A kid died on Christmas Eve in Bordeaux prison. 21 years old. Regardless of his past, his crimes, his choices and his mistakes, he was still first and foremost a kid. Killed on December 24. They won’t make me change my mind. He had a future that no one had the right to deprive him of. Yet he died while in unlawful detention.
A few years ago, precisely on August 29, 2018, I wrote in these pages a text entitled “The forgotten vocation of prisons ». It began as follows: “To talk about the situation of prisons in Quebec, we could begin with an enumeration that would quickly take on the appearance of a tragic chain. Look, we could say for example that at the Saint-Jérôme prison, we sometimes reach 120% of the maximum capacity, that at the Leclerc prison, the inmates were forced to live in cohabitation with men, then that in Bordeaux prison, people kill themselves for cigarettes. I did not invent anything: in Bordeaux, people kill themselves for cigarettes. Or again, we could swing assertions that we would quickly forget; but too bad, they must be said. To say that promiscuity rots men, that it’s torture to transform gymnasiums into dormitories, that it’s sport to try to find sleep on two-inch mattresses placed on the floor… »
Forgive me for this copy-paste, I would have preferred to have enough imagination and start my present text, which we could simply have called this time “The Ruins”, in a grandiloquent way, choose the right words. But you don’t write the same novel twice. In this past text is still everything that needs to be written today. I could pull out the synonym dictionary, but what’s the point, if it’s to evoke exactly the same thing as in 2018? Because basically, nothing, absolutely nothing has changed in the prisons of Quebec, except the fact that they have become even more unlivable. Since April 2017, as if in a frantic race towards disaster, 132 people have died in our prisons. Among them, 2 who were murdered, 59 who committed suicide and 27 whose cause is still strangely unknown.
A semblance of consistency?
I will not add much, therefore, to what I have already said, and especially to what others have written and described better than me. Only, I will take the opportunity to hammer home the need to read Deliver us from the prison Leclerc published by Écosociété, text written by one of its former inmates, Louise Henry, also recently interviewed in these same pages. Unbearable story, which makes us understand why we call a sentence a sentence. This is the biggest difference with the situation four years ago… The Leclerc prison, which Stephen Harper’s Canadian government closed in 2012 because it was falling apart, is now a detention center for women administered by the Quebec government.
Look for some semblance of coherence, you won’t succeed. What was unthinkable for men became a perfect solution for women, and so, in total indifference, the ruins straightened themselves out…
I will add a conviction that I did not dare to write at the time: a society is as modern and humanist as its prisons. The way a population treats its prisoners says a lot about it. We can be moved and point fingers to give ourselves a semblance of good conscience, but deep down, we are all responsible for the current situation. Because all it would take is a tiny wind of indignation for the government to intervene and remedy the situation in a snap of the fingers.
I can understand that a large part of the political class turns a blind eye. I can also understand that, by this ugly habit that characterizes our time, we are deaf to the cries of alarm from intellectuals and academics. But what I fail to grasp is the general silence of the artistic milieu.
A little would be enough. It would take a few words to reconsider the ruins for what they are, and so, perhaps, we can get down to building a healthy environment for those who desperately need to rebuild.