COVID-19 underscores the many failures of imprisonment
“Today, February 15, is a relatively new statutory holiday, called Family Day in half of the provinces and Heritage Day in Nova Scotia, although of course here too those of us who can do so are home with our families.
For the most part, the people in prison in Canada have now gone 11 months without a visit from family. Visits in most federal prisons are currently banned. The organization I volunteer with has not been inside a correctional facility to facilitate programming since March 2020.
Those entering prisons experience two-week long isolations (basically solitary confinement), without any of the communication tools we use on the outside to cope. The new normal in prisons, which were already unbearable in cruelty, has become total separation from support networks.
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