Prisons are among the least transparent public institutions in the world. This is particularly true in Canada, where only a handful of people have a legislative right to get inside to do research. This concerns both scholars and those worried about prisoner living conditions.
Dawn Moore, a researcher in Carleton University’s Department of Law and Legal Studies, in partnership with a team of 17 researchers in three countries, has been awarded a $2.5 million Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to tackle this problem. Through the aptly-named Prison Transparency Project (PTP), the team is breaking down barriers in accessing prison information and protecting the human rights of those incarcerated.
“Canadian prisons routinely engage in abuses of rights and power, and often with lethal consequences,” Moore says.
“The only way to find out for sure what’s happening is to speak to the prisoners themselves.”
Carleton University researcher Dawn Moore
Prison Transparency in Canada
Accessing prisoners in Canada is extremely difficult. Critical researchers like Moore and her team have been blacklisted from ever being able to do research inside these institutions and most importantly to be able to speak with people who are currently incarcerated about their lived experiences of imprisonment. As hard as it is for researchers to get inside prisons, it is equally as tough for prisoners to get information out.
“The reality is, when you’re a prisoner you can’t get any information out without it going through the guard first,” Dawn explains.
“It’s really dangerous for a prisoner to raise the alarm that something has gone wrong because either the complaint will get buried or there will be retaliation – usually both.”
With researchers in Canada, Spain, and Argentina, the PTP collective is developing a comparative study to shed light on this secrecy and outline best practices. The study aims to disrupt the idea that all knowledge should flow from the global north to the global south. Moore believes that Canada and Spain have much to learn from Argentina and other jurisdictions in the global south on alternate ways of effecting transparency through creating more porous prison systems.
“I was teaching in Argentina in 2019 and was interested in seeing some of the prisons. It was 8 a.m. and by 1 p.m. on the same day, I was inside speaking to a group of 12 prisoners for three hours with no supervision,” Moore says.
“I have been trying to get a colleague from Argentina into a Canadian prison for six months. All four requests made were denied with no reasons given.”
Given the difficulty in gathering information from prisoners, the PTP collective is starting by speaking to people who have been incarcerated in the last five years but are now out.
“For now, this is what we have to work with,” Moore says. “But we won’t stop trying to get inside.”
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