.  In repurposing Morris’ aesthetic, Davidson points out that even artists who attempt systemic critiques can mask or overshadow struggles under that system.

Davidson suggests that political and social criticisms should be connected to the material realities people are struggling against; this should lead us to ask what we may be missing about contemporary North American realities and, in particular,  about the conditions faced by women workers around us.

For example, conditions for unmarried women textile workers living in factory-owned boarding houses in Lowell, MA, are not that unlike conditions faced by the thousands of women who come to Canada as migrant workers. The women of Lowell faced inadequate, overpriced accommodations, insufficient access to food, and were forced to work long hours. Women who come to Canada to work – often as domestic workers or  on farms or in hotels – on temporary worker visas are subjected to inadequate, overpriced accommodations, are forced to work long hours, and face abuse at the hands of their employers. Migrant workers’ visas are connected to their employers, so speaking out against working conditions can mean losing your job – this isn’t much different from the women turned out of Lowell factories.

The Ladies’ Art Association fought to advance women artists, who still struggle for recognition equal to their male peers. As in most occupations, women make less money than men in the field of art. Women are also under-represented in Canadian galleries. While women currently make up the majority of practicing visual artists, a 1994 study of gallery holdings showed that there were three times as many works by living Canadian men than there were works by living Canadian women in the National Gallery’s Canadian Collection.[iv]

In each of Davidson’s depictions, there is some of today. In the story of Lucy Parsons, there is the racism and the marginalisation that racialised women continue to face, including their under-representation in positions of leadership, the lack of teaching curriculums on contemporary and historical experiences of racialised and indigenous women, and the wide wealth and income inequalities that racialised women face. In Mother Jones’ story, there is the current work of feminist political activists to demand that governments commit to end poverty and  shrink the gap between the rich and the poor. In the Bread and Roses strike, there is government and business colluding to suppress worker action, but also possibilities for community solidarity to create revolutionary movements.

By depicting stories of women workers’ resistance, Davidson highlights histories that are not often told. Women’s presence and contribution in labour and anti-capitalist struggles is often overlooked, and women artists’ work and contributions are not fairly represented in the art sector, even now. Agitate, Educate, Organise makes many political statements, but also calls on its audience to pay attention to political struggles, to find solidarity over attempts to divide, and to enjoy beautiful things!

Bibliography

1. Abrahams, Linda. “Who Counts and Who’s Counting,” Women’s Art Resource Centre, 1994. Accessed April 5, 2012. http://www.warc.net/v3/english.html
2. Benjamin, W. “Author As Producer,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Brigid Doherty, Michael W. Jennings, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 79-95.
3. Bill No. 1: An Act to Respect the Status of the Artist. 1^st Reading, March 30, 2012 61^st General Assembly of Nova Scotia, 4^th Session, 2012. (Online). Halifax: Office of the Legislative Counsel, 2012. Available: http://nslegislature.ca/legc/bills/61st_4th/1st_read/b001.htm [April 12, 2012].
4. Haiven, Max. “What is the Value of an Art School,” Art Threat, January 7, 2012. Accessed April 9. 2012. http://artthreat.net/2012/01/nscad-crisis-art-school/
5. Statistics Canada. Employment Income Statistics (4) in Constant (2005) Dollars, Work Activity in the Reference Year (3), Occupation – National Occupational Classification for Statistics 2006 (720A) and Sex (3) for the Population 15 Years and Over With Employment Income of Canada, Provinces and Territories, 2000 and 2005 – 20% Sample Data. Catalogue number 97-563-XCB2006004. in Statistics Canada [database online]. Ottawa, Ont., 2006 [accessed April 7 2012]. Available from: http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/bsolc/olc-cel/olc-cel?catno=97-563-XCB2006062&lang=eng.

“Words Break Down Walls” by Molly Fair

In April, I gave a talk on prisons for a monthly series of political discussions on issues from an anti-capitalist approach called Living Theory.

Some of the people who attended wanted a copy of the presentation I gave, so I’ve posted it. It borrows from the first issue of our Papers for the People series.

Hi Everyone,

To introduce myself, my name is Kaley Kennedy and I am part of a collective that brings books into the women’s unit at the Central Nova Correctional Centre in Burnside. We also do other programming, including a read aloud program, where we record women reading children’s books and send the recording and the book to their children, grand children, or other children they care about on the outside. Each day, there are about 25 000 children whose mothers are in either federal prisons or provincial jails in Canada.

I think it is important to acknowledge that while my personal background and experience has been essential to my own questioning of the prison system, I acknowledge that as a white woman who has never been incarcerated, my understanding of the effects and far-reaching implications of the criminal justice system in communities, especially communities of colour, is limited. I am, therefore, greatly indebted to activists and scholars from aboriginal communities and communities of colour and others who have faced imprisonment that have taken up questions of the prison system, and actual justice.

Today, I want to talk about a few things. First, I want to speak a bit about prisons in Canada and the current conditions of prison labour in Canada. Next, I want to talk a bit about the function of the prison in capitalism and what I feel to be some of the most troubling aspects of the prison system. Lastly, I want to talk a bit about how I think that prison abolition needs to be at the centre of an anti-capitalist analysis and praxis.

As of 2005/2006, there were a total of 192 correctional facilities across Canada, with 76 under federal jurisdiction, including 18 community correctional institutions and 58 federal institutions/prisons, and 116 facilities under provincial/territorial jurisdiction. Only 16 of the 116 provincial/territorial prisons were classified as minimum security. In total, over 252,000 people were admitted into custody in 2005/2006, but only 34 percent of those were serving sentences. Almost 60 per cent of people admitted to prisons were on remand, meaning they are waiting to go to court or serving time for probation violations. In terms of demographics, 12 per cent of those admitted were women, and, though aboriginal people only make up 4 percent of the total population in Canada, they represent almost 25 percent of all those admitted to prisons in the country. In Nova Scotia, there are 5 provincial prisons and 2 federal prisons. In 2005/2006 of the approximately 4,600 people admitted to prisons, 39 per cent were sentenced prisoners and 55 per cent were on remand.

