Today is August 10 - Prisoner's Justice Day. It started in the 1970s - in a context of horrific violence and turmoil behind bars. But many of the demands, the problems, the calls of justice, go back far further than that period.
I've been (very slowly) working on a project about the 1930s prisoner revolt in Canada. The first fruit of that research can be read here. During most of that decade, prisoners wrote, organized, protested, and struck against the penal system across Canada. In the early years of this revolt, prisoners created a diverse assortment of writings - public letters, petitions, constitutions, reform plans, memoirs and manifestos. Possibly the most famous of these is the collective document 'Barbarism and Civilization' written by the inmates of Kingston Penitentiary in mid-1932.
Although likely started by prisoners working with the Communists incarcerated at Kingston, as it was passed around, debated, and recopied (like a medieval scriptorium) new sections and demands were added, or repeated in new words and with new hands.
The manifesto argued that the Canadian penal system in 1932 was "a gigantic failure...smothered in a tangle of persecution, hard routine, distrust, etc., and every human passion that breeds a prolific hate. If you plant thistles you do not expect to pluck roses." Prisoners felt their "minds were censored" and compared convict labour to slavery: "Canada...makes slavery a medium for normal rehabilitation.”
I wanted to share a section of this manifesto, which was retyped by staff as evidence of 'communistic literature'. No handwritten version survives. A partial transcript is below. This is the final page that ends with a call to action to rise up.
Most of the demands, like inmate pay, were accomplished within a few years of writing, but many - like baseball - remained a point of contention until the 1940s and 1950s (and indeed organized team sports have largely disappeared from federal and provincial prisons across Canada).
To bring us back to PJD, some of the most radical 1930s demands made at Kingston Penitentiary - for the abolition of corporal punishment, for the removal of the Warden's unilateral power to punish, for voluntary job assignments, and for the creation of inmate committees - remained unfulfilled until the late 1970s when a new generation achieved change. This was, in the words of Bobby Paul at Kent Institution (and echoing sentiments of men and women incarcerated forty years before) "because [our treatment] was brought to people’s attention with blood, literally with blood. Then they changed it!"
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“This is no more than recognition of the fact that convicts are not beasts. Normal men need more than three meals a day and a tooth brush even if they are good meals, they need fresh air and sunshine and an outlet for their emotion. Will any intelligent man claim that fifteen minutes a day doing dumb round after round like a fools parade is exercise! Nobody not even an official could pretend that it is exercise or recreation we need to let ourselves go sometimes to get enthusiastic and excited even if it is over the exploits of somebody else, we need more than fifteen minutes per day in the sunshine less gang rule while we are out there and something more to exercise our lungs over than supper hash. The slaves of the southern states had their recreation…Even the rulers of ancient Rome recognized the need and gave the slaves circuses. All over the world today it is admitted that the so called criminal is a product of society, the same as a banker is, it is only in Canada that the inmates of penitentiaries are horded like dumb cattle and made the victims of revenge. Nearly every other country pays the inmates for their work so they have a little stake when they go out….prison work hours are limited to eight hours per day…they can have letters and visits more like human beings and smoke a cigarette without poisoned paper. We have none of these things, we should have them all. We can get most of them if every man will strive steadily in the proper way for one thing at a time. We want more air and sunshine less time inside and more time outside. We want recreation it will cost nothing to us it will mean a lot one hour per day in the air not like a bunch of apes trotting around their keeper but in free intercourse with each other we want recreation and we are going to have to it. There are nearly a thousand of us. If we want it badly enough we can get it – let’s go boys.”
- “Make a copy of this and pass it around. This is the 23rd copy. Send them to good people.”
