Police & Prisons

#FreeThemAll: Email campaign to release Federal prisoners

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Apr 122020

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

SUPPORT ALL PRISONERS NOW! NO ONE SHOULD SPEND A PANDEMIC IN PRISON!

The situation facing prisoners during the COVID19 pandemic is terrifying. It is widely understood that prisoners are in a dangerous position during this pandemic due to the close living quarters, lack of health care, and lack of access to sanitary supplies. Correctional Services Canada has done little to address the risks inside, aside from cancelling all visits, temporary work releases, and trailer visits. Predictably, COVID19 has already started to spread in the federal prison system with prisoners and staff testing positive in more and more institutions.

Calls for the release of prisoners have come from many different people and groups around the world and many mainstream news publications in Canada have published articles detailing the reasoning behind releasing prisoners now. We would like to add our thoughts to this conversation.

At the federal level, there are many tools that Correctional Services Canada and the Parole Board of Canada can use to release prisoners. These include: the extension of unaccompanied temporary absences, the use of Section 81 and 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA), expedited hearings for suspension and revocation cases, and using section 121)1.b) of the CCRA, which states that ‘parole may be granted at any time to an offender […] whose physical or mental health is likely to suffer serious damage if the offender continues to be held in confinement.’

The use of existing provisions to release prisoners to protect their health is not unprecedented. Indeed, as Jane Philpott and Kim Pate explain in an article in Policy Options, “sections 29, 81, 84, 116, and 121 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act were specifically created to move people out of prisons to address health issues, for other personal development, for compassionate reasons or for work. Sections 81 and 84 provide for the transfer of Indigenous prisoners to Indigenous communities but could be applied to others as well” (emphasis added).

In this context, we demand immediate action to protect the health and safety of federal prisoners. Specifically, we demand the following:

1. IMMEDIATELY RELEASE ALL VULNERABLE PRISONERS: Anyone who is over 50 years old, immunocompromised, pregnant, sick, or who has a preexisting condition that makes them at high risk of dying from COVID-19.

2. RELEASE ALL OTHER PRISONERS, STARTING WITH THOSE IN MINIMUM SECURITY PRISONS AND HALFWAY HOUSES: According to Correctional Service Canada’s own logic, those in minimum security prisons and halfway houses are considered the lowest risk to public safety, so start there. Let those with homes go home, provide safe physical distancing in halfway houses where people choose to remain, widen access to Canada Emergency Response Benefit funding to include people getting out of prison, and open up vacant housing for those with no homes.

3. TAKE IMMEDIATE SANITARY AND PREVENTATIVE ACTION TO PROTECT THOSE WHO REMAIN IMPRISONED: Provide soap, hand sanitizer with proper alcohol content as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), water, bleach, cleaning supplies, and self assessment tools (like thermometers) to every prisoner at no cost, and transfer prisoners in maximum and medium security into the empty minimums to allow for proper physical distancing.

4. NO MORE PUNISHMENT. PRIORITIZE CONTINUED ACCESS TO COMMUNITY AND FAMILY FOR THOSE WHO REMAIN IMPRISONED: Provide free phone calls and video visitation, allow phone calls and video visitation for volunteers and non-family supports, access to cell phones to limit use of communal phones and so that access to the outside continues if medical isolation happens, and stop using lockdowns to inhibit access to community and family supports. The World Health Organizing, stressing the importance of communication with the outside, has said that “decisions to limit or restrict visits need to consider the particular impact on the mental well-being of prisoners … The psychological impact of these measures needs to be considered and mitigated as much as possible and basic emotional and practical support for affected people in prison should be available.”

5. MEDICAL SERVICES FOR ALL: Ensure medical services are fully funded, accessible 24/7, and extra health care practitioners are hired. Provide training, PPE, and regular testing. Waive the need for guards to accompany prisoners to the hospital. No sending prisoners to special military hospitals.

Who should you contact?