The majority of those admitted to prison are there because of drug- or property-related offenses, not for violent crimes. In Canada, only 22 per cent of people admitted to provincial or territorial prisons were admitted for violent crimes and 49 per cent of people admitted to federal prisons were for violent crimes. Of the 4,600 people admitted to prison in Nova Scotia, less than 300 were sentenced for violent crimes. Even when exploring crimes classified as violent crimes, many are influenced or impacted by other factors such as mental health, poverty, or self-defense. Who derives safety from prisons and police and why is a question that relates closely to systems of privilege. For those people who have never faced police repression, the police seem like an important institution, but for communities that have been impacted by racial profiling and police brutality, the police represent a threat to the health of the community.

Every year, about 4800 inmates across the country participate in CORCAN work programs. CORCAN is a branch of the Correctional Service of Canada that coordinates corrections work programs. These include not only inmate programs, but also programs for people on community release, which would include people in halfway houses or on probation or parole. CORCAN additionally runs over 50 shops where inmate workers produce goods and services from office furniture to uniforms to industrial laundry.

Inmates are paid between $5.25 and $6.90 per day. Inmate pay increases based on the time an inmate works, their behaviour, and their work performance. This structure is constructed in such a way as to use disciplinary principles in order to regulate inmate behaviour. Inmates can be arbitrarily disciplined or restricted in their pay increases because while prisoners have the legal right to have access to counsel in disciplinary hearings, they often do not have the resources, and because of a general lack of resources for inmate law, not very many lawyers have experience in this are.

Inmates also have no vacation time or vacation pay, and need clearance from a health profession to take a sick day. Overtime pay is just over $1 per hour and inmates are required to hand over 25 percent of any earnings over $69 biweekly for room and board. It is also important to mention that inmate wages have not been increases since the mid 1980s, and between 1981 and 2005, the average cost of two week’s work of canteen goods increased from $8.49 to $61.59. Even accounting for inflation, prices have almost tripled.

In the 2008-09 Fiscal Year, inmates worked about 2.8 million hours collectively. Unlike rights granted under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that are intended to apply to all people, inmates are excluded from the statutes and regulations that define labour laws.

Prisoners are assigned to work programs in their correctional plan. A correctional plan is an outline of a program that determines the work, training, and activity for an inmate’s sentences. Inmates have little ability to refuse to work, even in poor conditions because an inmate’s adherence to their correction plan is part of decisions on inmate privileges and parole.

CORCAN’s mandate is supposed to be centred on work programs that work for prisoners; decisions ultimately come down to dollar figures. In 2009, CORCAN announced it would be closing 6 prison farms across the country because the farms had been losing money.  CORCAN’s 2008/2009 Annual Report states that the farms had lost $4.1 million that year. Prison farm supporters including prisoners, correction workers, prisoner justice activists, and community members cited the role of the farms in providing local, fresh food to prisons, and in providing meaningful work for prisoners. Closures were complete in 2011, despite opposition.

CORCAN sells most of its goods and service such to government departments such as Corrections Services Canada and the Department of National Defense. In 2008-09, CORCAN had about $70 million in sales, with $10 million of those sales to the private sector. If the 4800 inmates who worked in CORCAN shops were paid at the top rate of $6.90 per day, CORCAN would have spent just $2.4 million on paying prisoners, just 3.45 percent of their total sales.

Prisons have become integrated into the capitalist system in several, related ways. The first, and most obvious, is the sheer volume of money that goes into the system. In Canada, prisons either fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal government or provincial/territorial governments. Crime and justice is a big-ticket item for governments. Federal, provincial, territorial and municipal governments spent more than $12 billion on policing, courts, legal aid, prosecutions and adult corrections in 2002/2003. Policing accounted for 61% of justice costs; adult corrections, 22%; courts, 9%; legal aid, 5%; and criminal prosecutions, 3%. Almost 60 per cent of people admitted to prisons were there on remand, meaning they are not actual sentenced prisoners and are in jail awaiting trial or for breaking probation conditions, and the average sentence for a sentenced admittance is 60 days in Canada. Considering this, the cost of keeping people in prison seems even more ridiculous.

   Government spending on prisons also doesn’t account for the money corporations make from their involvement in the prison industry – prisons require everything from construction work to food services; guards to utilities like heat and running water. In the United States, prisons have replaced factories and farms in many small towns as the primary industries. The idea that prisons result in economic development has even popped up here in Nova Scotia. Currently, the Nova Scotia Department of Justice is planning on rebuilding correctional facilities in Cumberland County, Antigonish and Cape Breton, in order to bring them in line with the systems of prisons used at the other two provincial prisons: Central Nova and South West Correctional Facilities.

In 2009, despite the fact that the prison in Cape Breton is only at “mid-life,” former Justice Minister Cecil Clarke announced that the Department of Justice is trying to build a new $30 million facility because the current prison’s operations do not fit in with the preferred model that the Department is using a the two newer facilities. At the time, Clarke was adamant about how this new project would help with economic woes in the region “I don’t want Cape Breton to be left out of a capital construction process…Since we are looking at stimulus spending, this is an avenue that would provide jobs and would increase the capacity and size of the facility. Ultimately, you could have up to 250 persons in that facility, over double what it is now.” Clarke also lauded the economic benefits for local suppliers and supplementary industries. Interestingly, there was no mention of this being a response to increases in crime. Similarly, a 2009 leak from the Department of Justice that indicated that the replacement for the Cumberland County facility would move the facility out of its current location of Amherst, NS, to Springhill, NS, 25 kilometres away, caused uproar amongst the legal community and the mayor of Amherst. Lawyers contend that moving the facility farther from Amherst will increase costs as all necessary legal services are in Amherst, and from the mayor of Amherst has expressed concerned about losing the facility’s 38 jobs.

