Upcoming De-carceral Futures workshop at Queen’s will discuss borders, immigration detention and prison issues
Picture this.
You have just fled your home country for your own safety.
After a long and harrowing journey, you arrive in a land of promise and opportunity – Canada.
Unfortunately, border officials weren’t satisfied with your identity documents and decide you need to be detained until they can determine who you are.
Weeks turn into months, and months into years in a maximum-security jail. Your case goes nowhere.
Sound farfetched? In one case Professor Sharry Aiken cites, someone hoping to gain access to Canada waited more than five years in so called “preventive detention” without any kind of progress in their case.
“Someone convicted of an actual crime and sentenced to prison would have been released much faster,” she notes.
The human rights issues underpinning immigrant detention is a major focus of an upcoming two day-long workshop being hosted by Prof. Aiken and her colleagues on May 9 and 10.
“De-Carceral Futures: Bridging Prison and Immigration Justice“ will challenge the assumption that migrants pose security or flight risks and should be preventively detained. The event will bring together prison justice experts, abolitionists, ”no-borders” and open border activists and theorists, and detention experts to contribute to a reimagining of detention policies in Canada and globally. The word ”de-carceral” refers to the idea of a world without jails.
The workshop is organized by Professor Aiken along with Professor Lisa Guenther of the Queen’s Philosophy and Cultural Studies and Professor Stephanie Silverman of the University of Toronto. The event also features an innovative peer training session with the Walls to Bridges Collective, which aims to challenge the artificial boundaries between people experiencing prison and those who are not. Policy Options magazine will also be tagging along and creating podcast interviews during the workshop.
“Currently Canada detains up to 8,000 migrants every year, and this can include children – indeed whole families,” she says. “It's a huge incursion on the liberty of the individuals incarcerated – they actually have less rights than prisoners, as they have none of the access to programs that prisoners have. Successful migration governance can take place without detention and in a more humane and sustainable manner.”
The discussion is timely, with increased media and public attention on migrant crises in South America and the Middle East. Still, this topic has also been a passion for Aiken for much longer than it has been a mainstream news topic. Prior to her appointment to Queen’s, Aiken worked as a refugee lawyer in Toronto.
“The animating thread in my work has been a commitment to shaping law to serve the disadvantaged and shaping law to challenge the systems of oppression that have a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable members of our communities,” she says. “This detention issue is just one piece of that larger sphere of research and activism.”
The De-Carceral Futures workshop remains open to registration and continues to seek volunteers. For more information and the full program agenda, please visit the Queen’s Law events calendar.
By Phil Gaudreau