At this point you could call or email:
1. Anne Kelly – Commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada: anne.kelly@csc-scc.gc.ca, 613-995-5781
2. Angela Connidis – Deputy Commissioner for Women, Correctional Service Canada: angela.connidis@csc-scc.gc.ca, 613-991-2952
3. Jennifer Oades – Parole Board of Canada, Chairperson: jennifer.oades@pbc-clcc.gc.ca, 613-954-1154
4. Bill Blair – Minister of Public Safety: Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca
5. Kim Pate – Senator pushing for decarceration: Kim.Pate@sen.parl.gc.ca
6. Marilou McPhedran – Senator pushing for decarceration: Marilou.McPhedran@sen.parl.gc.ca
7. Jack Harris – NDP Public Safety Critic: jack.harris@parl.gc.ca, 709-772-7171

You can use the graphics at this link (demandprisonschange.wordpress.com) on social media! Tweet at @csc_scc_en AND @csc_scc_fr with the hashtags #FreeThemAll AND #FreeThemNow.

in solidarity,
the Termite Collective

CALL TO ACTION: Hunger Strikers Released as CBSA Resists Demands to Release Remaining Detainees

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Apr 032020

From Solidarity Across Borders

#HungerStrikeLaval #FreeThemAll #StatusForAll

Migrants detained in the CBSA’s Laval Immigration Holding Centre suspended their hunger strike yesterday as two more of the hunger strikers, including their spokesperson Abdoul*, were released yesterday, and another today. Around 20 detainees remain in the main part of the centre, along with more held in the Rivière-des-Prairies jail in Montreal.

— SEE WHAT YOU CAN DO BELOW

— GALLERY OF SUPPORT

— MESSAGE FROM ABDOUL, JUST RELEASED

The migrant detainees’ courageous 8-day hunger strike provoked an outpouring of support from coast to coast, demanding the immediate release of all detainees with adequate & safe housing ensured. The CBSA is instead slowly releasing migrant detainees one by one, through individual detention review hearings.

The strikers’ demands are even more urgent now than when the strike began. Migrant detainees and prisoners are at an increasingly high risk of contracting COVID-19. At least one employee at the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre has already tested positive for the virus. Detainees, whether in Laval or in other cities, in prisons or in detention centres, must be released immediately with adequate, safe housing ensured!

This crisis has made the necessity of removing the manufactured barriers and exclusions created by hierarchies of immigration status clearer than ever. For the good of all: Status for all!

Follow the continuing campaign here and on twitter.

Read daily updates from the men in the Laval Immigration Holding Centre here.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

SOCIAL MEDIA
Use the hashtag set #FreeThemAll #StatusForAll along with #HungerStrikeLaval to show your support for the struggle on social media! We encourage you to tag Bill Blair, Marco Mendicino, Justin Trudeau, and other government officials who refuse to free the detainees.

SOLIDARITY DRAWINGS
We are calling for artists of all ages to share drawings in solidarity with the struggle to free the detainees. We encourage you to post your art to social media with the hashtag set #FreeThemAll #StatusForAll as well as #HungerStrikeLaval.

CALL IN
Continue to pressure the government for the immediate release of all detainees!
Send support statements to detenuslaval@gmail.com

Direct calls and emails to:

Federal Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair
Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca
Telephone: 613-995-0284
Fax: 613-996-6309

Email script:

I am appalled that the government continues to flout its own public health recommendations when it comes to detention facilities, even as guards and prisoners test positive across the country. It is incredible that men detained in the Laval Immigration Holding Centre had to go on a hunger strike to pressure Public Safety Minister Bill Blair to take action.

Migrant detainees and prisoners remain at an extremely high risk of contracting COVID-19. At least one employee at the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre has already contracted the virus. Minister Blair has not responded to the widespread call for immediate, collective release. The Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) is instead slowly releasing migrant detainees through hearings. This is a wholly inadequate response to this urgent crisis.

All detainees, whether in Laval or in other cities, in prisons or in detention centres, must be released immediately with adequate, safe housing ensured.

Communiqué from Prisoners in the Laval Immigration Holding Centre: Hunger Strike Until We Are Free

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Mar 242020

From Solidarity Across Borders

Laval, 24 March 2020

Following the petition we wrote [on 19 March, sent to government officials and asking to be released in the context of the pandemic*], which had little impact on our situation of detention, we have decided to move to the second phase of our plan. This is to go on an indefinite hunger strike, starting today. This will be done in the most peaceful way and we are not breaking any detention centre rules. Thank you for your support and all help is welcome.

*Petition to free the detainees, sent to Ministers of Immigration and Public Safety on 19 March 2020:

We are currently detained at the Laval Immigration Holding Centre. Given the urgent situation of the propagation of the coronavirus, we believe that we are at high risk of contamination. Here in the detention centre we are in a confined space, every day we see the arrival of people, of immigrants, from everywhere, who have had no medical appointment nor any test to determine whether they are potential carriers of the virus. There is also the presence of security staff who are in contact with the external world every day and also have not had any testing. For these reasons we are writing this petition, to ask to be released.