The prison also serves a specific function within capitalism. It provides a space to hold surplus populations that are created and needed by capitalism. Capitalism seeks to place the lowest possible price on labour, and in order to achieve a cheap price for labour; a surplus of workers must exist who are seeking a limited number of jobs. This surplus is likely to be greater than the number of people, who control the system, and as such capitalism constantly faces disruption from those populations, and the prison is one way to control and divide the working class. Political myths about criminals are also used to redirect responsibility for crisis under capitalism: we see this as a way for the government to increase surveillance and security.

In Canada, the development of this process has been slower because the population and the prison system are significantly smaller than in the United States. But there are several examples about how a new “tough on crime” policy approach is creating new types of crime. For example, after a few prisoners were mistakenly released from prison facilities in Nova Scotia or escaped in transit, new security measures were implemented that increased surveillance intensely. The justice system introduced ankle tracking devices, new ion-detection machines that detect molecular level traces of drugs and contraband substances, and new dome cameras. In all, the Nova Scotia Department of Justice spent over $250,000 on these devices for a system that admits about 4000 prisoners per year. These machines increase perceptions that prisoners are a threat to the greater community, and provide new reasons for harsher punishments including longer sentences, solitary confinement, and suspensions of certain prisoner privileges.

Despite the strong connection between capitalism and prisons, inmates and prisons are often excluded from discussions or debates about workers and labour. This is common to most struggles. In feminist movements, for example, the experience of criminalized women is mostly ignored. In my work, the rhetoric around gender-based violence often talks about creating a more aggressive response from police to sexualized violence, but there is little attention paid to the violence that the prison system enacts in the form of cavity searches and rape in the prison.

The dominant discourse presents the idea that prisons are a deterrent to crime; the reality is that prisons rely on invisibility in order to perform their function in society. The prison complex is kept out of the centre of the city in order to create further divisions among working people. So, for those of us on the outside, the prison is not necessarily a constant presence in our life. If it was, I believe that there would be more of a consistent resistance to it, in the way that people with limited political consciousness will resist the police, the school system, and other institutions that employ a security apparatus that is modeled by the prison.

But I also want to argue that often the analysis of prisoner justice activists excludes an understanding of the inmate as worker or other experiences an inmate may have outside of their imprisonment. I think, for example, that the division drawn to create a category of “political prisoner” is problematic. It denies that all prisoners are there for political reasons, and I think de-politicizes the prison as a political structure made necessary by political decisions and values enforced in our society. I think it also doesn’t recognize the gendered and racial elements of the prison system, or the way that forms of political struggle are also gendered and influenced by race. So for example, women who commit fraud in order to feed their children are resisting their situation under capitalism, but if they are incarcerated for such an act, they are not seen as political prisoners. Similarly, if a racialized trans woman is incarcerated for sex work, the category of “political prisoner” doesn’t recognize her inevitable incarceration because of rigid gender structures and racism. Instead, I want to argue here, and am interested to hear the discussion, that an anti-capitalist analysis that wants to forward a more just world, relies on the abolition of the prison as an institution.

American prison abolition group, Critical Resistance defines the Prison Industrial Complex as “a complicated system situated at the intersection of governmental and private interests that uses prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems.” The term is a political term intended “to contend that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations.” The concept of the Prison Industrial Complex takes up Michel Foucault’s analysis that punishment and the prison system are closely tied to social structures and relations, including economic and political systems.

Foucault explains that, “We must first rid ourselves of the illusion that penalty is above all (if not exclusively) a means of reducing crime and that, in this role, according to the social forms, the political systems or beliefs, it may be severe or lenient, tend toward expiation of obtaining redress, toward the pursuit of individuals or the attribution of collective responsibility.”

Foucault discusses punishment as both “a complex social function” and “a political tactic” used to normalize behaviour that the government or society decide is necessary. Systems of discipline and punishment in the criminal justice system, the military, or schools, place the body in “a machinery of power that explores [the body], breaks it down, and rearranges it.” The purpose of this machinery is to normalize certain behaviour seen as useful to a particular context. Usually, this is in response to some need in society such as a need for more workers, a need for better hygiene during outbreaks of disease, or the need for an army during war. The military normalizes the behaviour necessary for an effective army through a certain system of discipline, and the high school system uses discipline and punishment to prepare students to enter the workforce. Currently, the school system, especially, normalized surveillance and the use of a zero-tolerance approach in schools normalize crime-related policies such as the war on drugs and three strikes. Submitting children to surveillance and zero-tolerance policies normalize these intrusions of privacy and autonomy, and can set up particular populations for a life moving through the juvenile and adult prison systems.

When you establish some behaviours as normal, behaviours that resist or fall outside these norms are labeled abnormal, and can be used to create different levels of social status or rank in our society based on obedience and disobedience to the norm. The shift from punishment that harms the body, such as the death penalty or lashings, to imprisonment, was based on the concept that discipline can reform and normalize behaviour of people labeled deviant or abnormal. In a society apparently based on freedom and democracy, then, the ultimate punishment for behaviour outside the norm is to deprive an individual or group from these two things. The prison system relies on the idea that punishment can reinforce systems of discipline, to maintain a certain system of order. This is only possible, however, because some order has been established as acceptable.

