A new short documentary film highlights the realities of incarcerated workers in Ontario and Canada more broadly. Working for Freedom, created by Ottawa filmmaker Conor DeVries, follows a woman who has been incarcerated at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre multiple times where she worked in the sewing room. Ottawa Prisoner Legal Supports requested her name be omitted from the article due to employability concerns.
“You come in here, you’re treated like a slave,” the woman says in the film before sharing that she was only paid one bag of chips and one chocolate bar for a week of labour.
Lydia Dobson, the producer of the film and a lawyer with Prisoner Legal Supports (PLS), noted that wages for incarcerated workers are capped at really low rates. In the federal system, wages are capped at $6.90 for a full day of labour. In the provincial system, incarcerated workers are often paid in canteen funds.
“Obviously this would violate labor legislation if the legislation applied to prisoners,” Dobson said. “But because they’ve exempted prisoners, they can violate these rules that would apply to everybody else.”
Esther Mailhot, a spokesperson for Correctional Service Canada (CSC), said the employment and employment training programs in carceral institutions enhances public safety by providing inmates with new skills and work experience. This would help them become “productive, law-abiding citizens and skilled workers when they return to the community.” Mailhot also said these programs improve personal and emotional conditions by giving people meaningful activities to engage in. She said several research documents show a connection between employment and positive reintegration results.
As for prisoner pay, Mailhot said rates for federal inmates are based on multiple factors including an offender’s accountability, their progress in meeting the objectives of their correctional plan and attendance associated with their participation in programs. She also highlighted that prisoner pay is reviewed once every six months.
Dobson, however, says the perspective of CSC and provincial correctional services is flawed. While CSC says the prison labour programs operate under the principle of free consent and do not occur under the threat of penalty, Dobson says the concrete conditions of prisoners do not leave them much of a choice.
“If you really look into it, it’s not a choice to perform labor or not. In a lot of these institutions, there’s lockdowns that are happening all the time,” Dobson said. “The only way to get out of your cell and not spend 90% of your time in a tiny, overcrowded cube is if you agree to do the labor.”
Dobson also challenged the idea that prison labour programs allow inmates to learn new skills. In the Working for Freedom film, for example, the woman working in the prison sewing room already knew how to sew before getting her job. In fact, prior knowledge of sewing was required.
“It’s not teaching people new skills, and it’s not teaching people skills that are valuable on the outside,” Dobson said. “The kind of labor that most people are doing is maintenance to keep the prison running. They’re sewing clothes, they’re washing the clothes, they’re doing custodial work. This really just cuts costs for the prison.”
Jordan House, a labour professor at Brock University, says in the film that prison labour is coercive and menial. However, prisoners do want to work. House noted that there has been organizing among prisoners to make their jobs safer and more dignified but there are still many complaints about lack of meaningful work.
“This is a system that sets people up for failure,” House said. “If a person works and makes basically no money for the duration of their incarceration and they are released with no money in their pocket and not marketable job skills, what should we expect to happen?”
In his book, Solidarity behind Bars: Unionizing Prison Labour, House argues that unionizing incarcerated workers would help advance prisoner justice and the labour movement at large.
Dobson said she hopes the new film by Conor DeVries will be used by prisoner rights organizations as a necessary educational tool.
“Raising awareness is a huge part,” Dobson said. “We need to be informing people about the conditions of confinement in Canada, because the CSC does a really good job of hiding these spaces and making them not accessible to the public.”
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