#HungerStrikeLaval #FreeThemAll

3/25/2020 – New call for solidarity

Post-demo Communique – March 15th, 2020

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Mar 182020

From the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP)

Approximately 150 people marched today in downtown Montreal as part of the 24th Day Against Police Brutality. In these troubled times, it’s easy to retire within oneself and forget about the rest of the world. We may be in quarantine, but the cops are not, anywhere in the world.

Not wanting to reduce the severity of the current health crisis, it must not be used as an excuse to forget and stifle the dissent that is taking place around the world. Whether in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, or even here in the unceded territories of the Wet’suwet’en, Mohawk or Mi’kmaq.

And this current situation is part of a broader ecological crisis. Obviously, crisis also means repression. Because the States are able to cut all social services but will never cut the police, on the contrary: it is becoming more militarized.

This can be seen everywhere in the world where resistance is multiplying. The more the people refuse the status quo, the more the state pours out fortunes to maintain it. And this resistance will multiply here too. Resistance can only grow when the most vulnerable continue to lose their jobs and the landlords’ associations continue to evict them. Resistance can only grow when indigenous and non-indigenous people continue to block the multinationals and the big shareholders continue to spread their hate propaganda. Resistance can only grow here, in South America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

The state can finance this wall of cops between us and the richest, but it will find us in its path. And we will be there: for Pierre Coriolan, for Bony Jean-Pierre, for Fredy Villanueva, for Sandra Bland, for Tamir Rice … and for all the vulnerable people who are always the racist system’s first victims.

This cannot go on for much longer. The lie that sustains this colonial system has never been so close to breaking. And its death bring us collective liberation, a space to build a new environment, where we can all live in peace, respect and dignity.

Together, there is nothing we cannot achieve.

Together, united, we will build this new world.

International solidarity.

Finally, we have been informed that 3 people arrested have been released with safety highway code’s tickets.
We are making a call out for witnesses; If you have been arrested, brutalized or if you witnessed an arrest or a case of police brutality, please contact the COBP cobp@riseup.net

We also remind you to be careful with what you publish (photos and videos) on social media.

The COBP

Spring of Action launched with Disruption of Lemay Offices

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Mar 082020

From Solidarity Across Borders

On Friday, community members entered the offices of Lemay, architects of the new prison for migrants in Laval. Chanting slogans, distributing flyers, and carrying silhouettes of friends and neighbours who had been detained and deported, they disrupted business as usual.

The new prison, located at 400 Montée Saint-François in Laval, will replace the current one. Like all prisons in Canada, it will be filled with poor, brown, Black, and Indigenous people colonized by European powers. This prison is an essential part of Canada’s border strategy, keeping poor people from the global south out and wealth in the hands of a few.

Tisseur, a construction firm located in Val-David, has worked through the winter with the result that the new migrant prison is beginning to take shape despite widespread, concerted community opposition (to see photo from last month, click here).

This is a call to stop any further construction of this prison. Take action! Work with others, thoughtfully, strategically, in love and determination. This prison must not be built!

Contact (for coordination, flyers, media points, petition, information, toolkit, backgrounders, etc.): solidaritesansfrontieres [at] gmail [dot] com

For more about immigration detention in Canada and the new migrant prison, click here.

For more about the companies involved in constructing the new Laval migrant prison, click her e.

To sign our statement against the prison, click here.

Solidarity Blockade Underway in Hamilton

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Feb 252020

Anonymous submission to North Shore Counter-Info

As of 5pm today (February 24^th) we have set-up a rail blockade in Hamilton, ON., in response to the OPP raid on Tyendinaga this morning. Our intention is to stay here indefinitely and we are calling on others to join us (See map below). Come for a couple hours or stay for the night, and bring your friends! If you plan on coming out, dress warmly, bring blankets and sleeping bags, and snacks are always welcome. If you can’t make it out, please help spread the word and share this with your networks.

The site is a bit tricky to get to, but not impossible. It can be accessed from either the West or East side of the tracks, and there is parking scattered around relatively close on both sides.

Call for Activities and Events of the Week Against Police Brutality

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Jan 232020

From the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality

Each year, the COBP organizes a week against police brutality built on a specific theme.

The theme this year is “Police Everywhere, Justice Nowhere:
International Solidarity!”.