Angela Davis provides a helpful example in the context of 1950’s women’s prisons. Prison reformers had long advocated that women prisoners be separated from male prisoners in large part because women could not be subjected to the same discipline that men were, and instead should be subjected to a disciplinary program that promoted “feminine” values. In the 1950’s, women in prison received training in domestic skills such as cooking and needlework. Davis points out, however, that while this would have established white women as “good wives” it effectively trained women of colour to be domestic workers. This was part of continuing a system of black servitude to white masters.

Christian Parenti makes a similar argument about the way gender roles are established in male prisons in the United States. He notes that, “jailhouse rape is more than sadistic thrills: it creates a gender and, therefore, a division or labor and a set of class relations.” Without women to take on the role of the second sex, “the subordinate “gender” in male prisons [becomes] the so-called “punks,” straight or gay men forced into a submissive sexual role, as well as “queens,” gay men and transsexuals who may embrace homosexual sex and their gendered role as submissive.” The prison system works to uphold systems of oppression that exist in society at large. Since society condones sexism and racism in both subtle and obvious ways, these structures are reinforced inside prison walls.

The purpose of prison is not to right wrongs, but rather to regulate the behaviour of prisoners so that they adhere to their appropriate place in the structures of power that exist in the outside world. The prison system can therefore not be removed from an understanding of power, privilege, and oppression, nor can it be tasked with addressing the social causes of “criminal” behaviour. Any attempt to dismantle the oppressive regime of capitalism must see the prison as a primary target because it at once enshrines and codes our structures of inequity and class that capitalism also relies on and creates.

The time period that gave rise to incarceration, as the primary mode of punishment was also the era that established that the value of labour could be quantified in an hourly wage. Foucault writes, “There is a wages-form of imprisonment that constitutes, in industrial societies, its economic “self-evidence” and enables it to appear as a reparation…hence, so the expression so frequently heard… that one is in prison in order to “pay one’s debt”” (Foucault, 216). This approach implies that the individual, and not the system are responsible for particular actions.

People in prison are not necessarily responsible for damaging the social relationships between the perpetrator and the victim, or between the perpetrator and his or her community. The song “Wolves” by political hip-hop group Dead Prez expresses this concept well. It uses a sound clip from a speech given by Omali Yeshitela, chairperson and founder of the African People’s Socialist Party, about crack cocaine. Yeshitela uses the analogy of an indigenous hunting technique that uses a double-edge sword stuck in the snow with blood smeared on it to explain how the introduction of crack cocaine into African American communities has destroyed them. As the wolf licks the blood off the blade, it cuts itself and eventually dies from drinking its own blood, but “instead of blaming the hunter who put the damn handle and blade in the ice for the wolf… what happens is the wolf gets the blame, gets the blame for trying to live.” This is what Yeshitela says is happening in African American communities. Instead of blaming racism and the legacy of slavery, society blames the individual drug dealers and drug users.

Assatta Shakur also discusses this in relation to her own experience of being in prison: “So many of my sisters are so completely unaware of who the real criminals and dogs are. They blame themselves for being hungry; they hate themselves for surviving the best way they know how, to see so much fear, doubt, hurt, and self hatred is the most painful part of being in this concentration camp.”

In his book, Lockdown America, Christian Parenti has a chapter entitled, “Balkans in a Box.” His comparison, if not obvious, is that within the prison exists a contained conflict zone akin that that which has existed in the Balkan countries – where rape, murder, and racial genocide, are common. He outlines how workers are exploited, how prisoners are denied voting rights, how there is little in the way of complaint processes, and about the excessive use of force, solitary confinement, and various other cruel measures. Angela Davis explains that “the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls” (Davis, 83). She points out that routine elements of the prison system such as strip searches and cavity searches are state-sanctioned examples of sexual assault that would be condemned outside of the institution of the prison.

Foucault writes that when the institution of the prison first rose as “the penalty par excellence” it erased all other alternatives that had been proposed during the eighteenth century because the prison “appeared so bound up, and at such a deep level, with the very functioning of society” (Foucault, 215). It is difficult for most people to imagine what life would be like without prisons, and to imagine how societies would function. People’s ability to think beyond capitalism, beyond prisons is connected. Capitalism intends to monopolize our understanding of value. We understand value in capitalist terms, in relation to private property. To think outside of this can be difficult, and capitalism itself limits to what extent we can think outside of the prison system. With prisons, we think about what would we do with the child molesters. Well, even beyond the concept that most prisoners are not pedophiles, the limits of our current system make it difficult to think about a world without child sexualized assault. Intergenerational trauma is a large part of the experience of aboriginal and racialized people, women, trans and gender non-conforming people, people who have regular contact with institutional detention, and so on. And harm exists all the time in our society that exists entirely outside of the criminal justice system, such as sexualized violence that continues to be a constant presence within radical movements.

What would an anti-capitalist analysis that centred the prison look like? Some prison abolitionists have focused on how prison spending, like military spending, has limited the funding available for social services. The $12 billion spent on the criminal justice system could make post-secondary education free, raise welfare rates, and invest in mental health programs. This method of resisting prisons fights to replace prisons with social supports and community programs is important. Those who argue for these reforms, also recognize the need for the decriminalization of drugs and sex work. This, paired with additional funding to social programs, is likely to reduce the need to incarcerate individuals under the current system, and give individuals and communities some additional resources. If people are not struggling to support themselves and there are adequate services to address mental health concerns, the number of people who need to go to jail will be vastly reduced, not only through a reduction in the number of acts that are defined as criminal, but also in that violence will be less necessary if there is not property and wealth to fight over. In one community in the US, community members bought up land that was intended for prison building in order to prevent more prisons in their community.

