Prison Farms

Helen Forsey | Feb 24, 2021

I'm pleased to see your article about the latest developments on the prison farm front, but there is so much more that needs to be said.

As you note in your article, the Correctional Service is in the process of converting the farms at Joyceville and Collins Bay Penitentiaries into an Intensive Livestock Operation using prison labour to produce goat milk for sale to a private corporation to make baby formula for export.

What's wrong with that picture? In a word - everything.

As a pro-prison farm activist and member of the Pen Farm Herd Co-op ever since the closures in 2010, I feel outraged and betrayed by the way the authorities have taken our work and twisted it beyond recognition. The CSC's current plan flies in the face of the goals we've fought for over the past eleven years - prisoner rehabilitation, training for life skills and employment, therapeutic involvement with animals, and food production for prisons and communities. Many of us have been uneasy for some time about the plan for the goat factory, and the group Evolve Our Prison Farms, with Perth-based spokesperson Calvin Neufeld, has diligently researched and analyzed the multiple problems with it. But CSC, the government, Kingston authorities and others who might stand to lose face have until now largely succeeded in keeping the whole controversy suppressed. 

The whole idea is so wrong on so many counts that it would take more than the 100 pages of the recent scholarly report to address it all. There are good reasons why that report is entitled: "Canada's Proposed Prison Farm Program: Why It Won't Work and What Would Work Better." Released on January 31st, it exposes the current CSC plan as fundamentally flawed, documenting its criticisms with facts pried out of the Corrrectional Service through Access to Information requests. And it's high time those flaws were exposed. 

With the facts now finally emerging into public view - in our local communities, the farm press, academia and on Parliament Hill - the veil of silence and denial is shredding. CSC and the government should cut their losses now, cancel the goat factory and replace it with a genuinely progressive prison farm program that will serve the goals of rehabilitation, justice and food security.

Helen Forsey