Revolts are multiplying worldwide: Chili, Colombia, Algeria Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, France, Hong Kong, India… And the common point in all these revolts is police brutality. A brutality supported by colonial forces, who do not hesitate to equip police everywhere with more and more lethal weapons.

We encourage collectives and individual to contribute to this week of activities through the organization of your own events denouncing police brutality.

This year, the week of activities goes from Monday, March
9th, to Sunday, March 15th.

You can send us your events at cobp@riseup.net before February 24th 2020.

Note that there are already events at the following times:

– Wednesday, March 11th, in the evening,
– Thursday, March 12th in evening
– Friday, March 13th, in the evening,
– Sunday, March 15th, in the afternoon.

Sherbrooke Against the World and Its Prison

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Jan 132020

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

To begin our 2020s, with the onslaught of disasters they will bring, in a combative way, our small crew of determined accomplices made a surprise visit to Talbot Prison in Sherbrooke/Nikitotegwak (at the river that forks) this December 31st a little before midnight.

Well hidden in the nearby woods, we waited until the clock struck 2020 to send our New Year’s greetings, by lighting and shooting our festive pyrotechnics towards this freedom-destroying, miserable infrastructure. Quickly we heard coming from the prison enthusiastic cheers from detainees, and we hope that this instant of joyful surprise allowed everyone to momentarily forget the violence of the carceral world and its rotten justice.

Solidarity with the prisoners of the entire world. With particular attention for indigenous people, including the Mohawks and Abenaki to whom the land we’re now squatting belongs, addicts, women and the LGBTQ+ community, people living with mental health problems, houseless people, immigrants and racialized people, marginal proletarians and other subjects over-criminalized, confined, assaulted, surveilled, ostracized, and assassinated by the armed forces of capital.

As a resolution for the decade to come, we have committed to no longer wait to affirm and maintain a relation of permanent conflictuality towards bourgeois and colonial institutions. The Old World will not collapse on its own.

Fuck the Well Sud project of accelerated gentrification and the police repression targeting downtown residents to make space for investors, bourgeois and other tech-industry yuppies.

This police occupation develops and takes root in daily life in a number of ways, from the extension of video surveillance to all of downtown, to municipal laws that discriminate against or advantage certain groups of residents, to supremacist profiling during police controls, to the arbitrary, often violent arrests by the forces of (dis)order. It’s always the same people who pay the biggest price and are systematically targeted. In these spectacular projects that privatize social-collective space, houseless people, drug users, sex workers, marginalized youth, racialized people, and precarious renters are at greater risk than an already perilous average of ending up trapped in the justice and/or prison system.

In response to this repression, we heard that some colleagues used projectiles filled with paint to attack the police training pavilion of Sherbrooke Cégep several weeks ago, and this seems to be just the beginning.

Against the new Laval migrant prison and all other projects aiming to uphold the lethal system of international borders, that leads to people’s deaths by the thousands at sea or in the desert, while commodities have no trouble crossing oceans!
For the abolition of the penal system and the authoritarian and disciplinary institutions of the state!
For a creative and conflictual future!

Réseau Autonome de Sherbrooke -Le-Bol !
[Autonomous Network of Sherbrooke – Enough!]

New Year’s Light Show for the Prisoners of the Quebec City Detention Center

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Jan 042020

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

December 31th, 2019

Around 7:00 p.m., a group of people gathered in the woods on the outskirts of the Quebec City Detention Center to display their support for those detained. The institution receives prisoners who are serving sentences of less than two years and defendants awaiting trial. The establishment can accommodate more than 710 male prisoners, it is the second largest provincial detention establishment in Quebec, after the Bordeaux Prison. The prison also has a female section which has 56 regular places. At the time of the night visit, about 15 prisoners were in the outer courtyard when fireworks and flares were lit, offering them a bright message of Happy New Year. Enthusiastic wishes and screams were exchanged on both sides before the security tried to control the situation. The action concluded without arrests.

Because we still live in a colonial and racist context where the First Peoples are incarcerated by the Canadian government in a disproportionate way compared to the rest of the population, we want to reaffirm our solidarity by denouncing the jurisdiction of “Canada” on these lands and his hand on life and determination of the people who live there.

We can no longer deny the impact of colonialism!

We salute the courage of Shanet Pilot, a native warrior, who is still incarcerated 3 hours a week in Quebec prison for defending her territory, the Nitassinan, and opposing hydro-Quebec hydroelectric development. Since 2012 that the Government made her pay her “debts” by imprisonment, when at this very moment, Hydro-Quebec only pays crumbs in return for the theft of her territory. SOLIDARITY WITH SHANET PILOT!

