Bell — Let Imprisoned People Talk
Wellness Within has sounded the alarm year after year about restrictions placed on an imprisoned person’s telephone communication and consequent severe impacts on their mental health. Imprisoned people and their loved ones incur egregiously high costs to be able to talk on the phone. In provincial facilities in Nova Scotia, a local costs $1.35 per call, long-distance calls cost $1.50 + $0.30 per minute, text messages cost $0.50 each, and voicemail costs $1.25 + HST per 3-minute message. Restrictions on communication and visitation imposed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and persistent staff vacancies in carceral institutions, exacerbate the impact of high-cost calls.
We support the team at PATH in their advocacy for the rights of individuals in custody who have been experiencing ongoing material deprivation at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility. Imprisoned people in the Burnside Jail are experiencing unlawful lockdowns, confined to their cells for 22 hours a day. During that time, there are no calls being made and no visits occurring.
Bell Let’s Talk Day obscures the role private telecom businesses play in imprisoned people’s exploitation. Wellness Within calls for free calls for all people imprisoned in Nova Scotia’s provincial institutions. This government claims to be invested in improving Nova Scotians’ mental health and wellbeing: the mental health of those in custody should be included. A bare minimum step is to allow barrier-free communication with their support systems in the outside world.
Wellness Within is a volunteer-based registered non-profit organization that serves women, transgender, and nonbinary people who have experienced criminalization and are pregnant or have young children in Nova Scotia, part of the unceded and unsurrendered ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq people.
Wellness Within supports people through the full spectrum of reproductive health experience; facilitates workshops and education sessions; develops resource materials; and advocates for reproductive justice issues.
Contact: Natasha Hines, Chair, 902-717-2956 or natasha_hines@outlook.com and Dr. Martha Paynter Director of Research, 902-292-7082 or Martha.paynter@gmail.com.
*Fee reference: https://novascotia.ca/just/Corrections/_docs/in-custody-Phone-System-FAQ.pdf