by Leslie Muñoz

The Central East Correctional Centre is rotting from the inside. The mould growing on the walls is slowly overtaking the prison, spreading into showers and cells, and endangerincentral ontario east correctional facilityg the lives of occupants and their prison guards.

The correctional facility located in Lindsay, Ont. has been an epicentre of migrant justice activism against indefinite detention for over a year. Migrants held captive within the jail began striking against their detainment in September 2013, giving rise to the creation of the End Immigration Detention Network (EIDN) in Ontario, which on Jan. 22 started a new chapter in Ottawa. The jail holds up to 1,184 individuals and features separate facilities where migrants, detained by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) without charge or conviction, are unjustly held for indeterminate periods of time.

Correctional officers themselves are beginning to organize against the state of law enforcement in the province. According to the Brantford Expositor, in December 2014 the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) received a strike mandate vote of 96 per cent from the correctional services sector of its membership.

This looming strike threatens to increase the precarity of migrant detainees held within prisons like the Lindsay jail. Detained migrants are subjected to increased lockdowns and the suspension of hot meals when correctional officers begin exercising their labour rights. This treatment highlights the inadequacies of the system while also undermining the problem of the prison’s deterioration.

According to the EIDN, prison guards have been seen wearing masks within the detention centre out of safety concerns. Meanwhile, detainees have been told to start cleaning the jail’s fungal situation with diluted cleaning supplies.

In light of this arrangement, we as residents of Canada must ask ourselves: how have
uncharged migrants come to be responsible for clearing hazardous mould in provincial jails?

The system of migrant criminalization and imprisonment is not only a testament to the Canadian government’s devaluation of certain human life, it is also a shocking violation of human rights. Not even children are exempt: parents can either choose to have their children taken away from them and handed over to Children’s Aide or they can opt to remain together in detention.

Incarceration is meant to be reserved for extreme situations. Migrants are nonetheless increasingly criminalized and detained by a government that not only promotes an unnecessarily tough agenda in relation to what it perceives as crime, but also seems to be fond of targeting racialized individuals with its law enforcement antics. Migrant detainee populations are too large to be held in CBSA holding centers. The imprisoned are therefore held in correctional institutions with other criminalized populations despite lacking charged and convicted criminal status. The most vulnerable in our society therefore become the most affected by the excesses of the state. Threats of criminalization and deportation become powerful forces in creating precarious populations that can be imprisoned and compelled to clean the rot in our law enforcement system as a consequence of the conservative, tough-on-migrants, order of the day.

This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol.7, No.4 (Jan/Feb 2015)