Jesse: yeah they are

Murayama: you know who else is beautiful?

I'm inserting some of my own comments on a story with not a lot of information available, except that provided by a correctional officer - highly motivated to tell a very partial and anti-prisoner narrative. I am no expert - I've spoken very informally and casually to people who have done time or worked at Stony Mountain Penitentiary, but that's it. I await further information, or interviews with inmates or even staff outside the security apparatus about this incident.

From the Winnipeg Free Press, July 19, 2023:

"...a riot broke out in Stony Mountain Institution's exercise yard Monday. Corrections officers used live ammunition to break up the brawl; another inmate was sent to hospital with a gunshot wound. Colton Patchinose, 33, was pronounced dead shortly after RCMP officers from the Stonewall detachment arrived at the federal prison north of Winnipeg at 6:35 p.m. to help deal with the "large fight" that involved several "edged weapons." The prairie region president of the union that represents corrections officers said the officers fired multiple rounds as warning shots to try to quell the chaos that broke out before 6:30 p.m., striking an inmate, who remains in hospital. "There was an outright riot," Union of Canadian Correctional Officers [UCCO] official James Bloomfield told the Free Press Tuesday. Bloomfield said an estimated 30 inmates were directly involved in the brawl, using homemade knives and spikes and blunt force weapons and "anything they could grab a hold of in that yard" to fight each other. There was warning shots that were fired. That is not something that we do very often and it got to a point where there were "several warning shots fired," he said. "We did deploy a lot of pepper spray last night, as well, to try to get that group under control and get it all back to a safe place today." About 100 inmates were in the yard at the time, Bloomfield said.

[There is very clearly a lot more going on then the UCCO president is capable of articulating or understanding - that there was a need the night BEFORE this event to spray ranges in pepper spray raises some questions to me.]

...

"Definitely gang violence - that's what this is about, it is fuelled by the drug trade within the institution. This is what that results in, it is one of the most violent institutions in this country," he said. The union has been trying to push federal corrections officials to address violence and the drug trade in the prison but have not had much luck, he said.

['Gangs' in prison have a bunch of overlapping identifies and reasons for formation - including the tendency of CSC itself to identify any three individuals in an organization or group outside their sanction as a security threat group. The extent to which these gangs are connected to street gangs or organized crime in Winnipeg or elsewhere is hard to gauge from press statements. I'm sure it is a complicated issue. The gangs also serve as a way of organizing and controlling the flow of contraband into the prison, often with outside help. The Union head makes a big deal of 'throw-overs' - that is, contraband being thrown over the perimeter - though corrupt staff are also a major conduit as well as family visits. What drugs are being traded is left obscure as is the volume of this trade.]

////

From the CBC article, July 19, 2023:

"No correctional officers were physically injured but "as you can imagine, there's definitely mental health injuries that occur over the next day or two for witnessing a murder or for the stabbings that occurred," Bloomfield said. "That's a very difficult situation to respond to, to deal with, to see. So over the next few days we'll be monitoring the staff and looking for symptoms and signs of stress injuries and mental health injuries."

[Again, a man died and many other prisoners were injured - their concerns and undoubtedly the desire of many uninvolved in this incident for safety and security don't really matter in this framing of the event. 'Trauma' as a way for the caretakers of power to avoid their own responsibility for causing it themselves, or the broader issues that bring violence to their door, is a really growing trend I've noticed...]

The incident was another example of a violent and unpredictable work environment for staff at the prison, which is being fuelled by gang activity and drugs, Bloomfield said. "There has been a lot of violent activity at Stony Mountain for a very long time. We have a huge amount of drugs within that institution," he said. "It is one of the highest throw-over institutions in the country, which means people throwing drugs over the fences into the institution." Bloomfield also suggested there are few to no repercussions for inmates who are involved in violent behaviour, which allows it to escalate. "The service has refused to address any behavioural concerns … for a very long time. It's almost encouragement," he said.

Sarah: ily

Ice: spell it properly, it makes it more special

Jesse: where the duck are you?

Jesse: *duck

Jesse: *duck

Jesse: *duck

Jesse: *duck

Jesse: *duck

Needless to say, intense homosocial sentiments in prison could evolve into homosexual relations. While there is evidence that prisoners had sex and formed unions with one another in the single-sex communal environment of colonial prisons, observers disagree about the nature and frequency of such practices. As communist writings tend to suppress representations of sexuality in general, the absence of homosexuality from postcolonial northern Vietnamese prison memoirs reflects long-term patterns of censorship and self-censorship. It is also possible that homosexuality does not figure in communist prison memoirs because ascetic and homophobic norms within Vietnamese communist and early nationalist culture discouraged its practice. Indeed, the most candid account of homosexuality in an Indochinese prison, Tran Van Que’s memoir Con-Lon Quan-Dao Truoc ngay 9–3–1945 (The Poulo Condore Archipelago before March 9, 1945), insists that it did not occur among political prisoners.

