By Jeff Shantz and Eva Ureta, May 5, 2020
There is an extreme health emergency at Mission Institution, in British Columbia (unceded Stó:lō and Kwantlen territory) in the context of the broader COVID-19 crisis. More than 130 people at Mission have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and one prisoner there has died. Only as late as April 26, months into the crisis and with more than 100 diagnoses and the death at Mission, was it was announced that a nurse would be present fulltime at the prison. Prisoners in Canada have been subjected to extended lockdown, confined to their cells all day, except for about 20 minutes. This has well documented severe impacts on prisoners’ mental and physical health. These lockdown conditions have been decried by the Canadian state’s own prison ombudsperson, who has called them “extreme.”
Prison justice, abolitionist, and anti-police power activist have been holding weekly noise demonstrations in solidarity with prisoners outside of carceral sites in the Lower Mainland of so-called British Columbia. These have included at Mission Institution as well as the Surrey Immigration Detention Centre, Fraser Regional Correctional Centre, and Alouette Correctional Centre for Women. This is to let prisoners know that people outside are aware of the situations they are experiencing and are calling for their safe release with proper and adequate social supports (such as health care, housing, income assistance, etc.). Calls have also been raised more broadly, and directed at governments, to free prisoners.
On Sunday, May 3, a noise action was brought back to Mission Institution for a second time. This time, the #freethemall caravan (vehicles used to maintain physical distancing among activists) managed to get fully on site at the prison and came very close to building in the medium and minimum security sections. And an incredible action unfolded. Prisoners inside the medium security building were able to hear the noise being made outside and responded immediately with noise of the their own—cheers, shouts, banging, and drumming. After a short bit of time one person hung a banner out their window saying, “Thank you.” Another thank you sign appeared. Then one saying, “Help us.” People inside started drumming in rhythm with the noise we were making. There were waves and claps. This kept up for the best part of an hour.
Guards had come to suggest that we were on private property and needed to leave. They were reminded that the prison, itself an institution of colonial violence, was located on stolen land of the Stó:lō and Kwantlen First Nations.
Carceral institutions are always sites of social inequality and injustice, of racist and colonial oppression and class structuring, and repression. Under conditions of COVID-19, the character of state capitalist systems of brutality, unequal access to resources, the withholding or failure to provide necessary services, like health care, and the prioritization of state control over human needs, are magnified.
