When I heard that Canada was going to close its prison farms my first thought was “Wow, we have prison farms?!?” I’d heard they had a garden at Gitmo, but I didn’t know we had them here! Well, it turns out we have six of them-one in New Brunswick, one each in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, and two in Kingston Ontario, which is just a couple hours from Ottawa. Or at least we had prison farms - they are about to be shut down. Correctional Services of Canada has stated that the farm program does not give inmates employability skills, are not ‘up with times’ of “technologically reliant agriculture”, and that the farms lose $4 million dollars annually (although, according to the National Farmers Union, no clear accounting of the prison farms had been made public). So basically, surprise surprise, it’s about money.
Now, I don’t know anyone in prison, nor had I given Canadian prison life much thought really… but the news that these farms would be shut down awakened uneasiness in me. It was because of something I’d heard recently in a sharing circle at a sweat lodge.
This summer I had the immense privilege of participating in a sweat lodge that was hosted by the region’s Algonquin people. It was one of the most physical and emotionally grueling things I have ever done. It was also a remarkable learning experience-and one that has forever shaped my feeling about governance, community, and the role of communication in healing. If you’ve ever been part of a sweat you know that it is an amazing place where people reveal immensely personal information as a way to share their ‘personal medicine.’ The Shaman leads the conversation carefully, so no one ‘bleeds’ or accuses, but everyone gets to say what they feel the need to share and, in my case, a ragtag group of strangers learned some heartbreakingly intimate things about the people sitting across from us-in a matter of 45 minutes. One of the gentlemen had survived the German Nazi camps only to come to Canada and find himself isolated and alone. Another man felt that he has just never fit in anywhere on the planet. One young man said a prayer for the mother of his child and asked that her wounds are healed, and one man talked about his time in prison. He didn’t go into why he was in prison, but it was clear that many of the others knew that he had somehow “pissed off the Queen”… so we could draw our own conclusions. But he said that when he spoke with the other men in prison, they had two distinct things in common: 1. they had difficulty relating to women, and 2. they had become disconnected with the land. He spoke of the importance of the connection to mother earth (again, a woman-his words), and how it is only through the ability to work the land that men can create and nurture life-on their own terms. He spoke of the humbling experience of watching something he planted sprout up from deep in the soil, grow strong and tall, and the joy of harvesting and tasting the fruits of his labor. It was pitch black in the sweat, but I could feel the pride radiating from him. I wonder if the people proposing to shut the farms down actually asked the inmates what they thought-and had any idea of the medicine that the experience contained.
I can appreciate the government’s efforts to help the prisoners find more training in “relevant employment for today’s economy”, but couldn’t they also consider expanding/modifying the role that prison farms play in adding value to the communities and therefore nurturing the healing AND the economy?
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