Locally, this means actively opposing increases in prison spending, especially give the current drive for increases in prison building being pushed by the Harper conservatives and being allowed by our provincial government. Prison workers are also able to resist prison building by recognizing their interests in maintaining older prisons which require more workers, it means communities pushing for stimulus spending for community spaces and public services, rather than prisons. These measures of reform should be seen as prioritizing immediate improvements in people’s lives, but have the revolutionary politics that they will not be enough.

We also need to prioritize building relationships based on accountability, solidarity, and support. Building accountability to one another in our communities can mean that the state policing system is not necessary. Robin Templeton, in an article on the work of young feminists in challenging the Prison Industrial Complex explains that young women, who have seen men consistently ripped from their communities and put in jail, are “working in their communities with the explicit intent of increasing trust and reciprocal respect as well as making their neighbourhoods safer places in which to live. She goes on to explain that creating a society free from the institution of the prison requires more than the “obvious answer[s] of economic justice and ending racism,” and will “involve the difficult work of transformation, redemption, and renewal.”

By building relationships that strive both to support one another in dealing with difficult experiences such as addiction and mental illness and to hold one another accountable for individual actions and choices, we reject the prison’s focus on removing people from their communities. This is work that is already central to many communities, especially communities that have been most impacted and marginalized by the prison system. In other communities, it is not prioritized and recently, feminists have argued that it leaves movements susceptible to police infiltration because sexism, misogyny, and gender-based violence are so prevalent in radical communities that people do not see these as a political threat.

Lastly, organising that tries to build relationships between people on the inside and the outside is essential. This could include working to try to organise prisoner unions, amplifying prisoner voices through public advocacy, and building alliances through long-term, sustained work with communtiies who are most impacted by prisons. Some examples I know about include prison education programs with students from the inside and from the outside, reading groups that include people inside and outside and use written correspondence. It also means rendering the prison system visible and talking about it to your neighbours and friends in the context of zero tolerance policies in schools, laws that criminlise queer and trans people, and a slew of other political contexts.

Any project that has at its centre a focus on justice needs to see the prison system as counter to its goals. As long as society relies on a criminal justice system that aims to maintain hierarchical power relations that oppress some for the benefit of others, our ability to undermine this in other areas of society will be weakened.

Some of the content for this talk was taken from my essay “People Before Prisons: The importance of challenging prisons and supporting and repairing our communities” available here, this article I wrote for the Dominion Newspaper, and an infographic available in the March/April 2012 issue of Briarpatch Magazine.

Sources:

• Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies Criminalized and Imprisoned Women Factsheet
• www.prisonerjustice.ca
• The changing profile of adults in custody
• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete
• Christian Parenti, Lockdown America
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Other Resources

• Captive Genders
• Critical Resistance
• INCITE! Critical Resistance Statement
• Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
• Prison Abolition in Canada
• Visions of Abolition (Video)
• Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements

In both articles, the point is that women’s actions are constantly under watch. Women are constantly scrutenized for our actions – from what we’re wearing when we’re assaulted or raped to how political the music we make is and a million things in between.

Two personal experiences in the past week hit the daily reality of this scrutiny home.

Last week, I got on a metro train in Montreal on my way to a friend’s house for the night. I sat down and pulled out a knitting project I’ve been working on. Immediately, a man in his late twenties or early thirties said to me, “You’d be a good one to marry.”

This isn’t the first time someone (usually an older woman), has made this kind of statement to me in public. Usually, though, they express interest in what I am doing, say hi, ask me how my day is going, before making a statement about how my aptitude in needlecraft makes me good wife material. Usually it offends me. I’m not a fan of the institute of marriage. I don’t take lightly to being presumed straight and looking for a husband by my choice of passtime.

But last week on the subway, there was no greeting, no inquiries into how I was, or any interest in exactly what I was doing. Simply, my knitting, makes me a good spousal candidate, and that is the only information that is necessary. I was tired and alone and in a city that isn’t my home, so I just looked at the floor, not making eye contact or responding to the comment. When the man got off he told me to have a good night.

Then yesterday, I went to see Fucked Up, one of my favourite bands, play at a benefit for the COUNTERfit Harm Reduction Program, and the Barriere Lake Legal Defense Fund. I was tired after having dinner and drinks with a friend earlier in the night.

I yawned and the next thing I know, some guy comes up to me to say that I “need to stop yawning because yawning is really contagious, and we all have to work in the morning.” He then apologized (not), by saying, “I’m sorry to have to call you out on that, but I’m trying to keep the atmosphere going, you know.”

To set the stage, we’re at a show, watching a hardcore band with hundreds of other people, and this guy is telling me I shouldn’t yawn because it will ruin the atmosphere. I wish I was making this up.

Again, because I was tired and kind of shocked, I didn’t say anything. But all I could think of was what if I was a young mom who was up all day running around with my kids or if I was caring after an ailing parent or if I was working two jobs and going to school or a number of other realities young women like me take on all the time and now some shit was telling me not to yawn.

Both of these experiences, though, were reminders about how perfect strangers feel like it is totally ok to not only judge and scrutinize the most banal of women’s actions, but also comment on them. These are some of the everyday ways that women’s behaviour is judged and regulated in our society.

I wish in both cases I’d shot back with some witty statement, but I stayed quiet. I’m going to try to get better at that.

But for dudes, specifically, if your friends pull this kind of shit, call them on it. Ask them who they think they are to assume that girls want to get married, or that telling someone not to yawn is a jerk move. And if you find yourself feeling the need to scrutenize or comment on the behaviour of perfect strangers, maybe just consider keeping your mouth shut.

New poster from go it alone (together)!

A couple of days ago, I received an email from Scholarships Canada, a listserv service I signed up for six or seven years ago when I was first preparing to go to university, with the subject line “My Library Matters to me Contest.”

