Prison

Last Sunday, January 30th, we were enraged and deeply saddened to learn of yet another death at the Laval immigration detention center. We do not have any information about the person who lost their life while in custody of the Canadian Border Services Agency. All we know is that they were a migrant detained for administrative purposes: ie. for not having papers. This person should never have been detained in the first place, and now they are gone. No one should ever be detained. ...

Your browser does not support the audio element. My name is Toby Shone, and I’m an imprisoned anarchist held in Bristol prison who was kidnapped at gunpoint by the anti-terrorist unit, as part of Operation Adream in the UK. The repression was aimed to target the anarchist group of critique and practice, 325 collective and the website 325.nostate.net. Operation Adream is an attack by the British State in conjunction with European partners against anarchist direct action groups, counter-information projects, prisoner solidarity initiatives and the new anarchist critique of the technological singularity and the fourth and fifth industrial revolution. Operation Adream is the first time that anti-terrorist legislation has been used against the anarchist movement in the UK. ...

In the summer of 2020, three high schoolers - Bogdan Andreev, Denis Mikhaylenko, and Nikita Uvarov, all 14 years old - were arrested in the city of Kansk in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, within the claimed borders of the Russian state. The three boys are accused of forming a terrorist organization, and plotting, among other things, to construct a model of the Russian secret police (FSB) headquarters in the game MineCraft then blow it up. More credibly, they are accused of demonstrating solidarity with Azat Miftakhov, a graduate student in mathematics in Moscow and an anarchist, presently aged 28. Miftakhov was initially accused of constructing a smoke bomb that had been thrown into an office of the ruling political party over a year before. He has more recently been sentenced to six years in a “penal colony”. Andreev, Mikhaylenko, and Uvarov are all awaiting trial. ...

Seven inmates of the Laval migrant prison are continuing the hunger strike they began on March 1, 2021. The strikers have launched a declaration to announce their strike, denounce their situation and demand their release. Declaration of the Inmates of the Laval Detention Centre We are a group of migrants detained at the Laval Detention Center. With this letter we wish to denounce the conditions in which we are being held at the Center. For some time now, the COVID virus has entered the prison. The sanitary measures taken by the immigration officers are clearly insufficient. ...

Hello, I don’t know if it’s your organization that passed in front of the Federal Training Center detention center (CFF600) on Montée St-François on December 31st, 2019, but if it was, I’d like to thank you. I was in prison at the time, in the condos that face Montée St-François. I could see you from the window of the living area and from my cell. For that moment, you made me forget that I was incarcerated, and I felt important and alive. Knowing that people on the outside were thinking of me and traveling for me did me good. ...

The night of July 11th, the Volvo belonging to Vince Parente was burned in front of his home in Ste-Thérèse. Vince Parente was just recently named interim associate deputy minister at the Ministry of Public Safety. Besides this nomination, he is the assistant director-general for the Montreal region at the Bureau of Correctional Services. In clearer terms, he is the boss of the prison wardens at Bordeaux and Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal. ...

June 13, 2020 – Montreal – At 12pm today, one hundred Montrealers gathered in front of the Bordeaux prison to call for defunding the police and decarcerating prisons. Black activists told the crowd about the violence inflicted upon their communities by prisons and the police. The crowd held banners with slogans such as “Prisons Kill,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Defund the Police,” and made noise to show solidarity with prisoners inside Bordeaux. ...

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In the context of ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks in Canadian prisons and jails, I was curious about other times in history that prisoners have faced similar situations and especially times when prisoners have been released as a result. Today’s interview is with a local prison historian about epidemics and public health in Canadian prisons, mostly about the 19th and early 20th century. Also some stories about prisoners being released, what health care was like inside and outside of prison walls, and what kind of world people were returning to. ...

20 May, Montreal – In the wake of today’s announcement that a 72-year-old prisoner at Bordeaux has died of COVID-19, family members and prisoner advocates are calling for immediate and significant actions to keep prisoners and the community safe. In doing so, they reject Minister of Public Security Geneviéve Guilbault’s claim at today’s press briefing that the preventive measures implemented by her ministry are working and that nothing more needs to be done. ...

From Solidarity Across Borders Community Update #FreeThemAll #StatusForAll #HungerStrikeLaval #BordeauxHungerStrike After two months of resistance by detainees and their supporters, the Laval Immigration Holding Centre now stands almost empty. Only 2 men and 1 woman remain inside, watched over by dozens of guards. While the struggle continues to empty this prison entirely, and to ensure it never reopens, we now confront other ways the state controls migrants and is even pushing forward new forms of surveillance under cover of the pandemic. ...