ABSTRACT
The main carceral responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, in Canada and across the globe, centred on unprecedented restrictions to the rights and freedoms of individuals in custody. These manifested as extensive periods of time spent in isolation, interruptions of communications with the outside world, including family and lawyers, suspension of programs and prison leaves, reductions in the provision of healthcare services, obstruction of external oversight, and delays in parole hearings and early release. International health organizations provided extensive warnings to governments, early in the pandemic, that prisoners are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. All evidence-based recommendations indicated that large-scale decarceration is the best strategy to prevent illness and death in prisons. The governments’ choice to continue to keep low-risk populations in prisons despite these warnings speaks volumes about who is seen as the bigger risk to the public and, thus, in need to be controlled. Considering who the majority of incarcerated people in Canada are and what populations are overrepresented in prisons—Indigenous people, Blacks, other racial minorities, people with mental health illnesses, people who use drugs, people living in poverty, elderly—the broader implications and the message sent by the chosen responses to the pandemic should not be lost.