The email read:

Hi Kaley,

Our public libraries are in danger of being closed or privatized by Toronto City Council’s cost cutting. This could mean the loss of a powerful educational and cultural force through branch closures, service reductions and program cutbacks.

In response, OurPublicLibrary.to and some of the biggest Canadian authors are hosting a contest. You are invited to submit a written or video essay on “Why My Library Matters to Me” by September 9th, 2011.

Children 12 and under can submit a short essay or a drawing!

Thanks for your support,

The ScholarshipsCanada Team

P.S. Keep our libraries open. Sign this petition.

The email was surprising to me since ScholarshipsCanada is a website tool for students looking for scholarship money, not a political organisation. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s attacks on libraries in Toronto are so unpopular, that this website service felt the need to implore its subscribers to do something to defend this powerful educational and cultural force.

Despite claims from Ford, his brother Councillor Doug Ford, and their ilk, the Toronto Public Library system is growing:

The marvel is that in the wireless era, bricks-and-mortar libraries have become not less relevant, but more so. The [Toronto Public Library] recorded 18 million visits to its 98 branches in 2010, a 4-per-cent increase over 2009. The number of cardholders rose 4 per cent too, reaching 1.25 million. Library users borrowed 32 million items, making the TPL the busiest big-city library system (based on items borrowed per capita) in the world. No wonder that in a recent public consultation, residents rated libraries a high priority, placing them eighth on a list of 35 city services, ahead of police, parks and recreation centres.

People will notice changes to library services, they will miss branches if they close, and library cuts will impact communities.

Libraries are where we hold community meetings, where workshops happen, where young people hang out, where people take English classes, where after school programs happen, where people find their political voices. My childhood libraries, some of the branches Doug Ford has claimed no one will miss, are where I did my homework, where I read Judy Bloom books as a pre-teen, where I discovered politics, where I learned about independence and autonomy, but also about community and diversity. The library was where I saw who my community was: mostly racialised people, immigrants from all around the world, young people and old people.

They are also sites of struggle. In 2005, librarians in Connecticut challenged the USA PATRIOT Act, refusing to give over patron records. The American Library Association plainly asserts that it ” opposes any use of governmental power to suppress the free and open exchange of knowledge and information or to intimidate individuals exercising free inquiry…ALA considers that sections of the USA PATRIOT ACT are a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users.”

People all over the UK protested library closures this past February, with Save Our Libraries Day. One library even emptied its shelves by having all of it’s patrons take out the 15 books they’re entitled to.

For people who believe in the need for radical social change, the fight to defend libraries is an extremely important one. Libraries are the most hopeful institutions our communities still have, and not only can they be used as a hub for community organising, but they are a familiar example of what a more just society could look like.

Libraries espouse the principle of the commons. Our communities own library holdings collectively, and libraries are one of the last indoor public spaces. In an increasingly alienated society, libraries continue to be a place where communities convene.

Libraries are radical. And people love them.

A Red Umbrella contingent on the Reclaim the Night march in London in November 2010.

In May, Emily and I gave a workshop at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair: “The Struggle for Reproductive Autonomy: From underground abortion collectives to the fight to decriminalize sex work.” Before we had even left our home city of Halifax, we received a phone call from one of the bookfair’s organisers to discuss some of the conflict that had arisen in the feminist movement in Quebec around the decriminalisation of sex work. The organiser explained that there was a strong movement in support of the abolition of sex work in Montreal and Quebec.

Later, Emily and I spoke at length about strategies for addressing possible disruptions at the workshop, as well as a number of ways to ensure an effective discussion could be had recognising and respecting divergent views.  There was no vocal presence from the “sex work abolitionists” at the workshop and largely the discussion was focused on the need for more inclusive, accessible, queer- and trans-positive health care providers focused on a model of informed consent with regards to care.

But we also had to ask ourselves – what does “abolishing” sex work mean?

Abolition v. Prohibition

Abolish, in my understanding of the word, means to eliminate, to end, maybe even to destroy. This is the way I use the word when I speak with my political allies about abolishing the prison system. I mean there should be no more prisons. I also know that this is a long and difficult process – one that involves struggle in many forms, and one that posits social revolution.

Near the end of her book, Are Prisons Obsolete, Angela Davis explains:

“[P]ositing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment–demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons.” (pp.107-108)

The struggle to abolish prisons, then, is an active struggle that works to shrink the role prisons have in our society – the role they play in the core of our understandings of justice.

Coming from this position, and having read a lot written by those who oppose sex work, I have a series of questions for “abolitionists” who are currently opposing the decriminalisation of sex work in Canada.

1. What would abolishing sex work actually look like?
2. How, in practical terms, does prohibition work towards the goal of abolition?
3. Where has prohibition been an effective tool for changing social conditions or altering social practices?

These are not rhetorical questions; they are genuine questions I would like to see answered by those people who are currently opposing the decriminalisation of sex work. There are more questions that run through my mind: What kinds of sex work would/should be prohibited? What about strippers, professional dominatrices, webcam girls, freelance fetish workers, burlesque perfomers? Who should be criminalised? Sex workers, johns, madames, members of the kink community, bachelor parties, bar/club owners? I would like those opposing sex work decriminalisation to speak plainly – in materialist terms – about how that fight fits with their goals, strategies, and tactics.

In the current political climate of our “tough on crime” Conservative government, I can imagine the horrors of a “war on sex work:” the most marginalised sex workers and johns thrown into cages, perhaps first brutalized by the police. I can see the way that those who are most vulnerable to police violence – sex workers of colour, trans sex workers, survivor sex workers, Aboriginal sex workers, sex workers without status, underage sex workers – would be treated, forced further and further underground and out of sight. I can see it because it happens already. I can see it because these are patterns that pop up elsewhere: in our mental health system, the way that people struggling with addictions are treated, the way that survivors of domestic violence continue to be treated.