The practice of putting detainees in the “hole” in excessive ways is a recurrent practice, which happens here in the Quebec City detention center and which must be abolished, just like prisons. Rapper Souldia recounts his experience of the “hole” when he was 24: “I was taken to the hole for 21 days. It smells of leftover food from the day before, it smells of piss, it smells of shit. The walls are dirty. There’s dried blood, drool. In less than 10 days, you are delirious. ”

Quebec prison has also received the “E” rating from Quebec’s infrastructure society, which means it has the lowest rating and is in very poor condition.

A class action is brought against the government of Quebec to denounce the prejudices lived by the prisoners in this prison. The request, which is led by Samuel Cozak, a former detainee, reveals a measure called the “campsite” where detainees must sleep on the floor in the cell of another incarcerated person, at less than 20 centimeters from a toilet. Cozak also denounces detainees’ malnutrition, unhealthy kitchens and the interventions of officers who are tainted by intimidation, the use of fear and excessive isolation. Also deplored that only one doctor is present per week to respond to the health problems of some 800 prisoners including mental health services.

Another class action is underway in connection with the suicide of Gaétan Laurion who was incarcerated in the infirmary area of the prison under increased surveillance after several attempts to kill himself. At the time of his death, the guard had worked 45 hours in the three preceding days and was sleeping at the surveillance post. The family claims compensation for negligence.

Prisons in Quebec are generally overcrowded, it is estimated that the occupancy rate at Quebec prison is 104%. This has had a major impact on the lives of those who have been criminalized, including the large transfers of detainees, the equivalent of a whole prison displaced every day in the province.

Finally, we would like to affirm our solidarity with trans people and the LGBTQIA2 community who experience all more discrimination in the gendered prison environment and who also face humiliation when the time comes to have to comply with strip searches. A network is in place and is developing more and more to support these people in prisons through written correspondence which serves to create links and even create certain security for these prisoners. We therefore invite you to contact the Prisoner Correspondance Project for more info.

AGAIN A HAPPY NEW YEAR AND SOLIDARITY!
THE FIST IN THE AIR BECAUSE WE ARE ALL BORN TO BE FREE!
NO PRISONS! NO STATES! NO QUEBEC! NO CANADA!

“État policier” Newspaper – Call for Submissions of Texts

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Dec 282019

From the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality

The theme this year of the 24th International Day Against Police Brutality is “Police Everywhere, Justice Nowhere: International Solidarity!”.

Capitalism is collapsing. Neoliberalism is dying. Those in power cling to their authority as their greed pushes us towards environmental catastrophe, they wage war on solidarity and become more and more monstrous every day that passes.

As they did during the bloody colonial birth of this state and all its kind, the power-holders turn to the police, the gendarmerie, the capital watchdogs to guarantee their ill-gotten gains.

Our continents become fortresses, those who seek refuge are imprisoned, the poor work hard and die, the rich get richer, the pigs get their wages by smashing our heads in.

What they don’t know, however, is that we will win.

The fight against police brutality is about removing the fangs of a rabid beast, which walks through our communities like the scarecrows they are. Here to frighten us, to prevent us from getting angry, to keep us small. From Ferguson to Palestine, from Montreal to Rio de Janeiro. From Winnipeg to La Paz, from Port-au-Prince to Santiago.

As we struggle to build a better world, the police, in all its disgusting forms, are blocking our way.

In order for us to move forward, we must get rid of them.

As has been the case for more than 20 years, the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (C.O.B.P.) began its conscientious work by organizing the International Day Against Police Brutality on March 15.

As we have done since our inception, we will print and distribute our annual newspaper “L’État Policier”.

This year, we are turning to our comrades, allies and colleagues who are activists against the police state for articles, comics, designs, poems, opinion pieces or any other contribution to add to our annual journal.

If you would like to submit an article to our journal, please send it to the following address: cobp@riseup.net

The texts must be a maximum of two pages long and may be written in French, English or Spanish. Authors who want their texts translated must let us know within a reasonable time so that we can find people for the translation, and we invite you to send us images to match with your text if you wish. However, the images will be part of both pages.

The final deadline for the journal’s content is February 15, 2020.

International solidarity with all those who fight, fight against the State and its armed wing, the police, and flee police action.

COBP (Collectif opposé à la brutalité policière)

https://cobp.resist.ca/

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