Whereas few ex-convicts acknowledged the presence of homosexuality in their memoirs, French observers found it wherever they looked. According to Dr. Louis Lorion:

Pederasty is widespread in Cochin China, but it rarely falls under judicial purview. . . . It is above all practiced by Annamites and Chinese; the latter, more vigorous and audacious, seem to play the active role. It is in markets, opium dens, gambling houses, and theaters that this shameful industry is practiced and where one would meet those searching for this genre of debauchery. One also observes pederasty in all agglomerations where individuals of the same sex live communally, such as barracks where populations of workers, coolies, guards, and servants swarm together, and in the penitentiaries, notably Poulo Condore.

Lorion’s comments are echoed in official reports that allude suggestively to the fact that communal architecture encouraged “promiscuity” among inmates. On Poulo Condore, the famous gentleman bandit Thomas Phuoc told Demariaux that he preferred solitary confinement to the “promiscuous obscenity” of the communal dormitories. Another of Demariaux’s informants forthrightly reported that prisoners routinely traded gay sex for opium or cash.

In the writings of prisoners themselves, furtive allusions to homosexual desire most frequently appear in accounts of prison theater. For example, Thu Con Lon (Letters from Poulo Condore), a collection of missives written from prison by Nguyen Duc Chinh and published in 1937, contains a provocative passage linking homoerotic desire in prison to plays in which female roles were performed by young male prisoners in drag:

In the play performed this Tet, there was a brothel and the young girls who work there hug their “guests” and dance with them. If I had known before that Tho was to play a prostitute, I would have volunteered immediately to take the part of the libertine youth [cong tu]. That way, I could have hugged the one to whom everyone’s been writing letters this year—the one about whom we often joke: “If there was a flower garden in the prison, I would risk several days of punishment in the hole to pluck a flower and present it to her.”

The suggestion of homoerotic yearning is implicit in the passage. While “Tho” can occasionally be a woman’s name, it is much more commonly used for men. Moreover, there is no evidence from other accounts that female prisoners were allowed to participate in theatrical productions with male prisoners. Also, women convicts were no longer sent to Con Dao after 1910.

A remarkably similar episode appears in Tran Huy Lieu’s “Tinh Trong Nguc Toi” (Love in the Dark Prison), a posthumously published prison memoir originally written in 1950, which describes Lieu’s loneliness and unrequited longings while incarcerated on Poulo Condore during the early 1930s. In one passage, Lieu admits to a temporary attraction for “brother T,” a fellow prisoner who had performed a female role in a play staged within the ward; 

After viewing the play performed during Tet in Bagne II, Isent a letter over ten pages long to brother T, who, on that day, had played the role of a female courtesan. As the prison regime suppressed family sentiments and petty bourgeois romantic sentiments, we were often forced to seek other outlets.

It is instructive that “Tinh Trong Nguc Toi” was only published in 1991, after the cultural liberalization that accompanied the Communist Party’s Renovation Policy in 1986. This contrasts with roughly a dozen other prison memoirs written by Lieu, all of which were published during the 1950s and 1960s. It is tempting to conclude that the decision to put off the publication of “Tinh Trong Nguc Toi” derived from its candid allusion to homosexual impulses among political prisoners, during a period in which the Party was promoting a distinctly sexless image of the “new socialist man.”

The only first-person account to address the presence of homosexuality in Indochinese prisons directly is Tran Van Que’s hybrid memoir/history Con-Lon Quan-Dao Truoc ngay 9–3–1945. Que devotes considerable attention to the em nuoi, an ambiguous term that may be translated as “adopted younger brother,” “adopted younger sister,” or “adopted beloved,” depending on the meaning attributed to the intimate personal pronoun em:

Because members of the weaker sex were absent on Poulo Condore, the common prisoners were plagued by the problem of “em nuoi.” Far from their wives and children for long periods, gang leaders [anh chi] and caplans at different work camps needed a way to share love with others and to chase away their boredom. As a result, they provided protection, money, and clothes for pretty young prisoners known as “em nuoi.”

Que’s account suggests that homosexual relations were integrated into the colonial prison’s formal and subcultural social hierarchies. It is significant that the inmates who “kept” em nuoi—caplans and anh chis—were situated at the apex of the prison’s twin pecking orders. According to Que, control over em nuoi could provoke conflicts between rival members of the prisoner elite. “Sometime before 1940,” he wrote, “competition over an em nuoi led one prisoner to kill his love rival [tinh dich]. Before he was guillotined, the murderer begged to see his em nuoi one last time before he died.” Que’s account implies that just as anh chis struggled to control em uts and caplans competed over patronage networks, so too powerful members of the prisoner elite vied with one another for the affections of the most desirable em nuois.”