If the Canadian Border Service Agency can go into shelters and crisis centres searching for non-status survivors of abuse, why do we think we can trust them to treat non-status and/or trafficked sex workers with dignity, respect, and care?

The end of sex work will not come by way of the law, and as with many other things, the law continues to work in the interests of those who have power, not the oppressed.

For decades, feminists have repeated over and over that criminalising abortion will not stop abortions. Where abortions are needed, they happen – often with terrible consequences. Women die when abortion is not accessible. How many times have we repeated the chant, “Pro-life that’s a lie, you don’t care if women die,” in opposition to anti-choice forces?

So, why now do we think that prohibition of sex work would stop trafficking or violence against sex workers?

The Discussion We Cannot Have… Yet

There are valid political, ideological, and moral discussions feminists need to have on their analyses of sex work, of labour, of the police and prisons, and a hundred other facets of the role of sex work in our society. The time for those discussions is not now.

The decriminalisation of sex work could actually open up space for a larger, more creative discusssion to be had about sex work, sex workers, patriarchy, the criminal legal system, and state control of women’s bodies. We could start talking about new models for sex worker organising. We could think of new ways of approaching anti-violence work in our communities. We could think critically about what role (if any) we see the legal system having in our fight for a more just and equitable world.

It is in these discussions that we could actually talk about abolishing sex work because the question before the courts right now has nothing to do with abolition and everything to with prohibition.

I am prepared to have those discussions, debates, arguments. I am willing to be open and to challenge myself and to listen during what would be challenging times. But I won’t do that until this court case is settled because now my energy needs to be there, supporting sex workers in my communities – most of them women and queer and trans folk – in this battle against dangerous and oppressive laws.

-Kaley

There has been a lively debate amongst feminists in North America and beyond about several Slutwalks that have been organized throughout Canada, the US, and the UK. The first Slutwalk took place in my home town of Toronto, and was sparked by a comment made by a police officer at York University, a school that my younger sister and several of my friends attend or have attended.

For the past several years, York has also been a hotbed of gender-based violence and rape. There were rapes in residence, sexual assaults at knife and gun point, recently a gay bashing, a murder, and a sexual assault at 4 PM in the afternoon.

For those not familiar with the campus, York University is in northwest Toronto, and even with massive urban development in and around Toronto over the past few decades, it remains fairly isolated. There is limited public transit to the campus, it is set back from main roadways, which are themselves mostly populated by townhouses and strip malls. The campus is also surrounded by some of Toronto’s poorest and ill-serviced areas. The campus population is a diverse one. There is a significant population of racialized students, a large newcomer and international student population, a significant and active Muslim student population, and a history of radical student and labour action.

Violence on campus even sparked a safety audit conducted by the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC). The METRAC audit was released on June 25, 2010 and included 101 recommendations to increase safety on campus. It included some reactionary measures, like increasing security staff, and providing more financial support to the Sexual Assault Survivors Support Line (SASSL), but also some more structural recommendations like making equity or women’s studies courses mandatory for undergraduate students in order to address problems of racism, misogyny, and sexism on campus.

In January, at a session being given by the Toronto Police Service at the Osgoode Law School at York, a police officer told a group of York university students that women could avoid being assaulted or victimized if they didn’t dress like sluts.

In response to the police officer’s comment, some women started organising and held the first Slutwalk, to call out “victim blaming” – to say that it’s rapist who are responsible for raping, not women who are raped. There has been all kinds of blogs and articles both critical of Slutwalks and defending the tactic. I don’t want to wade into that debate right now. We can talk later about sex-positivity, generational gaps between women, the need for political movements for young women, and more at a different time. I want to talk about the role of police, the criminal legal system, and prison, in the fight against sexual assault, gender-based violence, and rape. I think the Slutwalk is a recent, relevant, example we can point to.

The comment made by that police officer is in many ways just an extreme version of a common sentiment our society passively accepts. Don’t walk alone at night. Never put your drink down. Don’t take the stairs alone. Lock your door at night. Lock your windows. Don’t dress that way or do that thing. Women are taught over and over again that we in some way incite or encourage sexual harassment, gender-based violence, and rape.

In many ways, this argument is used to say that we need to teach police to be more sensitive to sexual assault. Women have long struggled against police services that bring domestic abuse survivors back to abusive partners, that don’t answer calls from women getting beaten by their husbands, who let lesbians and racialized women get beaten and raped, or beat and/or rape lesbians and racialized women. Many people argue that we have police forces that are more “sensitive” to these “issues” now. There are policies and protocols, and victim services and some kind of complaints process, which are all supposed to mediate the problem of police brutality and police violence.

Despite all these measures, there are recent legal cases that show that the problems within the criminal legal system are not just about the police. Earlier this year, a Manitoba judge gave a perpetrator of sexual assault a reduced sentence based on the clothing that the survivor was wearing at the time of attack. Instead of being removed from the bench, he was only removed from cases of a sexual nature.

Just this week, a case involving the ability of a person to give advanced consent reached the Supreme Court of Canada and while the judgement found that no one can give advanced consent, three judges gave dissenting judgements.

We can say that we can educate the police and maybe they will understand the complexities of rape and violence against women, and intimate-partner abuse. We can talk about how we need to add/get rid of laws, and then police will stop attacking sex workers or women struggling with addictions. We can choose to dismiss a judge’s ruling as just a bad apple, an old white man left on the bench, a relic of a different time.

All of these ideas amount to “We can make the criminal legal system work better” or “We can make the system just” – statements that I just don’t think are true. The criminal legal system, like broader society, accept that some women deserve it, that in many cases women are responsible for the violence of perpetrators. The police, judges, and the courts, as institutions, have the power and the purpose to maintain certain power structures in society. So while many in society do nothing to challenge rape culture, the police and the courts are responsible for its maintenance.

Large groups of people (racialised people, poor people, sex workers, people struggling with addictions, queer people, aboriginal people, youth, trans people) are denied access to the service of the protection afforded by a police service and criminal legal system working in their interest. The desire to have access to such a privilege is understandable. It is understandable that people who are denied this privilege just want to be able to call the police when they are beaten or raped or robbed or feeling unsafe, but they can’t because of a legacy of violence perpetrated in their communities by police and criminal legal systems. Calling the police also means giving over control to an institution that you may not trust – maybe you need support getting home after being robbed, but you don’t want the person who robbed you to go to jail. Maybe you need to see a doctor after a rape, but you are not sure about reporting the crime for any number of reasons. Maybe you need help breaking up a fight, but don’t want charges to be laid, or maybe you need protection from an abusive partner, but are afraid that the police will discover your partner is a drug dealer and put him in jail for 20 years.

But, turning to the criminal legal system, will not stop rape, it will not build community power to deal with difficult issues like assault, intimate partner abuse, and drug addiction.

It is common to hear in the media and from women’s advocacy groups that reporting rates for sexual assault and rape are low, and that rape and sexual assault are not punished adequately by the courts. But for a minute, let’s think about what the result of higher reporting rates would be.

When we report crime and when the courts hand down harsh sentences, people end up in cages. Perpetrators go to jail, experiencing de-humanizing conditions, violence, and abuse. When a perpetrator is a person of colour or Aboriginal, their sentence is likely to be harsher than if they had been white. Perpetrators who are poor, and/or struggling with addiction or mental illness, are also likely to face harsher sentences than perpetrators who can afford lawyers.

The criminal legal system enforces the same racist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic systems of power and control that centralize power in the hands of a few. Prisons are inherently punitive and retributive. They allow the state to exert revenge on people for actions they may have taken.

Rape and gender-based violence are tools of war used in prisons to keep people under control. A year ago in Toronto, during the meeting of the G20, police threatened women with gang rape, segregated queer people, and subjected prisoners to dehumanizing and cruel conditions. Those events were not just a one-off occurrence. Instead, many people saw for the first time the reality that incarcerated people experience day in and day out in our prison system. Rape culture is pervasive in our prisons. It’s part of the institution of power in prison, and we can’t challenge rape culture, without also challenging prisons, police, and the court systems.

The Slutwalk came from a particular context, one in which attempts to deal with gender-based violence and rape on campus have been brushed off. Where attempts to deal with the systematic issues of rape – patriarchy, oppression, privilege, and misogyny – are ignored. The threat of challenging the underlying causes of rape culture – misogyny and hate – and refusing to give over our power of collective organizing to institutions like the police and the courts, is significant. Rendering prisons and the courts irrelevant in the battle against gender-based violence and rape culture would mean new concepts of solidarity and support, new ideas of accountability and community power.

These are big and ambitious ideas. The court system is what we have right now, and some people will still need to use it. But we need to keep dreaming big.

-Kaley

Some Recommended Reading:

Community Accountability Working Document Principles/Concerns/Strategies/Models (INCITE Women of Color Against Violence)

Towards Transformative Justice (Generation FIVE) -

Slutwalk: To March or Not to March (Harsha Walia)

Community Responses to Violence (Victoria Law) – Upping the Anti, Issue 12

Are Prisons Obsolete? – Angela Davis

In March, Emily did a residency with our friend Susan in Seattle as part of Project Space Available and then went on a little West Coast adventure. I’ve been wandering aimlessly in the Northwest, taking a little vacation, and talking to people about rad projects on the go in this part of the world.

But… we’re still working on go it alone (together) stuff and there are some exciting things to share!

In March, we did an interview on These Things that People Make about the How-to Guide to Manarchy. You can listen to it here.

Next month, we’ll be tabling at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair and presenting a workshop on struggles for reproductive autonomy.

As well, we’re working on some wider distribution of our stuff, so watch out for some announcements about that!

We’ll also be posting some new work in the next couple of weeks – including a poster series in support of some comunity groups we’re stoked on, and some new swag (pins/patches/etc).

Also, we’re still accepting submissions for the sisterhood zine #2. Check it out here.

That’s all for now!
Kaley

There won’t be stories about male soldiers raping their female coworkers. We won’t hear about how Barrick Gold denied that women were being gang raped near one of their mines in Papau New Guinea. We won’t hear outrage about Barrick Gold chairman and founder Peter Munk’s comment that “gang rape is a cultural habit” in Papau New Guinea. There won’t be images of Canadian Border Service Agents busting into women’s shelters and crisis centres looking for women without immigration status to deport.

Today is International Women’s Day, and today, women will get raped. Women will be sexually assaulted and harrassed. Women will face intimate partner abuse. There will not be a ceasefire in the war on women today.

Tomorrow, there will still be judges that think that what a woman wears causes her to be raped. There will still be people who would rather criminalise sex work than support sex workers in their communities. There will still be those who refuse to believe that someone can fight to expose injustice and still be a rapist. There will continue to be legislators who want to control women’s bodies, whether by criminalising abortion and sex work, or denying same-sex marriage rights, or criminalising trans women and denying them access to health care or other public services, or restricting access to safer sex education to girl. My list could go on, because there is so much farther to go.

Today, the hundreds of women incarcerated in prisons across the country, will continue to be isolated from their families and communities.

So, today, on International Women’s Day, support the women and girls in your communities. We will need to find hope and strength in each other in the times ahead. The struggle continues.

- Kaley

PS: Coming soon: new posts in my blog series on rape culture/updates from go it alone (together)/new stuff!